asmarani
Poems
Writing from a Third Culture
Literature Project
Submitted by Safia Elhillo
In partial fulfillment of
The Master of Fine Arts Degree
Submitted May 2nd, 2015
Approved by: Mark Bibbins
Signature of Advisor: ______________________________
Approved by The New School Writing Program: ___________________________
asmarani
poems by Safia Elhillo
table of contents
asmarani makes prayer ..…………………………………………………………………………………2
vocabulary…………………………………………………………………………………………………3
Sudan Today. Nairobi: University of Africa, 1971. Print ……………………………………………4
to make use of water ..……………………………………………………………………………………5
- ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………6
while being escorted from the abdelhalim hafez concert.……………………………………………7
application for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl..………………………………………………8
abdelhalim hafez asks for references……………………………………………………………………9
talking with an accent about home……….……………………………………………………………10
first interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl……………………………………………11
the lovers………………………………………………………………………………………………….12
talking with an accent about home……………………………………………………………………..13
callback interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl ..……………………………………14
bride price ..………………………………………………………………………………………………15
old wives’ tales .…………………………………………………………………………………………16
date night with abdelhalim hafez ..……………………………………………………………………17
first quarantine with abdelhalim hafez…………………………………………………………………18
self-portrait with dirty hair ……………………………………………………………………………..19
watching arab idol with abdelhalim hafez..…..……………………………………………………….20
self-portrait with the question of race …………………………………………………………………21
abdelhalim hafez wants to see other people……………….…………………………………………..22
late-phone call with abdelhalim hafez…………………………………………………………………23
republic of the sudan/ministry of interior/passport & immigration general directorate/alien from
sudanese origin passcard………………………………………………………………………………..24
talking with an accent about home …………………………….………………………………………25
talking with an accent about home (second take)…………….………………………………………26
second quarantine with abdelhalim hafez……………………….…………………………………….27
portrait with asylum…………………………………………….……………………………………….28
talking to boys about abdelhalim hafez at parties…………….………………………………………29
biopic containing lies about abdelhalim hafez..………………………………………………………30
asmarani does psychogeography………………………………………………………………….……31
why abdelhalim…………………………………………………………………………………………..32
abdelhalim hafez asks who the sudanese are………………………………………………………….33
the part i keep forgetting…………………………………………………………………………….…..34
talking with an accent about home (reprise)………………………………………………………..…35
third quarantine with abdelhalim hafez………………………………………………………………..36
final interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl ..…………………………………………37
self-portrait as abdelhalim hafez’s girl………………………………………………………….……..38
portrait with abdelhalim hafez & the question of race…………………………………………….…39
lovers’ quarrel with abdelhalim hafez …………………………………………….…….…….………40
portrait of abdelhalim hafez as orpheus……………………………………………………………….41
glossary………………………………………………………………………………………….….….…42
everything i know about abdelhalim hafez……………………………………………………………43
notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………44
‫ أسمر‬: /as·mar/ adj. dark-skinned; brown-skinned
‫ أسمراني‬: /as·ma·ra·ni/ diminutive form of ‫أسمر‬
“‫ مني أساك عليا‬/ ‫”أسمر يا أسمراني‬
“brownskinned one/ what makes you so cruel to me”
asmarani makes prayer
verily everything that is lost will be
given a name & will not come back
but will live forever
& verily a border-shaped wound will
be licked clean
by songs naming
the browngirl in particular verily she
will not heal but verily the ghosts will
not leave her alone verily when asked how
she got her name if telling the truth she
will say [a woman died & everything
wants a home]
vocabulary
fact:
the arabic word ‫ هواء‬/hawa/ means wind
the arabic word ‫ هوى‬/hawa/ means love
test: [multiple choice]
abdelhalim said
you left me holding wind in my hands
or
abdelhalim said
you left me holding love in my hands
abdelhalim was left
abdelhalim was left
fairouz said
fairouz said
o wind take me to my country
or
o love take me to my country
fairouz is looking for
fairouz is looking for
oum kalthoum said
oum kalthoum said
empty
or
full
vehicle
or
fuel
where the wind stops her ships we stop ours
or
where love stops her ships we stop ours
oum kalthoum is
oum kalthoum is
stuck
or
home
Sudan Today. Nairobi: University of Africa, 1971. Print.
Note on Arabic
It is difficult.
The Publishers do not pretend
to have solved the problem.
1: INTRODUCING THE SUDAN
Above all, the story of Sudan
is the record of a fight against
nature.
to make use of water
dilute
i forget the arabic word for economy
i forget the english word for ‫ ﻋﺴﻞ‬forget
the arabic word for incense & english
word for ‫ ﻣﺴﻜﻴﯿﻦ‬arabic word for sandwich
english for ‫ﻭوﻟﻪﮫ & ﺻﻴﯿﺪﻟﻴﯿﺔ & ﻣﻄﻌﻢ‬
/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/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
did our mothers invent loneliness or did it make them our mothers were we
fathered by silence or just looking to explain away this quiet is it wasteful to
pray for our brothers in a language they never learned whose daughters are we
if we grow old before our mothers or for their sakes they called our
grandfathers the january children lined up by the colonizer & assigned birth
years by height there is no answer we come from men who do not know when
they were born & women shown to them in photographs whose children left
the country & tried for romance & had daughters full of all the wrong language
while being escorted from the abdelhalim hafez concert
halim can i call you halim i didn’t mean to make you tragic again
i’ve done it before
i did it to myself
& i didn’t
mean to make it
about me
it’s only that i’m west of everything i understand
the songs help
i speak their arabic
i could be as dark
as the girl they’re meant for
i know the words they help
when i go home
east of everything i’ve learned
don’t be upset with me
i saw your hands float up
saw them separate from the rest of your body & dance
i looked to them for direction
i thought violins meant this way
you cue the flute
i hear
go home
i didn’t mean to drown you out it’s only that i’m not the best listener
i get my languages mixed up i look for answers in what is only music
i heard the lyric about a lost girl
i thought you meant me
application for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl
i go quiet for days
i turn the color of mirrors
i turn the color of smoke
men tell me sometimes
that blue becomes me when i answer my voice
is hoarse from disuse i am afraid of my body & the ways
that it fails me i faint a woman on the subway platform
catches me floating into the tracks
i become the color
blue i don’t like to be touched
i wonder why
more people have not been kidnapped by taxi drivers
white men ask me
to say their names in arabic
ask where i’m
[really from]
i am six months
returned from sudan henna fading to look like burns
dusted up my arms i bleed & can’t stop bleeding
i speak & my mouth
is my biggest wound
every language is a borrowed joke i catch myself
complimenting strangers on their english
i am six months
returned from incense smoke to soften the taste of river water
incense burned to avert the evil eye
i see a possessed
woman scream when a prayer is read
her eyes the color
of smoke
& mine is a story older than water
abdelhalim hafez asks for references
there’s a saying about women who cannot
remember their homes
how they love to
mourn
what does not belong to them
a language
a man
a silk dress
that glides quietly
along the thighs
umeima hissed a rumor in our arabic class
that i wore such tight jeans
because
my father had gone missing
basma
leaning up
from the row behind me
whispered
if both parents had let umeima
leave the house with that ugly t-shirt on then
i was better off with just the one & now
i think if i had to choose
then better
a man gone missing
than drawn on a map
talking with an accent about home
‫ ﺏب‬:
home is
a name
maryland
is my
sudan
first interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl
i do not always survive
across boundaries i pull
sweet blue smoke from a coiled
hookah pipe i sometimes
lie bleeding painted gold
& you need not find me beautiful
mixed with water my border dulls
here i am little dagger ready
to make a home of your shirt pocket
answer me answer me
the lovers
khartoum in the eighties
my mother with ribbons in her hair
dress fanning about her nutmeg calves
my father
who i hear
was so lively & handsome
that only bad magic could have emptied
& filled him with smoke
the borrowed record player
the generation that would leave
to make nostalgia of these nights
to hyphenate their children
& grow gnarled by
every winter
but tonight motown crackling
into the hot twilight
mosquitoes drifting
near the lanterns
my parents dance
without touching
talking with an accent about home
‫ ﺹص‬:
smell winter
wash
the
sudan
of
red
geography
i grew
&
my rift grew
&
another
sudan
was
missing
scorching the untouched nile
callback interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl
when did you first hear abdelhalim
after my mother’s first attempt at leaving my father we’d left egypt for a pink house in
geneva i remember the tap water ran clear & i no longer had to shower with my mouth
shut i drank exclusively from the downstairs bathroom sink the water there was coldest
when did you first hear abdelhalim
in my grandmother’s kitchen
she knew all the words
the story goes that
she was the fairest of her sisters & knew all the egyptian films by heart
could have fit
right in from what i’ve seen in pictures
but anyway her sister fatima would say
why because your face is white that’s just paint on a mud wall
she’d learned the
accent the affected lilt & you know
the attitude was sure the sudanese are
honest people but
what about glamour
so what you’re saying is you thought the song was for you
i guess you can say i have a type
haunted men/dead men/men marked to die
i don’t follow
you know
black
i mean black
then you do think you’re the girl from the song
i guess i see the parallel
i am brown like her i am always halfway gone
like her
i’m not as cruel but i have tried
it’s just like the lyric says
i can’t sing but it goes
‫طمنوني األسمراني عملة إيه الغربة فيه‬
reassure me how is
the browngirl what has distance done to her
you know he didn’t mean that brown you know he didn’t mean black
the first time i heard abdelhalim was when i moved to new york city & finally got rid of
my accent
speaking of which what are you exactly are you arab or not are you black or not
the first time i heard abdelhalim was when my mother moved back to egypt & cairo was
burning & i forgot to call rather than saying
you know
i’m not sure i still
speak arabic
would you care to address the treatment of nubians in egypt & in the arab world at large
look black as i am i still feel like the girl from the song i mean i remember walking
through cairo khan al khalili you know
the big bazaar anyway
i remember the
men were calling from their shops
hey nile girl
hey aswan dam
& i never
got the context so i’m not sure if they were taunting but
i mean
they looked at
me & thought of water
does that answer the question
bride price
married off at seventeen
my grandmother
creamcolored girl
to a man who saw her in a photograph
hair heavier than night
spilled from her mother’s lap
thinks i am taking too long
we all outlive our beauty
for a house
it is currency we trade with men for their names
for someone to belong to
& become the only kind
of woman that we know
stung by the kitchen’s
heat & our own
tempers
fingers
sanded down by prayer
beads
forever frying
meat
&
scrubbing
yellowed linen dyeing
withered hair in the
bathroom
at
night
raising thick-knuckled
daughters & well-loved
sons
dying without
learning to smile with
our teeth
old wives’ tales
spraying perfume on your hair will turn it gray
a black cardamom seed
will cure any ache white toothpaste will cool a burn
a man will make
your hips big
braiding your hair before bed keeps it from falling out
in the night caramel removes body hair wearing shorts is an invitation
[men like big-legged girls] spraying perfume on an open wound will clean
it
wearing your hair loose invites the evil eye & it will fall out in the
night a pierced nose means you are ready to marry a small chest means
you are not eating enough red meat
walking too much will shrink you
[men like big-legged girls] castor oil will make your hair grow back
a
prayer bound up in leather will protect you from the evil eye
a prayer
dissolved in water casts a spell
date night with abdelhalim hafez
the story goes
my father would never unwrap a piece of gum
without saving half for my mother the story goes
my mother saved all the halves in a jar
that’s not the point
i’m not looking for anything serious
just someone to watch
my plants when i’m gone
[you can sing now if you want to]
they’re worried no one will marry me
i have an accent in every language
i want to be left alone but
that’s not how you make grandchildren
i can’t go home with you
home is a place in time
[that’s not how you get me
to dance]
i’m not from here
or from anywhere
i mean to say
i don’t know that song
first quarantine with abdelhalim hafez
& maybe it is too easy to blame
mortality on our capacity for love
the slow death that is putting
your breath in another’s body
trusting your name in another mouth
but maybe it is smaller
say water
sweat yes
tears yes
but also
the nile as a vein between our two home
countries
washing the red dust
from my feet yes
cooling the sear
of a blood orange sun yes but also killing you
the way only foul water can kill
& i do know how it is
to be young & always
sick at the mercy of
something meant
to immortalize us
the slow finish is in my heart
its syrup trickle
& i don’t mean love
i mean my wet crooked
actual heart
self-portrait with dirty hair
trying to flatten the jagged curl i hear my great-grandmother she's a
pretty girl but why do you let her go outside like that people will
think she does not have a name i hear my grandmother trying to
explain away all my knots her mother took her to america it is
different she does not know anymore how to look done i hear my
mother trying not to hurt my feelings but unable to escape how her
mother raised her habiba you always look nice but today you look
maybe a little tangled i hear a man i don’t love begging me to undo
my braid to show his friends my girl got a waterfall i watch halim
sing to a creamcolored girl i hear the quiet ripple of her loose waves
i get searched to the scalp at airport security i wear my hair big &
loose & free of the straightening iron to my cousin’s wedding &
grandma says you might as well have just shown up in pajamas
watching arab idol with abdelhalim hafez
i speak the language
but to learn the words
i learn an accent
that is not mine
i learn
halim could be singing
of a brown
that is not mine
i am reminded by thick lute music
not halim’s melancholy glamour
here the voices crack
the men squat around drums in their white cotton ‫ﺟﻼﻟﻴﯿﺐ‬
the percussion urgent
their accent just like mine
i open my mouth
a man in a cairo shop
tells me i look too clean to be from sudan
waits for me to thank him
lebanese singer ragheb alama
is my least favorite judge
on arab idol
i watch every week as the brownest
are first to leave
including my favorite
a dark-lipped nubian from the egyptian side
who parts his hair to the left
& sings
halim songs
in halim’s voice
when ragheb alama says
sudanese women
are the ugliest in the world
i am afraid
that i believe him
when i see halim in a suit
in a ballroom
with an orchestra
i think of glamour
then look at my own brown hands
at my own grandmother
hiking a printed ‫ﺗﻮﺏب‬
up around her knees
to wash her feet for prayer
her hair parted in the middle
in two fat braids coiled around her ears
self-portrait with the question of race
ِ /‘i·riq/ n. race; vein; SUDANESE COLLOQUIAL derogatory african blood; black blood.
‫ع ِرق‬:
“‫“ ”اهلل يسود ليلتك زي ما سود وجهك‬may god darken your nights/ as he has darkened your face”
‫اسمرت‬: /as·ma·rat/ v. FEMALE THIRD PERSON SINGULAR PAST TENSE to tan; to get darker.
