By Gbenga Adesina, PhD

Let us begin with the flowers, spices, seeds, fruits, and trees—guavas, hibiscus, crocus, mangoes, jasmine, pomegranate, nutmeg, date palms, rice, dill, magnolia, coffee seeds, onions, eggplant, castor beans, corn cobs, ginger among others—which in Safia Elhillo’s poetry, across three expansive books, published over a span of six years, and translated into several languages, are allegorical insignia of a dismantled paradise.  

Her language, or better still, a third kind of utterance emerges at the interstice and border of the tongue where her various languages collide and leave bright, mournful shards in their wake. She’s adroit at allowing the gaps to speak, but this grammar of rupture, we must believe, is not merely aesthetic but an ethical and political philosophy; for her poetry, polyphonic by design—choral, propulsive, lyrical, and liturgical—is a poetry that could only have been written in the wake of a vanished Eden. In this post-Eden, the mouth of Adam, we sense, is clogged with shame and brokenness, and only the daughters are left to tell the tale. This shame is a manifest prognosis of postcolonial disquiet, a condition in those who have suffered forced exile and multiple evictions occasioned by war and neocolonial violence as Elhillo’s people have. Her parents fled Sudan in the 80’s. Since 1983, when a civil war, in the wake of British colonization, started between a tyrannous central government and resistance groups in a clash of cultural and religious affiliations, and disparate peoples forced into a suffocating and inorganic national project, over two million Sudanese have died and over 4 million people have been displaced. What the poet has done with this disquiet, though, is transform it through poetry—with swagger, style, verbal elan, and urgency—into psalms of restored lineage. Restoration and return, however, are inexhaustible projects, perpetual and unfinished, cyclic, unending.  

Within this theory of a lost paradise—a theory in which the yield of the land is used through fractured memory to create lyric and narrative landscapes having been ejected from the actual land—we might start to understand the vegetal imageries Elhillo strategically deploys in her poems as the pursuit of an ecological epistemology. In this epistemology of seeds, spice, and flowers, knowledge accrues from sensory data grounded in ecological details and retrieval of scenes from past lives through mythic reconstructions prompted by the natural world. Her poems thus serve as sensory recovery maps, sewn from fruits, trees, and spices, for her people, seeds of dispersal across geographies. For the sake of this analysis, I shall consider three of her poems, one from her first book of poems, January Children, and two from her latest offering, Girls That Never Die. 

Consider the poem “first adornment”:  

In this poem, we are immediately situated in a holy, festive season and the togetherness of extended family under the auspice of such festivity. It is a time that functions not by clock but by belonging. This landmark of time is poignant as it attenuates the temporal orphaning Mohamed Mbougar Sarr tells us in The Most Secret Memory of Men is the destiny of those dispossessed of their land. The catastrophe of dislocation, the violent urgency of dispersal, the exilic exodus become the only markers of time expected to be worthy of memorial, but here Elhillo subverts that expectation and retrieves a time in which her subjects exist in a communal rhythm and drama of assemblage in oppositional affirmation against dispersion.  

The title, “first adornment,” and the first line of the poem, “it’s ramadan i’m nine years old” position us at the cusp of a child’s ritual passage. We intuit that adornment is the final drama of the poem. From the Latin root word adornare the inflected form of adorno which means to “endow” to “prepare” to “embellish.” To be “robed” in a garment or dress, but also, we suspect adornment could be interpreted as in to be “robed” in the garment of history, to be wrapped in the ritual cloth and weight of family legacy. This doubleness of “adornment” allows us an entry into the elegiac intelligence of the poem.  

The “ramadan” festive assemblage of kin in this poem is configured as a private paradise. We see how their rituals form an ecology of belonging around a child’s fragile inner world. She shyly observes the adults and intuits that she belongs to them, and she is therefore an inheritor of their beauty, which is “bright & beaded” but also difficult, “burnt” and “biglegged.” Part of their difficult beauty is dislocation, separate as they are from their “lost” or “sleeping” men. At the edge of the tableau is a sensitive child, lips darkened red by juice from crushed hibiscus, overwhelmed, though she cannot yet name it, by anticipatory grief. Like any paradise, this one is delicately cobbled together by a fraying glue. The paradise, the child suspects as we do, is on the verge of disintegration. 

