ISSUE II

8 SIENNA SOLSTICE
Earlier, you mentioned how you’re “limited by your particular obsessions”. One of
the things I noticed is you have quite an “obsession” with ampersands, and you
utilize them a lot in your poetry. Could you expand more on your attraction and
utilization of ampersands within your poetry?
SAFIA ELHILLO: On the most basic level, the ampersand is me trying to write
an Aracelis Girmay poem every time and failing. She also has a poem called
“Ode to the Ampersand”, but what I love, just on a technical level, when I am
making a poem, is I’m always trying to use as few words as possible to articulate
the thing. At the end of the day, the ampersand is very economical. It
is one symbol that takes up the space and the meaning that, otherwise, you
would have to have a whole other word in there—three more letters [and] this
much more space on the line. That feels cluttered to me. I like this neat, little
bundle that contains a word in it without going through the trouble of spelling
out a word.
You once said in a previous interview the best advice you ever received was in
the form of a Toni Morisson quote saying “If there’s a book you want to read and it
hasn’t been written yet then you must write it.” What would you say to young writers
entering a world that feels everything has either been written or is too niche
to be read?
SAFIA ELHILLO: I don’t believe anything is too niche. I don’t think there’s such
a thing. Nothing is universal. I think the only thing that is universal is specificity,
so we might as well write [about] our particular situations because
that hasn’t been written before. Even if there was a book that was written by
someone who was not me, whose main character was Safia and she was Sudanese-American
and she was a Sagittarius and 5’3 and born in Maryland. I still
would have something different to say. Because all of that stuff is just identity,
[and] identity is central to a lot of those questions surrounding representation
in literature but it’s not the end of the project. Just because there’s a book with
a Sudani girl in it doesn’t mean that the book is written. I think that’s when
representation politics fails us—when representation is seen as the end of the
project. But it’s not. There are still things that I have experienced, that I have
observed, that I have felt, that intersect with my identity and also intersect with
my geography and my astrological sign and the weather and where I am in my
menstrual cycle. All of that is the alchemy that makes the voice and the story.
It is niche. Everything is niche. Even those old canonical, white men eating
an apple in a forest—that’s niche. That’s a subculture that I’m forced to get to
know because that is literally niche. I’ve never met those types of people. That
does not mirror the culture I grew up in. So, I think there are ways that stories
and cultures and perspectives that are not straight cis, white, old men are
made to feel that they’re niche because they’re not as historically cannonized.
But that really was an oversight on the part of the canon and the cannon is
lucky that we’re trying to correct that.