egyptian comedian mohamed henedi dresses as a sudanese man & sings
“‫"وسمرت وإتحرقت بس بطاطا‬
“she got darker/ & burned like a potato”
[but your daughter will be fine but keep her out of the sun but do something
with that hair or people will not know she is ‫ بنت عرب‬daughter of arabs]
abdelhalim hafez wants to see other people
so i choose another
i choose
blue music
hookah smoke unspooling from our mouths i want him
to know i am not lonely
i have ghosts i have my illnesses
i have a mouthful
of half-languages
& blood thick with medication doctors line up to hear my crooked heart
some weekends i dance
sometimes i go missing i fry eggplant i listen to his stories
that are my stories
dead boys
burned cities
ache older than our bodies
our homes that are not our homes
most days i feel i am walking through water
most days i forget the sound of my voice
& he tries to kiss me goodnight
late-night phone call with abdelhalim hafez
it was fine but people kept touching my hair
without asking you don’t have to translate
you know i still speak it
no i don’t only
talk about race sometimes i talk about my father
that’s not true ‫ أبو‬means father it also means owner
as a prefix
____ ‫أبو‬
he of the_____
i know you said that in a song
you called yourself
‫أبو الغناوي املجروحني‬
he of the wounded songs did you mean
father of the wounded songs do you think a father is made a father
by what belongs to him
i already know that story
it goes your father died young
he used to sing to his horses
i don’t know the one about my father
yes he’s still alive but he keeps quiet i know him yes
i know he’s a name crowded around mine i know some names
do not survive translation
i know your father sang to his horses
to get them to dance
republic of the sudan
ministry of interior
passport & immigration general directorate
alien from sudanese origin passcard
at the khartoum office a veiled woman
made the card in microsoft paint
told me my arabic
was [not bad for a foreigner you can barely
hear the accent]
i board the plane with
grandma’s voice crackling through the phone
[come home again soon]
my blue passport
made me american place of birth maryland usa
& in the months since my last visit i feel american
syrup settle back to coat my r’s
& in new york
i am ambiguous browngirl
[but your english
is so good you can barely hear the accent]
mama
still speaks to me in arabic but we eat with fork & knife
we play abdelhalim
but mostly motown
to remind mama of those swaying eighties nights in the garden
before it turned to dust
before the old country crumbled
& mama came here to give me
the blue passport
& last time i was home
a soldier stopped the car
asked where i was from laughed when i said here
talking with an accent about home
‫إ‬:
downtown khartoum
‫ﺣﺮﻳﯾﺔ‬
[means freedom]
street
‫ ﺣﺮﻳﯾﺔ‬street
elusive khartoum
fly home
i didn’t go back at all
make home
talking with an accent about home (second take)
‫ب‬:
we went to a restaurant in khartoum
after an hour police arrived
shouting
turn the music off
interrogating women & men
i pretended i didn't speak arabic
they took a whole table of young women
without male protectors
& threw them in the back of a truck
‫م‬:
kidnapped girls
thirty year dictatorship
morality police
to ru[i]n the country
‫ص‬:
& so those who could afford to leave
left
either migrated or as refugees
& all over the world
sudanese refugees now
‫أ‬:
it was easier to just be
something else
second quarantine with abdelhalim hafez
the lyrics do not
translate
arabic is all verbs
for what
stays still
in other languages
‫تصبح‬
to morning
what the
translation
to awake cannot
honor cannot contain its rhyme
with ‫ تسبح‬to swim
to make
the night a body
of water
i am here now & i cannot morning
i am twenty-four
& always
sick
small for my age & always
translating
i cannot sleep
through the night
no language
has given me
the rhyme
between ocean &
wound
that i know to be true
sometimes
when the doctors
draw my blood
i feel
the word at the edge of my tongue
halim sings
‫أغرق‬
aghraq
i am drowning
i am drowning
the single word
for all the water
in his throat
does not translate
halim sings
teach me to kill
the tear in its duct
halim sings
i have no experience
in love
nor have i a boat
& i know he
cannot rest
cannot swim
through the night
i am looking for a voice
with
a wound in it
a man who could
only have died
by a form of
drowning
let the song take
its time
let the ocean close
back up
portrait with asylum
& then two boys
from sunday arabic school
identical twins
beautiful boys like the moon my mother said
dressed in matching
outfits long into our teenage years
both dead by twenty five
& all the mothers
in dc maryland virginia [crossed an ocean &
thought it was enough to keep us safe] cooked for days & packed into
the emptied house & later crowded around cups of sweet strong tea
& traded theories gang violence mugging hate crime islamophobia
xenophobia because they were too black
because they were not
black enough
murder mistaken identity accident though
probably not both times
but all agreeing this would never have
happened if we’d never come to this godless country each still haunted
by the brother back home twenty years missing the husband shot in
the street daughters whipped through thin cotton blouses but
back
home this would never have happened
not both
not both
talking to boys about abdelhalim hafez at parties
who decides the equator is real what marks the end of my body what if i do not want
to bear fruit where does a father go to abdicate where does a folktale go to die the
first time i heard abdelhalim i found an affordable glamour i prefer the mythology i
prefer to perfume my hair and say no & mean no what makes a man a man & not a
rumor i haven’t yet decided what if i do not want to go home at all let alone with you
let alone [i got a girl from the land of milk & honey] [you’re so beautiful may i ask]
[okay but mixed with what] [but if you’re from africa how come] do you know my
country conjoins a split nile do you know how my parents met i’d tell you but there
are plenty of songs & i’m sorry what was your name
biopic containing lies about abdelhalim hafez
because of the blood in his lungs
halim coughs little roses into napkins
at parties takes each one home in his
pocket & cannot fight in the war sings
instead by the blood of the englishman
by the blood of the american who stole
my country my mother & did not pay
her dowry
the actor playing abdelhalim hafez dies
before filming ends
gives the crew
permission
to record his funeral &
use it as halim’s
who died in a hospital
in london
spent seven hours in a coffin
on an airplane
left behind two siblings & four
hundred thousand widows haunts the balcony
of every girl born brown & far away
asmarani does psychogeography
once we lived in zamalek in the same building as mohammed tharwat once i
was four years old in dar es salaam in love with a boy named osmani once in
sharm el sheikh i bought a peachcolored doll & was called darkgirl for the first
time smiled with my teeth didn’t know he meant to be cruel once in cairo i sat
next to amr diab’s daughter while learning to embroider nameless & tiny
flowers once in nairobi i learned to speak english once in washington dc i
answered black & was told to say nigger to prove it once in khartoum i was
three days returned not yet readjusted & wearing bright white sneakers that i
cleaned with a toothbrush once in khartoum the sun warmed my earrings until i
had to take them out once in geneva the pink wall took the skin off my arm
once in geneva i was one of three african girls at school two of which were said
to stink i was never told which two
why abdelhalim
because he's gone
he can never tell me i am too much or not
he will never think me too
dark or not dark
enough
he sings
an endless echoing note
& anyone can be the girl he says browngirl & never says
how brown
he's been dead my whole life
he's used up
he's eulogizing home
he's eulogizing my mother as a girl not yet filled up with children
he sings & she's the browngirl
he dies before she’s hurt
he dies before
belonging
he belongs to no one country [same]
he belongs to no one language [check my mouth]
he belongs to no one
in this way he never leaves
abdelhalim hafez asks who the sudanese are
*
Northern Nile River Arabs Not Genetically Arabs
Arabized Africans
Mostly from the Nubian Tribes
Adopted Arab Culture and Language Self-Identified
[as] Arabs
Arabs Consider Northern Sudanese Not
Arabs but Africans Aspiring to Change Their Race
They Are Often Treated with Disdain Insecure About
Their Adopted Cultural Inheritance
*
‫جمهورية السودان‬: /jum·hū·rīy·at as·sūdān/ republic of the sudan
‫بالد السودان‬: /bil·ād as·sūdān/ land of the blacks
from ‫ سود‬/sūd/ plural of ‫ أسود‬/aswad/
"black"
*
‫ أسمر‬: /as·mar/ adj. dark-skinned; brown-skinned
‫ أسمراني‬: /as·ma·ra·ni/ diminutive form of ‫أسمر‬
“‫ مني أساك عليا‬/ ‫”أسمر يا أسمراني‬
“brownskinned one/ what makes you so cruel to me”
*
[don’t think he means you
don’t think he means black]
[in context /asmarani/ means something closer to swarthy ]
[closer to a girl who can run a comb through her hair]
the part i keep forgetting
sudan is crackling around the edges is a
singed bit of paper is cracked by a river in
two is new border fresh wound soldiers
standing in the street [sudan was always an
invented country]
sudan in grainy
photographs
& dalia’s been arrested &
yousif’s been arrested
sudan broke my
mother’s heart [i came from a sudan that had
gardens & magnolia flowers] [now i’m not
from anywhere] cut open my uncle’s back
[forty lashes] [i haven’t been able to wear silk
since] but the part i keep forgetting
