WEBVTT

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My name is Safia Elhillo,

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and this poem is called 
"to make use of water."

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dilute

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i forget the arabic word for economy

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i forget the english word for عسل

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forget the arabic word for incense

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& english word for مسكين

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arabic word for sandwich

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english for صيدلية & مطعم & وله 

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/stupid girl, atlantic got your tongue/

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blur

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back home we are plagued by 
a politeness so dense

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even the doctors cannot call 
things what they are

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my grandfather’s left eye

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swirled thick with smoke

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what my new mouth can call glaucoma

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while the arabic still translates to

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the white water

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swim

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i want to go home

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dissolve

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i want to go home

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drown

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half don’t even make it out or across

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you get to be ungrateful

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you get to be homesick

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from safe inside your blue 
american passport

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do you even understand
what was lost to bring you here.

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My name is Safia Elhillo,
and the title of my poem is

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“To Make Use of Water”.

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Around the time of writing this poem,
I’d made the decision that I wanted

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to try and get closer in my writing 
to how language functions in my head.

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In any moment that I am 
speaking entirely in English

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or entirely in Arabic,

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there’s always a part 
of me that’s translating.

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If I write the word in the
language it occurs to me in,

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then what’s that 
going to look like?

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What’s that going to feel like?
How can I make that work?

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I was sitting down to write 
this poem about water,

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and this idea of being diluted 
was one of the first things

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that presented itself to me.

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There’ve been a lot of questions 
about dilution throughout my life.

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About my identity being dilute, 
my fluency being diluted,

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my ‘Sudaneseness’ being diluted,
my ‘Americanness’ being diluted.

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And then I was thinking a lot 
about the body in water.

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So the idea of swimming as, 
sort of, a voluntary way

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to get to and from somewhere, 
whereas something like dissolving

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is more of a surrender, 
more of a release.

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“Blue” by Carl Phillips,

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which I think is the poem that gave 
me permission to use obsession

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as my primary tool in my writing.

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Also it’s just a really beautiful 
poem. I love it.