The imagery of “crushed & stained hibiscus      it darkens / my lips a bitten red” performs two interpretive functions: first, it signifies the innocent sensory delight of childhood and is therefore a temporal marker; and secondly, it simultaneously serves as a rupture of that season of innocence. For immediately, the young speaker’s lips are darkened by crushed hibiscus. She looks and suddenly beholds herself and perhaps her future in the mirrored reflections of genetic and morphological archetypes of her family tree arrayed before her by her aunts. There is a foreknowing, the elegiac intelligence. It manifests as a caesura, an uncanny rupture signified by the white space between the word “red” and the phrase “& i / think” as if to dramatize the breakage of her innocence as she comes into an awareness of her heavy family legacy. We receive the imagery of hibiscus in the poem as a simulacrum of the fruit of the knowledge of history. If this has Edenic echoes, it is because we are hewing close to the paradisal allusions on which this analysis is premised. The colorfulness of the crushed hibiscus mirrors the bright and beaded scarves, though the scarves mask heaviness. We observe and follow along as the young speaker looks out of the cocoon of innocence into the lives of her aunts and beholds the reality of exodus that marks their family lives (“their men lost or upstairs sleeping or gone / to america to look for work / gone to england / to saudi arabia to the emirates to look for work”).  

Is this what awaits her? she asks, or is this what has spawned her, this cyclic dispersal? Moreover, the hibiscus survives and has survived for thousands of years through the evolutionary intelligence of dispersal. Creatures of flights—birds, bees, and butterflies—carry their seeds and deliver them to continents. The poet glimpses this exilic condition, which is both her reality and her future and, in that moment, she crosses from innocence to elegiac knowledge with the fruit as the sensory door of passage.   

If these ecological significations are subtle in Elhillo’s first collections of poems, January Children, they assume a central and maturely distilled role in her sophomore and latest book of poems, Girls That Never Die. Consider the poem, “Pomegranate with Partial Nude”: 

The declarative first line of this poem is a signaling toward rootedness. From the adolescent uncertainty of “i think i look like my big legged aunties” of the previous poem, we sensed a bridge has been crossed to the grounded-ness of “i know my history.” In this poem, we are in a nebulous and unnamed location, yes, but spatially, Elhillo’s poems are situated in a polyphony of cities, countries, and continents, though these elsewheres are haunted always by Sudan which in this poem returns to us as “my garden city.” The flight of the poet’s parents in the 80s from Sudan through multiple cities and countries across years before settling in the United States and her own subsequent cycle of flights and returns form a thematic island chain of exile within exile—a cyclic temporality of childhood, rupture as place, and home as a kinetic dwelling. In her work and in these dizzying cartographies of movements, the ecological imageries serve as fluorescent landmarks which calibrate time and seasons and serve as repositories of private epiphanies and communal memory.  

The line “pomegranate in my throat” is particularly jarring as an ecological insignia. The imagery lands with a haunting tactility. It recalls “my lips, a bitten red” from the previous poem, but where “lips” are external or peripheral to the body, the “throat” is internal signifying the inseparability of her home from her body. Here, home is totemized by the absorbed smell of a fruit, an ecological signifier. If “my lips, a bitten red” was immediately followed by “i / think I look like my biglegged aunts” in the previous poem, “pomegranate in my throat” in this poem is immediately followed by “color of all my sisters” thus continuing the matrilineal lineage of Elhillo’s poems. This lineage has a resonant ecological parallel. Pomegranate trees are either male trees or trees with both male and female sexual characters. The male trees produce trumpet-like flowers but not fruits. In the pomegranate trees with both anthers (the male feature) and stigma (the female feature) which contains the ovary, a pollinating agent such as a bee transfers the pistil from the male to the female where fruits grow in a cluster of sisters. This image returns us back to Elhillo’s “color of my sisters.” The sisters, like the fruits, are a cluster or a chorus, as in the choruses of the epic Greeks or those of the contemporary Blues. 

The concluding lines are particularly resonant for their ecological signification:  

In these lines, fruits and seeds elegize rupture, dispersal, dislocation, and disappearance so achingly. The lines singe: “their names peeled & sucked / their names spit like seeds from car windows.” This is not sensuous pollination, this is forced eviction, bruising dispersion. The vegetal images simultaneously serve as the poet’s metaphorizing tool for the inalienable and sensuous diffusion of home into her deepest parts (“pomegranate in my throat”) and as the totem of forced ejections from that home (“spit like seeds from car windows”). Moreover, the word “rupture” proves her rupturing of white space created by her use of blank space, stanza breaks, and caesuras, which invites meditation. If your language is a dialect of shards, if your history was invented by rupture, then you might have to master the discipline of rupture itself as a grammar to take a measure of what was lost. It is a long, patient work of assemblage, memory by memory, which the poet cultivates from fruits and seeds in search of her garden city and lost beloveds. That search echoes hauntingly in the last line of the poem in which the poet asks, “where have they gone?” 