is that i am at the jazz museum in
harlem
& i am hearing the stories
secondhand
& i am hearing
the stories in english
on television
& i am spared the smell i am cutting
pomegranates in my pretty kitchen
& my fingers are sweet red talking with an accent about home (reprise)
after Lawrence Joseph
sudan of gardens & magnolia flowers
of cloying thick coffee
dark dregs
carved with an ending for each story
sudan of my grandfather awake with
the sun & feeding the birds & the
early morning perfume of something
burning sudan split by a river in two
quartered by new boundaries
&
i with my feet in my grandmother’s lap
& my story perfect by never beginning
oiled in romance the river nile a dirty
refrain
emptied of actual water
the great-aunts long dead dark-lipped
smiling in pictures
four long burn
scars striped down each face
healed
over
to look painted on
third quarantine with abdelhalim hafez
summer unclean & humid
air a fat piece of velvet
draped over my body & despite the pills meant to firm up
my blood
i faint i am old fashioned this time
on the 103rd street platform & a stranger reads to me
from his paperback
to keep me awake until the
ambulance arrives
looks at my rounded set of features
& won’t believe i am not a child
i don’t know
i can’t remember
either he said
[your
grandfather’s sisters
never learned to read or write
they made poems committed to memory & the poem
died with the body]
or he said
[you should take
better care]
what i’ve seen does not live forever
& i thought i’d be older
before starting to ask
what if i die what happens to everything i haven’t yet
said halim sings stay here with me
take one of my
eyes & come back to see me
or take them
both
& ask after me
from the very first day
i haven’t been able to sleep & i want to sleep
but i want to stay
& i get lost in wanting
i forget to breathe
final interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl
will you miss me
i learned all the words
& do you speak arabic
in little curls of smoke
what brings you here today
i want to know
when you say browngirl
if you mean me
do you know the double meaning
the browngirl’s eyelashes/fanned us into the wind
the browngirl’s eyelashes/fanned us into a great love
& the nile
two braids of black hair
you’ve been in the water
where the two niles meet
if you had known the river was dark
would you have drowned
would you have died
i invented a great love i did what was asked
i can hear where you get sick
does it make you love me less
i know what the water did to you
i know i used to be beautiful
did it hurt
i didn’t mean to die
a new wound/or nowhere at all self-portrait as abdelhalim hafez’s girl
my beloved
i swear
still my beloved
i swear
still my beloved
even if you’ve forgotten me
abdelhalim
“the loverboy prototype”
“the first romantic”
mourns smoothly from a set of crackling speakers
‫حبيبي‬
‫لسة حبيبي‬
‫واهلل‬
‫حبيبي مهما تنسى‬
‫واهلل‬
abdelhalim
“little brown nightingale”
“sad-eyed heartthrob”
in his patient sadness
the maker of all our love songs
beloved of our whole language
but beloved by what cool palm
what gentle neck
what sighing mattress
[fourteen egyptian girls killed themselves when he died]
portrait of abdelhalim hafez with the question of race
halim’s skin is the barely-brown
of ‫شاي صاموطي‬
tea leaves
boiled in milk
& was called
‫ أسمر‬/asmar/
& i come from
cinnamoncolored women nutmeg
colored women
& i want my due
when halim sings /asmar ya asmarani/
& when i go to cairo if i open my mouth
shopkeepers say [we are both children
of the nile we are one people]
& black is not the only way to be followed
in a store
but it is the surest way
& i yes live in america where halim & i
would not be the same race because halim
yes is brown is /asmar/ but i yes i promise
am black
& that is taking /asmar/
too literally
i am asked to give it back
lovers’ quarrel with abdelhalim hafez
“The idea of a balcony death, therefore, hits close to home…Were there not
reports of [women] jumping off balconies after the death of heartthrob crooner
Abdelhalim Hafez in 1977?”
-Tanya Goudsouzian, Death by Balcony in Egypt (Al-Jazeera)
you ruined it by dying
we are all missing the same pieces
then why sing those songs
why make us love anyone more than our own countries
our desires are not our own
why be specific
why sing to a browngirl if you were just going to leave
no one believed i was sick
why go in the water
people wash their cars in the nile
if you had known the water was deep/would you have set sail
if you had known love would leave a scar/would you have loved
loving you tips a body off a building
the words for love & wind
sound the same in arabic
why assume i didn’t already know
brownest of browngirls/what makes you so cruel to me
we learned romance from a dead man
you understand my problem
you are beside me & your eyes are my darlings
they make me forget the living still beside me
look i’m a sad girl from a long line of sad girls
doesn’t mean you can talk to me that way
portrait of abdelhalim hafez as orpheus
after the funeral women poured down
from balconies
fourteen brown
nightingales diving
in the name of
a communal beloved the legend goes
a brownfaced head hair combed back
with water
skims down the river nile
by night
o moon o you who have
forgotten me survives the failed body
the storied mouth
propped open
& a final song
falls out
if you see my beloved reassure me
reassure me
leaves no ripples
in its wake
glossary
everything i know about abdelhalim hafez
once at a party he wore a white suit & vomited blood
in the hospital
in his last days
his hair was still
shellacked still neatly combed
he loved his country
my beloved my mother
abdelhalim was an orphan
abdelhalim was honest
only when he sang
he swam in the river as a child
little brown boy shoulder-deep in dirty water abdelhalim
was always singing
abdelhalim died in london
but it was the river nile that killed him
bilharzia liver damage
massive uncontrolled bleeding
did we make him up
[wait
i’m getting to that part]
abdelhalim sings of his country as a beautiful girl
washing her hair in the canal
& my country
[did i make him up] is the man i meet in the songs
the lover i waited
to deserve
only to learn
he is already dead
i am most afraid of having nothing
to bring back
so i never come home
Notes
vocabulary:
The lines “you left me holding wind in my hands/ you left me holding love in my hands” are translated
lyrics from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫( زي الهوى‬Zai al-Hawa)”. The lines “o wind take me to my country/
o love take me to my country” are from Fairouz’s song “‫( نسم علينا الهوى‬Nassam ‘Aleyna al-Hawa)” and
the lines “where the wind stops her ships we stop ours/where love stops her ships we stop ours” are from
Oum Kalthoum’s song “‫( شمس األصيل‬Shams al-Aseel)”
Sudan Today. Nairobi: University of Africa, 1971. Print.
This poem is an erasure of the first chapter of the textbook Sudan Today (Nairobi: University of Africa,
1971. Print.)
talking with an accent about home:
The series of poems “talking with an accent about home” are erasures of found text from interviews I
conducted in 2012 with members of the Sudanese diaspora. The different voices are marked by Arabic
letters for each speaker’s first initial, in order to preserve their anonymity.
callback interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl:
The line “ ‫ طمنوني األسمراني عملة إيه الغربة فيه‬reassure me how is the browngirl what has distance done to
her” is a lyric from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫( سواح‬Sawwah)”
self-portrait with the question of race:
The phrase “‫( اهلل يسود ليلتك زي ما سود وجهك‬may god darken your nights/as he has darkened your face)” is a
quote from the Egyptian film “Ali Spicy” (Dir. Muhammad Al-Najjar. Perf. Hakim, Soraya Al-Khashab,
Salah Abdullah. 2005.)
late-night phone call with abdelhalim hafez:
The line “‫أبو الغناوي املجروحني‬
‫( النهار‬Mawal al-Nahar)”
he of the wounded songs” is a lyric from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫موال‬
second quarantine with abdelhalim hafez:
The lines “teach me to kill the tear in its duct […] i have no experience in love nor have i a boat”
are translated lyrics from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫( رسالة من تحت املاء‬Risala Min Teht al-Maa)”
biopic containing lies about abdelhalim hafez:
The lines “by the blood of the englishman/ by the blood of the american who stole/ my country my
mother & did not pay/ her dowry” are a combination of translated lyrics from Abdelhalim Hafez’s songs
“‫( بالدم‬Bel Dam)” “‫( باالحضان‬Bel Ahdan)” and “‫( موال النهار‬Mawal al-Nahar)”
abdelhalim hafez asks who the sudanese are:
The title of this poem refers to a quote from the book A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts by James
Copnall: “The National Question of who the Sudanese are— Arabs? Africans? Muslims? People of many
faiths?— has preoccupied Sudan since its birth.” The first stanza of this poem is comprised of found text
from the book Sudan, South Sudan, & Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know by Andrew S. Natsios. The
line “‫ مني أساك عليا‬/ ‫أسمر يا أسمراني‬
brownskinned one/ what makes you so cruel to me” is a
translated lyric from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫( أسمر يا اسمراني‬Asmar Ya Asmarani)”
the part i keep forgetting:
The phrase “sudan was always an invented country” in lines 2-3 is quoting the title of an article by
Richard Walker, "Sudan was always an invented country. Maybe we should invent it again: A
review of ‘A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts’ by James Copnall” published in the Spectator in April 2014.
