"To Make Use of Water" by Safia Elhillo

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.