Safia Elhillo is a poet and author who released her first fiction novel, “Home is Not A Country,” this year. The book follows Nima, a first-generation Muslim girl, finding her identity in America. Since the release, Elhillo’s novel has gained much acclaim, landing itself on this year’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Longlist. Elhillo is also an alumna of The New School, with an MFA in poetry.
Hi Safia, thank you so much for taking the time to answer some questions. First off, could you introduce yourself?
Thank you for asking me! I am Sudanese from Washington, DC, and am currently bouncing back and forth between Los Angeles and the Bay Area. I use she/her pronouns.
How rooted in your own reality is this story?
I borrowed just a few details from my own life to this story— just the stuff with the Sudanese Sunday school and almost being named Yasmeen—but everything else is fiction. I wanted to allow myself to relish that freedom. In the rest of my work as a poet so far, my speaker’s “I” will often be read as an autobiographical “I” and so there are responsibilities that come with that, so it was really fun to get to make things up for once! It was fun to not talk about my own life for a little bit.
In terms of writing, which parts came easiest? What was the hardest?
The hardest part was convincing myself to try writing a novel in the first place! I feel like I’ve been a poet for as long as I can remember, but I sort of don’t know how to do anything else. But I was having a conversation with Christopher Myers, who ended up publishing “Home is Not a Country” through his imprint, and he asked me if I’d ever considered writing a novel. And I was like, a novel? I am a poet. And it’s not because I’m such a snob about only writing poetry or anything like that, it’s not about, like, genre purity, my default is just to be terrified of doing anything I feel like I’m not already good at, but I’m trying to work on that now. But after I said no, he sort of casually asked me what my favorite book of poetry was. And I immediately started talking about Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. And he let me finish before telling me: you know that’s a novel, right? It’s a novel in verse. So it turned out that I had accidentally been studying the form for years. And that helped demystify it for me and made it feel less like this impossible, forbidden genre. So it was very easy after that to convince me to sit down and try.
Also, in many ways, writing each section for this project felt much easier than how it usually goes when I sit down to write a poem. Instead of all the engine-revving and noodling around, I feel like I usually have to do with a poem, I had all these prompts already in place because I knew who my characters were and what their world is, so it was much easier to re-enter each time.
For readers who have experienced being a ‘third culture kid’, what do you hope they connect with the most?
I’ve always wanted to belong to a city, to a place, but never have. But I have always belonged to diasporic communities everywhere I’ve gone. Those are my people, rebuilding a life in the aftermath of a great rupture. Those are the communities that taught me there are many Englishes, many Arabics, and that my language was my own to make, that my home was my own to make. I made Home Is Not a Country for my communities, for the aunties and uncles that taught us Arabic on Sundays in a rented classroom at a middle school. I made it for their children, my friend-cousins, my infinite siblings, and the languages we invented together. I grew up in an invented world, among the people who built it with their own hands, so I grew up believing anything could be made, could be made real. Those handmade spaces, those hybrid approximations of one country inside another, those spaces are the closest I’ve come to feeling “from” anywhere. It means a lot to me for my first novel to be a novel for young people. It started out as an offering to my younger self—the young reader I was who is the reason I am a writer today. I wanted to make a book that would have made it all feel possible for me sooner. It took me a while to really believe that the world I came from was deserving of poetry, of literature, because I wasn’t seeing my particular intersections in any book. So I wanted to tell a story about a young person who is not me, but who contains my intersections. I wanted to offer this story to someone who is the age now that I was then, to hopefully add a little bit to the conversation they might be having with themselves about what is possible in a book. And maybe make a home for them in that possibility.
When did you begin to write? When was writing the most important to you, growing up? When did you realize writing was something you wanted to pursue?
I feel like the love of and need for community is what made me a poet—is what made it stick. And I think I knew I wanted to be a poet before I’d even really written many poems. I had a million hobbies as a child—I would pick up all these things and then quickly abandon them. When I first got into poetry, I thought it would be the same. Then I remember going to an open mic for the first time, and it was just this incredible group of weirdos, and I thought–These are my people. If all I have to do to keep getting to hang out with these people is write some poems, I will write a million poems. Just please keep letting me be part of this community. So that kept me coming back. I thought poems were cool, but early on I didn’t feel a particular spark or magic or think it was like, my calling, or even something I was particularly good at. I just loved poetry spaces and poets and the poetry community. Everyone talked to everyone. It was a cozy, welcoming space and I wanted to be part of it. It kept me coming back long enough that I started to learn things and have creative impulses and an artistic point of view. So I feel like I became a member of a poetry community and a poet at the same time.
What do you hope for the future of this book?
I hope to get to keep making books and to remember this book as a moment where I gave myself permission to learn to do something new.
The National Book Award for Young People’s Literature will be announced on October 5
Check out more information about Safia here.
“Home is Not A Country” is available in print here.