The phrase “i came from a sudan that had gardens and magnolia flowers” is a quote from my mother’s
interview for the “talking with an accent about home” series.
third quarantine with abdelhalim hafez:
The lines “stay here with me take one of my eyes & come/ back to see me or take them both & ask after
me/ from the very first day i haven’t been able to sleep” are translated lyrics from Abdelhalim Hafez’s
song “‫( أنا لك على طول‬Ana Lak ‘Ala Toul)”
final interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl:
The lines “the browngirl’s eyelashes/fanned us into the wind/ the browngirl’s eyelashes/fanned us into a
great love” and “a new wound/ or nowhere at all” are translated lyrics from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song
“‫( جانا الهوى‬Gana al-Hawa).” The lines “if you had known the river was dark/would you have drowned”
are based on translated lyrics from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫( رسالة من تحت املاء‬Risala Min Teht al-Maa)”
self-portrait as abdelhalim hafez’s girl:
The lines “my beloved/ i swear still my beloved/ i swear still my beloved even if you’ve forgotten me […]
‫ ”حبيبي واهلل لسة حبيبي واهلل حبيبي مهما تنسى‬are translated lyrics from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫حاول تفتكرني‬
(Hawel Teftekerny)”
lover’s quarrel with abdelhalim hafez:
The line “if you had known the water was deep/would you have set sail” is a translated lyric from
Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫( رسالة من تحت املاء‬Risala Min Teht al-Maa).” The line “if you had known love
would leave a scar/would you have loved” is based on a translated lyric from the same song. The line
“brownest of browngirls/what makes you so cruel to me” is a translated lyric from the song “‫أسمر يا‬
‫( اسمراني‬Asmar Ya Asmarani)” and the lines “you are beside me & your eyes are my darlings/ they make
me forget the living still beside me” are translated lyrics from the song “‫( قولوا لو‬Ouloulou)”
glossary:
The first column on the left is a list of Sudanese idioms and figures of speech. The second column is the
transliteration of their Arabic pronunciation. The third column is a literal translation, and the fourth
column is their intended meaning.
everything i know about abdelhalim hafez:
the line “my beloved my mother” is a translated lyric from Abdelhalim Hafez’s song “‫( باالحضان‬Bel
Ahdan)” and the line “bilharzia liver damage massive uncontrolled bleeding” is a quote from the
Abdelhalim Hafez biopic, “Halim” (Dir. Sherif Arafa. Perf. Ahmed Zaki. 2006.)
Writing from a Third Culture
Safia Elhillo
“All nationalisms in their early stages develop from a condition of estrangement”
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile
“Where, if not faraway, is my place?”
Malik Ibn Al-Rayb
1. When someone asks where I am from, usually a harmless enough question in its intention, it
is never entirely clear which piece of information they are asking for with the word “from.” I
look up definitions of “from,” and cannot unite those any more than I can unify my answers to
the original question:
i. “Used to specify a starting point in spatial movement; a train running west from
Chicago.” By this definition, my starting point is Rockville, Maryland, where I was born.
Or, Khartoum, Sudan, where my parents were born, where they met, and where they were
married.
ii. “Used to express removal or separation, as in space, time, or order; two miles from
shore; 30 minutes from now; from one page to the next.” I am 6,349 miles from Khartoum,
Sudan; I am twenty-four years from Khartoum, Sudan; I am exiled from Sudan to the
United States of America. By this definition, from is the point of origin before the
occurrence of the removal or separation, and this is the way I have come to think of from,
as the before to an after.
2. In December of 2013, I was asked, informally, to present at TEDxKhartoum during my next
trip to Sudan. I did not want to. I know that I am Sudanese, and know that I feel an attachment
and a patriotism to my Sudaneseness; I do not, however, know whether or not I am from (iii.
“Used to indicate source or origin; to come from the Midwest; to take a pencil from one’s
pocket”) Sudan as a geographic location. Zora Neale Hurston wrote “I feel most colored when
thrown against a sharp white background.” I feel most Sudanese when I am in diaspora, and I
feel most patriotic when I am in exile, my cultural identity simultaneously at odds with and
strengthened by my geographic reality. I did not want to stand in front of an audience in
Khartoum, made up of people far more Sudanese than I am, and talk about Sudaneseness. My
Sudaneseness is native to an absence of an actual Sudan, and starts to dissolve when this actual
Sudan becomes present. Though it may not have started off as such, my exile is now voluntary.
I can pack up and move “back” to Sudan whenever I want to; I just don’t want to. I feel more at
home missing Sudan as it was told to me than I do actually experiencing it.
3. And so, I am not from Sudan. I am not from anywhere, and I believe that if enough people
are from nowhere, then “nowhere” becomes a location—the space between here and there—
and a nation in its own right.
4. In Reflections on Exile, Edward Said defines nationalism as “an assertion of belonging in
and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language,
culture, and customs.” In the case of the community of exiles, this “place” to which they now
belong is the shared experience of a cultural and/or geographical after to the loss of the before.
This not-home is the new, locationless, figurative “land” to which all exiles become native—a
world constructed in response to the loss of a world. Its defining geography is its hybridization
of space, reshaping the adopted land by allowing it to be haunted by the one left behind.
5. And, accordingly, the language of exile (I am speaking now of my particular experience of
exile from an Arabophone Eastern culture while living in the Anglophone West) is often a
hybrid form of mutated English (or whatever the dominant language may be in the adopted
land), what Wail Hassan refers to in Immigrant Narratives as
a language semantically infused by its Other, bearing the marks of linguistic and
ideological contamination…a major language in the hands of a minority writer is
defamiliarized through its infusion with words, expressions, rhetorical figures, speech
patterns, ideological intentions, and the worldview of the author’s minority group,
which differentiate the writer’s language from that of the mainstream culture.
My grandparents (and occasionally my mother) speak what an old Arabic teacher of mine used
to call “translationese” English, a beautiful, crooked syntax in which they first conceive of a
thought in Arabic before speaking it in English: “turn on/off the light” becomes “open the
light” and “close the light;” “I would like some tomato soup” becomes “I love tomato soup.”
These moments of misspeaking are my favorite language, are my native language.
6. I am especially interested in writing in this language. For example, Suheir Hammad’s uses
Arabic words in her otherwise Anglophone poems, transliterating them to blend in with the
English words but leaving them untranslated. I am especially interested in her use of the word
ana [‫]ﺃأﻧﺎ‬, which is Arabic for “I,” instead of using the English “I.” This ana keeps her Arab self
(quite literally, her Arabic “I”) intact despite choosing to write in the dominant language. As a
result, she reshapes the dominant language to accommodate her Arabness and her Arabic:
ana gathering new selves into new
city under construction gaza eyes pitted zeitoun spit meat taqasim
brooklyn broken english wa exiled arabs sampled
(from “break [rebirth]”)
7. Hammad’s work leads me to consider what it is to make work that is Anglophone rather than
English, where English is the vehicle for the work but not a characteristic of the contained
message. This is a subversive act of appropriating a language once considered property of the
Western side of the Orientalist divide, to express the [Eastern] Other’s point of view. This point
of view goes on to alter the language it employs by mutating this language to express concepts
that may not be native to the world which this language usually represents. In Suheir
Hammad’s work, the consistent refusal to adhere to Standard English’s rules of capitalization
by writing entirely in lowercase letters, regardless of a word’s status as proper noun or
beginning of a sentence, is directly defiant of English standards of grammar and correctness.
Her transformed English can be thought of as english instead. This relegation of English to
english demonstrates the reversal of the traditional Orientalist power structure, with the major
language at the mercy of the minority world it is used to depict.
