My name is Safia Elhillo,
and this poem is called "to make use of water."
dilute
i forget the arabic word for economy
i forget the english word for عسل
forget the arabic word for incense
& english word for مسكين
arabic word for sandwich
english for صيدلية & مطعم & وله
/stupid girl, atlantic got your tongue/
blur
back home we are plagued by a politeness so dense
even the doctors cannot call things what they are
my grandfather’s left eye
swirled thick with smoke
what my new mouth can call glaucoma
while the arabic still translates to
the white water
swim
i want to go home
dissolve
i want to go home
drown
half don’t even make it out or across
you get to be ungrateful
you get to be homesick
from safe inside your blue american passport
do you even understand what was lost to bring you here.
My name is Safia Elhillo, and the title of my poem is
“To Make Use of Water”.
Around the time of writing this poem, I’d made the decision that I wanted
to try and get closer in my writing to how language functions in my head.
In any moment that I am speaking entirely in English
or entirely in Arabic,
there’s always a part of me that’s translating.
If I write the word in the language it occurs to me in,
then what’s that going to look like?
What’s that going to feel like? How can I make that work?
I was sitting down to write this poem about water,
and this idea of being diluted was one of the first things
that presented itself to me.
There’ve been a lot of questions about dilution throughout my life.
About my identity being dilute, my fluency being diluted,
my ‘Sudaneseness’ being diluted, my ‘Americanness’ being diluted.
And then I was thinking a lot about the body in water.
So the idea of swimming as, sort of, a voluntary way
to get to and from somewhere, whereas something like dissolving
is more of a surrender, more of a release.
“Blue” by Carl Phillips,
which I think is the poem that gave me permission to use obsession
as my primary tool in my writing.
Also it’s just a really beautiful poem. I love it.