ISSUE II

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6 SIENNA SOLSTICE yasmeen Safia Elhillo Source: Poetry (July/August 2018) i was born at the rupture the root where i split from my parallel self i split from the girl i also could have been & her name / easy / i know the story all her life / my mother wanted a girl named for a flower whose oil scents all our mothers / petals wrung for their perfume i was planted land became ocean became land anew its shape refusing root in my fallow mouth cleaving my life neatly & my name / taken from a dead woman to remember / to fill an aperture with cut jasmine in a bowl our longing our mothers’ wilting garlands hanging from our necks
<strong>ISSUE</strong> <strong>II</strong> 7 An Interview With Safia Elhillo While you were explaining your poem “yasmeen” in The Poetry Magazine Podcast, we came to understand the poem as recounting three separate timelines: one where the speaker is Yasmeen, one where she’s Safia, and one where she has to live with both, and neither is extricable from her identity. Why did you think a contrapuntal poem was the best way to present these three timelines? SAFIA ELHILLO: I was thinking a lot about inherited form, in general, at the time of writing that poem, and in the case of this particular poem, the form preceded the content. I’d never written a contrapuntal before, and I’d been reading Olio by Tyehimba Jess, which is full of these wild contrapuntals that you can read backwards and upside-down and all sorts of unfair stuff. The summer before, at Cave Canem, he’d given a talk about his process and walked us through a bunch of his contrapuntals. I had not been particularly excited about form in that way until I saw him take such ownership of a form that I think people of color in general—Black people in particular—have been left out of the conversation about some of those older forms. So, to see him achieve beyond fluency in the form made me really want to write a contrapuntal. I would say that the process of building a poem is measuring out each word and each line, and [writing a contrapuntal poem] takes that process and magnifies it because the line not only has to work as a line, it also has to work as half of another line. So, it really was the longest I’ve ever spent writing such a short poem. So, the poem was made from scratch in that way, where I had to go into it not knowing what the poem was going to be and go to meet the form and see what came out. I was thinking a lot about this idea of an alternate self. There’s a Ladan Osman interview, where she talks about the particular diasporic experience of always having to contend with an alternate version of yourself and using that alternate version of yourself as a metric to measure your actual self against. Like, if I’d only grown up back home all this stuff I think is wrong with me would not be wrong with me. If I’d only grown up back home, my ends wouldn’t be split. In hindsight, it is an idea that makes a lot of sense for the contrapuntal form. I am not generally so “woo-woo” about the process of making a poem—it’s work. I have to sit and think and do, but sometimes, there is an element that is beyond something I can language and this was that—where in hindsight, when the poem was done, I was like, “Oh. Okay, of course. This is the only poem this could have been.” But at the time, I knew what I was doing, and also, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so occupied with fulfilling the exercise that I almost didn’t notice the poem that was being made.
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ISSUE II

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