8. It is a similarly subversive act when Hammad transliterates the spoken pronunciation of her
english rather than silence the non-Standard accent in order to conform to Standard English
spellings of the word:
as bleached blonde brunettes
w/ burn scars on dare necks […]
through da hands of frustrated boys
who shoulda been home for dinner awready
(from “mariposa”)
9. In Emails from Scheherazade, Mohja Kahf includes Arabic words and text in her otherwise
Anglophone/english poems, and does not gloss the sections written in Arabic (or the Arabic
words transliterated into English but left untranslated within the poem) until the end of the
book: “We are going to rewrite English in Arabic/-‫ ﻳﯾﺎ ﻋﻴﯿﻦ‬, ‫ ﻳﯾﺎ ﻋﻴﯿﻦ‬-“ (from Copulation in English)
“Say Amen/ Say ‫ﺁآﻣﻴﯿﻦ‬/ Say it, say it” (from Fayetteville as in Fate). These occurrences of
Arabic-within-English/english are therefore prevented from appearing anthropological, as a
means of “selling” her culture to the English language, and instead subvert this very process by
making elements of her poems temporarily inaccessible to those not versed in her hybrid exilelanguage. Her work demonstrates the intentional use of opacity as a means to counter the
practice of reading work by non-English Other writers, particularly writers of color, as an
exercise in cultural tourism.
10. In considering cultural tourism, I think often of Mustafa Sa’eed, the protagonist of Tayeb
Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, who “consciously makes use of Orientalist clichés to
woo British women.” Sa’eed’s character can be read as a vehicle for critique of selfexoticization, especially considering that Tayeb Salih, despite spending most of his adult life in
Europe, continued to write in Arabic “as a matter of principle.” Mustafa Sa’eed’s self-
exoticization is condemnable but also quite radical in its appropriation of colonial essentialism
to serve his own interests as an Arab-African man from a freshly post-colonial Sudan.
There came a moment when I felt I had been transformed in her eyes into a naked,
primitive creature, a spear in one hand and arrows in the other, hunting elephants and
lions in the jungles. This was fine. Curiosity had changed to gaiety, and the gaiety to
sympathy, and when I stir the still pool in its depths the sympathy will be transformed
into a desire whose taut strings I shall play as I wish. (Salih, 33)
Sa’eed’s manipulation of his exoticization by the British woman is studied enough that he even
knows to use familiar Orientalist essentialist tropes when describing himself to confirm the
woman’s image of and vocabulary for the Sudan: “I’m like Othello—Arab-African […] My
face is Arab like the desert of the Empty Quarter, while my head is African and teems with a
mischievous childishness” (33). This guarantees Sa’eed an appealing, rather than dangerous,
Othering, one that is familiar in its adherence to this British woman’s assumptions and
vocabulary of “deserts” and “jungles” in this faraway yet familiar “Africa.”
11. I do not write in Arabic as fluently as I write in English, and think back frequently to
Salih’s words of writing in one’s mother tongue as “a matter of principle,” especially since the
language of one’s writing does, to some extent, choose one’s audience for them. If I am writing
about my Sudaneseness, but I am writing it in English, then who is my audience? If I require a
non-Sudanese audience (Zora Neale Hurston’s “sharp white background”) to assert my
authority over Sudaneseness, what better am I than Mustafa Sa’eed, spinning stories of “deserts
of golden sands and jungles where non-existent animals called out to one another” (33) to
impress white women? Is a process of self-essentialization involved in locating myself in what
Assia Djebar calls “the language of the former conqueror”?
Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to unveil
oneself...tantamount to stripping oneself naked...but this stripping naked, when
expressed in the language of the former conqueror (who for more than a century could
lay his hands on everything save women’s bodies), this stripping naked takes us back
oddly enough to the plundering of the preceding century. (Djebar, 157)
12. By this analysis, allowing “the language of the former conqueror” into the body by
speaking it is, therefore, an act of perpetuating colonialism, a shameful surrender of one’s voice
and body to an occupying force. This act of surrender reenacts the former occupation, with the
voice and body acting as the land. Voluntarily allowing this occupying force into the body
irritates a historical wound and conjures the memory of the forced entry by, in the case of the
Djebar text, the French into Algeria. This makes the speaker of this “language of the former
conqueror” a traitor, whose mouth is the entrance through which the enemy finally infiltrates
these bodies upon which he could not lay his hand “for more than a century.” This is the more
complicated alternative attitude to that of “writing back” to the empire, coopting the language
of a former colonizer and reclaiming it by using it to express the point of view of the formerly
colonized. This is my dilemma as an Anglophone writer whose native country is a former
British colony. I of course find more comfort in the idea of “writing back,” but cannot escape
the question of the intended audience. If I am writing in “the language of the former
conqueror,” who will read it but “the former conqueror” himself? My resolution is in the
english of Hammad and Kahf’s work, a mutation of “the language of the former conqueror”
into a new language, that of those who survived conquest and have two languages to show for
it.
13. By writing in English and living a predominantly English-speaking life, I participate in a
series of Western definitions of my own identity, constantly revising and rephrasing in an
attempt to bring back some of the nuance lost in trying to describe my non-Western, nonAnglophone cultural, national, ethnic, and, to an extent, racial identity, in English. In America,
Black is my default in that it is a broad enough category that the nuances can be accommodated
—even when looked at simplistically, I am Black because I am a brown-skinned person of
African descent. Sometimes, I say “black Arab” or “Afro-Arab,” but I often find this
problematic and in need of revision; it implies that Arab is my default and that my blackness
and Africanness came after and modified it. I like “Arabized African” despite its slight
awkwardness; it makes room for my fundamental Africanness while acknowledging the history
that made me Arabophone. There is a widespread fiction that northern Sudanese (which I am
considered) are “Arabs” in terms of their ethnicity, often brought up in juxtaposition with the
“blackness” or “Africanness” of South Sudanese; this fiction broke the country in half and
gave northern Sudanese a whole set of complexes built on the need to constantly prove their
own Arabness and scapegoat those “less Arab” or “more African” (used interchangeably) than
themselves.
14. In this way, I am grateful for the different vocabulary for race in America, as it has taught
me to be critical of the fiction that “northern Sudanese are Arab as opposed to Black or
African” as if one cannot be all three, simultaneously, as I am (and as most northern Sudanese
are). This is not to say, however, that this destructive fiction about Sudanese racial identity is
not a direct result of colonialism and the systems of scapegoating it installed. Western
conversations about race allowed me to see the failures in my own native country’s vocabulary
for race, but these failures are a direct result of Western occupation, which strategically divided
the Sudanese along invented racial lines.
15. This is to say that a reality in one language, or one country, or one culture, can collapse
when translated to another, as simply as this: in America, I am Sudanese; in Sudan, I am
American. My race in America is not the same as my race in Sudan. My body does not change
in any of these instances, but the language ascribed to my body does, and this makes all the
difference. This is at the root of why I believe it is it is important for “third culture kids” to
write, because the worlds on either side of the hyphen (in my case, Sudanese-American) do not
have any ready-made narratives for us, and will often pretend that we do not exist. Theodor
Adorno observes that “for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to
live.”
16. Although the traumas of third culture identity are real and valid, a significant portion of
these traumas are often inherited from the previous generations whose migration to the host
land were prompted by war or political instability in the homeland. “If exile pains you and does
not kill you, it will take you back to the cradle of the imagination” (Darwish, 85). The
difficulties of transnational belonging and constant questions of identity are, in spite of
themselves, also markers of the previous generation’s survival despite the odds— as Audre
Lorde wrote in “a litany for survival,” “So it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never
meant to survive.”