Let us consider one last poem “Pomegranate”:  

As in the two previous poems of Elhillo, the poetic gaze centers aunts, daughters, and sisters, which is significant. The history and literature of postcolonial dislocation, a mosaic of texts across homelands and diasporas, was for the longest time the story of heroic men who were traumatized by the hand of colonial brutes. Case in point, the postcolonial genius of Achebe, Soyinka, Walcott, Braithwaite, our great fathers who have been cited ad infinitum. Elhillo challenges this single story and the erasure it encapsulates. Working in the lineage of Maaza Mengiste,  Leila Aboulela, Marwa Helal, Warsan Shire, Ladan Osman, among others, what Elhillo does is not so much that she chronicles and reinvents this lost archive of daughters, so much as that she lifts a curtain and allows us listen in on the multivocal hum of these women and girls’ sacred togetherness; these women and girls who in relation to one another and among one another—the audience they most treasure anyway—have never been voiceless. It was the world’s listening that was askew. In so doing, she conjures a lyrical scripture of ordinary lives elegized, elevated and made sacred by a transmogrifying specificity—so that rather than women who exist in the mute periphery of postcolonial literature as written by men, we enter a lyric configuration that centers the complex inner life of specific women and are thus offered a fuller and richer narrative world.  

What is a daughter? The poet seems to ask in this poem. She pursues her answers through the morphology and ecological history of a fruit. A fruit is a gift of nature tenderly and jealously nurtured, the poem seems to say, but this nurture is ultimately for consumption. A fruit does not, cannot, eat itself. Someone else, something else, must do the devouring. A fruit derives its life and integrity from its intactness and purity. Here, we reach the limit of the ecological signification and Elhillo’s masterful and unflinching interrogation of it, so she might reject its implications with her power of subjectivity. The next line cleaves in half as it marks that rejection: “& it is wasted on me?” The question mark that delineates the border of that statement functions almost like a sickle with which the poet cuts deep into the stem of a tap-rooted tree of an asphyxiating sociological practice and inheritance. We read the question mark not just as signaling a question and an interruption in the middle of a poetic line, but also as signaling a break in tradition, a questioning of long-held assumptions and cultural landmarks. 

As in the other poems considered earlier in this essay, the ecological significations in this poem perform two functions simultaneously. The fruits metaphorize the suffocating information passed down to the poet by the society as encrypted in her name—a command to be pure, intact, unbroken for a man; however, as the poem continues the fruits also encode her rebellion, her brilliance, and her aliveness. This is her break from tradition:  

The “I” that begins the first stanza is symbolic as it is the negation of the imposed objectification, the condition predestined for the “fruit” of the first stanza by those who gave her name. Yet, the persona is on her own search for agency and self-definition, and the search is itself a category of liberation. She searches for what was buried and forgotten (the deeper and alternative meaning of her name, her agency, her sisters’). She searches for what was discarded “without ceremony” like fallen seeds, which recalls the “seeds spit out of car windows” from “Pomegranate with Partial Nude,” which in turn recalls the pang of eviction and dispersion from a native paradise. The “buried” in this poem achingly signifies erasure and disappearance.  

But as the poem climaxes, we observe the fall of seeds is merely a prelude to resurrection. In the last stanza, we are encouraged to read the word “wonder” as the door to that resurrection. The poet writes “I have to wonder” and as she does, this sensory archival work further transforms her as she transforms the story that was allotted to her: “I wonder about the trees.” The “wonder” in this poem serves as an aesthetic and political antidote to burial. We read “trees” as standing in for an ecosystem denoting fullness of life and possibility, her “garden city.” “Wonder” then functions as a sentient shovel which digs and excavates the fossilized soil of history. It exhumes, uncovers, and reclaims. It brings closed and discarded things out into the open for reconsideration. The catalogue of fruits “guavas, blood orange, pomegranate” is resonant and returns us poignantly to where we began this essay: a paradise, albeit a dismantled one. But the poet is in the act of reconstruction, as she is naming the fruits of her reclaimed paradise and in so doing, perhaps she is also renaming herself. These reclaimed fruits are neither pure nor intact and need not be. They have been slit and splayed open; they have been ruptured but their rupture signals the beginning of a metamorphic cycle. This rupture, like a door, allows the fruits to reveal their sturdy and startling interiority, their aliveness beyond the surface-level purity and ripeness. The poet is constructing purity as a less fruitful currency than alertness, rawness, wildness, and openness in this new Eden of self.

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Works Cited  

Elhillo, Safia. “first adornment.” The January Children. University Of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2017, p. 16. 
Elhillo, Safia. “Pomegranate.” Girls That Never Die: Poems. Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2022, pp. 21-22. 
Elhillo, Safia. “Pomegranate with Partial Nude.” Girls That Never Die: Poems. Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2022, pp. 23-24. 
Sarr, Mohamed Mbougar. The Most Secret Memory of Men. Other Press, New York, 2023. 

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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