ISSUE II

ISSUE II 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.