17. In the essay “Reimagining the Ancestral Arab Homeland,” Carol Fadda-Conrey
encourages the Arab-American writer to “destabilize nostalgia” of the homeland by moving
past idyllic, often essentialist representations to work towards acknowledging “harsh realities
of war, dispossession, gender politics, and exile,” and quotes Evelyn Shakir by calling this
process “demythologizing the homeland” (29). On the one hand, I agree with this analysis as it
encourages the writer not to lose the full-bodied image of the homeland as it actually exists to
create a flattened, idealistic myth that loses most of its reality in favor of preserving the
idealized image of the ancestral home—“Longing is not a memory, but rather what is selected
from memory’s museum […] it is the replaying of a memory after its blemishes have been
removed” (Darwish, 111). Remembering the homeland is a twofold process of remembering
both what was left behind and why it had to be left behind, and to sacrifice either component is
to sacrifice an integral part of the picture. Acknowledgement of both the beauty and the failures
of the ancestral homeland is fundamental to a nonbinary, anti-Orientalist perception of thirdculture identity, to “challenge binary constructions of national belonging, which pit the US
against the Arab world and posit any simultaneous claim to both locales as a contradiction in
terms” (Fadda-Conrey, 29). In my third culture narrative, the Sudanese homeland and
American host land are both fundamental to a transnational engagement with identity—being
Sudanese-American means collapsing the binary notion that I am either Sudanese or American,
that I belong either here or there:
The US becomes a central locus from which the Arab homeland is explored, identified
with, and reimagined, but not forgotten…challeng[ing] the binaries of exclusion and
inclusion inherent in dominant understandings of US citizenship and belonging.
(Fadda-Conrey, 29-30)
18. (To clarify my use of “Arab” and “Arab-American” here, in the aftermath of the discussion
of the fictional Sudanese binary of Arab and African, and my Arabized African identity: when I
say “Arab” in the current conversation about Arab-American identity and “the ancestral Arab
homeland” (Fadda-Conrey), I am using Arab as shorthand for Arabophone, in terms of the panethnic cultural identification of people from Arabophone countries, whose races vary.)
19. On the other hand, I find myself quite attached, and quite patriotic, to the mythology of an
idyllic, pre-collapse Sudan as it is told to me by my mother and grandparents. According to
Mahmoud Darwish, “whatever is lost is worshipped” (84). However, I do believe that there is a
way to represent both a longing for this mythologized homeland while still acknowledging its
difficult present-day realities and the circumstances which caused these difficult realities—
again, it is a matter of resurrecting what was left behind while simultaneously remembering
why it had to be left. I do not believe these processes to be mutually exclusive, though one
must work not to fall into the sort of longing described in Mahmoud Darwish’s book In the
Presence of Absence:
Longing is exile’s punishment for the exiled and the exile’s shame of liking exile’s
music and gardens… to long means not to be overjoyed by anything here, except with
shyness. If I were there—you say—If I were there my laugh would be louder and my
speech clearer.
This form of longing as punishment reinforces the binary of here and there, which, admittedly,
is stronger for one such as Darwish, born and raised in the homeland before experiencing exile,
than for one already born into this exile, for whom the host land has been a presence for as
much of their lifetime as the homeland has. For the “third-culture kid,” the binary of here and
there is significantly less defined, with the host land here haunted & modified by the original
homeland there, which is often more mythology than it is geographic reality. However,
returning to Darwish’s point on longing as “the exile’s shame of liking exile’s music and
gardens,” I consider the words of Somali-American poet Ladan Osman, who in an interview
says that “the most difficult part of negotiating both identities was not knowing if I was my
authentic self, whether I’d be a different person had I grown up ‘back home,’” echoing
Darwish’s “if I were there my laugh would be louder and my speech clearer.” This is at the
crux of third-culture identity— the constant meditation on the hypothetical “true self” that
would have developed had the third culture kid been given a chance to live uninterrupted in the
homeland, undiluted by a life lived in the host land.
20. The mythology of the original homeland does not have to be nothing more than the idyllic
fantasy to which Fadda-Conrey refers when encouraging the Arab-American writer to
demythologize the homeland in order to make work that does not succumb to nostalgic
essentialism. The mythology of the homeland is not only the stories passed down of the
country in its prime before the onset of war, political instability, or other difficulties leading to
the previous generation’s migration or exile; it is also the version of the homeland recreated
within the immigrant home:
In the absence of the US-born-and-raised generation’s direct experience of an Arab
homeland, the immigrant parents’ and grandparents’ reproduction of it from memory
within the space of the immigrant home becomes the primary site through which this
generation first comes in contact with it. The reproduction of this Arab homeland
occurs primarily through material fragments, including food, Arabic text, photos,
music, plants, and religious icons and scripture. (Fadda-Conrey, 30)
While reducing the homeland to nothing more than these “material fragments” is to reduce it to
a nostalgic-essentialist caricature, these material fragments, when acknowledged to be the
physical markers of a much larger, much more complex culture and history, are valuable to the
third-culture kid in providing tangible markers of the elusive homeland and allowing access to
traditions, cultural artifacts, and food that may otherwise be inaccessible in the host land.
21. The mythology of the homeland is also necessary for some to begin to heal the traumas
inflicted by war, corruption, and exile, and salvage the memories that preceded these traumas.
It is a way to preserve the version of the homeland that they loved, in order to have something
more than stories of tragedy and war to pass down to the next generation. Since the majority of
Western media coverage of Sudan focuses exclusively on these harsh realities, rather than the
joys and cultures complexities that also exist in Sudan alongside the wars, these idyllic
retellings of a former Sudan are important for the third-culture kid living in the West to form a
more balanced image of Sudan. This image is neither entirely the hardships reflected in media
coverage—war, genocide, dictatorship, poverty—- nor is it entirely food and music and
incense smoke, nor is it entirely the stories of older generations dancing and revolting and
making literature. Sudan, like any other country, is as much defined by its beauty as it is its
difficulties.
22. In 2012, I interviewed several members of the Sudanese diaspora from my generation and
my mother’s generation, opening with the question “where do you consider home?” The older
generation spoke predominantly of the beauty of a long-lost Sudan, while the younger
generation focused primarily on their struggles with an inherited nostalgia for a place they have
never encountered, that no longer exists. In my mother’s interview, she spoke at length about
the ways in which the wounds Sudan inflicted on the older generation often left them with
nothing to pass down to their children, so great was their desire to leave Sudan behind.
The children of a lot of Sudanese were missing out from the opportunity of at least
learning the language and the culture because their parents were very busy trying to
make a living so the kids would spend a lot of time in front of television or with their
non-Sudanese friends and therefore ended up not being able to speak Arabic well, and
at the same time confused because their parents expected them to be Sudanese,
expected them to behave as Sudanese kids, but they didn’t really quite understand what
that meant. (El-Kogali, Safaa. Personal interview. December 2012)
The younger interviewees all provided versions of the same answers when asked “where are
you from?” and “where do you consider home?” They all answered “I’m from Sudan” to the
first question, but their answers to “where do you consider home?” never mentioned Sudan.
I’m from Sudan. Home to me is Maryland. My name is Basma Rustom and I was
born and raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. For the first eight years of my life, I lived
in Jeddah. At age nine, I came to the United States and I have been living in
Maryland ever since. Home to me is Maryland. (Rustom, Basma. Personal
interview. December 2012)
My name is Awrad Saleh. I’m from Sudan. I was born in Washington DC, lived in
Maryland for most of my life, and Pennsylvania for some time. I consider
Maryland my home. It’s where I grew up. (Saleh, Awrad. Personal interview.
December 2012)
I’m from Sudan. I consider home to be Washington, D.C, because I’ve lived here
for the majority of my life. My name is Almustafa Elhillo. I was born in
Rockville, Maryland. I lived in Cairo, Egypt for two years. I consider home to be
Washington, D.C. (Elhillo, Almustafa. Personal interview. December 2012)
23. I find this paradox at the heart of third-culture identity—the dilemma that occurs when
where one is from is not the same as where one considers home. “Exile [is] a misunderstanding
between existence and borders” (Darwish, 85). When pressed to address this paradox in their
answers, the three interviewees addressed the fact that they do not feel enough of a connection
with Sudan to feel at home there.
Since moving to the United States, I have been to Sudan three times. I haven't visited
since summer 2009. I do not consider it to be home because I have never lived there. To
me, Sudan is just my nationality. I do not have any physical connection to it. (Rustom)
I used to go to Sudan once every two years, but I haven't been back since 2010. I
do not consider Sudan my home. I think home is where you are most comfortable
to be yourself, a place where you feel a sense of belonging. When I go to Sudan,
it’s [sic] always the feeling of being an outsider, whether from family, or airport
security, or just people in the street. All they see is an American girl stripped of
her culture. (Saleh)
24. The need for the myth of Sudan was addressed in my aunt Issraa El-Kogali’s
interview. Equidistant in age from both my mother and myself, she experienced some of
the former glory of Sudan that the older generation lived through, but has lived most of
her adult life with this version of Sudan as a distant memory. Now a mother herself, she
observes the importance of keeping the mythologized beauty of the homeland present
while raising the next generation, in order for them to feel a connection to Sudan despite
a lack of geographic connection.
Home is an elusive concept. I go home to my blue room in Khartoum and fly
home to D.C. with a visa and make a home of Stockholm. Home is sometimes
where memories live, other times it's where I don’t have to stop to ask for
directions. Since relocating to study in Sweden, I went home once. During my
years in the U.S. and Egypt, I didn’t go back at all. Go there or go back. Is it
always a return journey because mama gave birth to me there? It's an image of
home, flimsy and temporary. If I am blessed with children, I would not like to
raise them in a Sudan that has no South. I'll raise my children in a Sudan that I
construct within the walls of my house, just as I was raised. A mythic former
Sudan of values and diversity. (El-Kogali, Issraa. Personal interview. December
2012)
This “Sudan that has no South” is the geographic reality of a post-civil war, postreferendum Sudan in which the South has seceded to form a sovereign nation separate
from the North and the government in Khartoum. This version of Sudan, and the
circumstances that caused this version, is the one with which my generation has become
most familiar in our lifetime. The other version, the “Sudan construct[ed] within the walls
of my house […] A mythic former Sudan of values and diversity” is the Sudan that we
are from. Therefore, the disparity in our answers to the two questions “where are you
from?” and “where do you consider home?” is a reflection of the different versions of
Sudan we have had to consider in the negotiation of our identities. I’m from [a] Sudan
[constructed within the walls of my house, a mythic former Sudan]. This Sudan is no
longer the same piece of actual land that the previous generation knew—the current
Sudan, reshaped by war, dictatorship, and the secession, is the “Sudan that has no South.”
The two generations therefore know two entirely different geographies for Sudan. The
former Sudan inherited from the older generation no longer exists, and therefore cannot
be made home, while the current Sudan is not considered home by those who remember
the “mythic former Sudan,” and therefore cannot be inherited by the younger generation.
25. These difficult circumstances sent so many Sudanese out into diaspora that there was
an official identification card created in acknowledgement of the increasing population of
those who are Sudanese (from “a mythic former Sudan”) but who hold foreign passports
and consider other places (Jeddah, Maryland, Washington D.C.) to be home. This
document is called an “Alien from Sudanese Origin Passcard.” A close reading of this
title gives me insight into my own identity, where my origins are clear but my current self
is foreign, “alien,” to any geographic location.
26. My patriotism, then, belongs to the “mythic former Sudan” of my origins, rather than
the current version, a chosen exile which allows me to participate in what Carol FaddaConrey outlines as one of the primary characteristics of the Arab-American literary
canon, this negotiation of a world constructed in response to the loss of a world. I have
come to terms with the fact that this absence of the Sudan of my origins is central to my
identity as Sudanese, and is central to my engagement with my Sudaneseness. In In the
Presence of Absence, Mahmoud Darwish engages with some of the difficult questions
that arise when one harnesses one’s exile as a fundamental condition for one’s work,
particularly in terms of his identity as a Palestinian poet living and working in exile:
What will you write without exile? What will you write without the occupation?
Exile is existence […] But why are such questions never put to poets from other
countries? Is it because slavery is the precondition for Palestinian creativity, or is
it that freedom is not in sync with our rhythms? What does it mean for a
Palestinian to be a poet and what does it mean for a poet to be Palestinian?
(Darwish, 126)
27. The “mythic former Sudan” informs and reshapes my identity as an American, as a
resident of a United States of America containing “a Sudan that I construct within the
walls of my house” (El-Kogali, I.) A visit to the actual Sudan rarely feels like the
homecoming that I hope for it to be, where my origin finally aligns with my geography.
Rather than reinforce my Sudaneseness, it highlights just how much a life lived primarily
in the United States has shaped my identity and has allowed me a Sudaneseness not tied
to Sudan as a country, but rather Sudan as a culture. As Mahmoud Darwish wrote in
describing an exile’s visit to the Gaza of their origin, “I came, and did not arrive. I came,
and did not return” (Darwish, 128).
28. Through reading Darwish, I begin to understand that my image of the homeland, of “a
mythic former Sudan” is a direct result of my absence from it and of its absence from the
world I was born into. Its absence is the source of its perfection, of my pride in it and
patriotism to it. This is why I leave each visit to Sudan troubled, my claim to Sudanese
identity shaken by my lack of a relationship with an actual Sudan. The harsh realities of
the actual Sudan interfere with the preserved beauty of the Sudan I inherit from my
mother and grandparents through hearing their stories, learning the language, music,
customs, food, and history. Mahmoud Darwish raises the question posed to all exiles who
return to a homeland that does not align with their dreams of how it would be: “Has he
come closer to the place, or has the place departed from his imagination?” (124). He goes
on to describe the difference in experience between those born in the homeland before
experiencing exile and those born in exile and raised on stories of the homeland:
The older returnee is prone to making comparisons, perplexed as to whether he
should prefer the imagined over the real. As for the one born in exile and reared
on the beautiful attributes of exile’s antithesis, he might be let down by a paradise
created especially for him, composed of words he soaked up and reduced to
stereotypes that would guide him to difference. He inherited memory from a
family that feared forgetfulness […] He inherited memory from the steady
refrains of anthems glorifying folklore and the rifle, which eventually became an
identity when the “homeland” was born far away from its land. The homeland
was born in exile. Paradise was born in the hell of absence. (Darwish, 124)
29. “The homeland was born in exile.” My Sudan was born from the absence of a Sudan,
from the absence of my original homeland in my host land. I believe that my version of
Sudan—my need for a version of Sudan—would not exist had I grown up surrounded by
an actual Sudan. I would not have had to construct something new if I had never lost the
original. “So refine distance with the competence of a skilled professional and not the
vulnerability of a perplexed lover. The poetry of exile is not what exile says to you, but
what you say to it, one rival to another[ …] So fashion yourself out of
yourself” (Darwish, 85).
30. In my mother’s response to the interview questions, she reflects on the construction of
a Sudanese homeland within the American host land.
The memory of home in Sudan…I made home in Washington, D.C. Raising
children in the U.S, or outside the country that I grew up in, I wouldn’t say I have
regrets at all. In fact, I think that this is a fantastic opportunity because I got to
give them all the things I liked about my culture, and I got to cut out the things I
didn’t like, so it was like an edited version of bringing them up where I could
bring the best of all worlds. The Sudan, glorified picture that I have in my mind,
with the values…I could also give them the things I learned from American
culture that I valued. So, no regrets at all…We live in Sudan until we step out of
the house, and then we live in America. (El-Kogali, Safaa. Personal interview.
December 2012)
I am inspired by the agency she expresses, where home is not a ready-made location
determined by one’s birth, but an active construction. “I made home,” in its expression of
activity, is one of the most important resolutions I have heard presented in the face of the
third-culture identity crisis. Often, the third-culture kid feels they have “lost” home by
being born and/or raised in a host land, and that the host land cannot fully be “home” in
that it is culturally and/or geographically disconnected from their land of origin. “I made
home” combats the notion of home as a fixed, static location that the third-culture kid can
only hope to happen upon if they were to just learn the right language, or tradition, or
recipe. It presents the option of home as a portable environment—-“a Sudan that I
construct within the walls of my house”—home as a decision, a project, rather than a
country. A country is fallible, is at the mercy of its governments and their wars. A country,
ultimately, was once itself created by the drawing of a manmade border.
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