Pastoral, and: Sudan, TX
2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2022.0029
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoPastoral, and: Sudan, TX Safia Elhillo (bio) Pastoral if we ever again meet i have a story about persimmons to make youlaugh, how i mistook them for tomatoes. i have a story about bay leaves,plucked from the side of the road, one forgotten & crisped perfectly,dried at the bottom of my purse. i want to show the way californiainflects my speaking, california in its frankness, long seasonless line,clear clauses, the bay & the lake like parentheses. days like an orangepeeled in that unbroken spiral. i place inside me figs & nectarines, gnarled tomatoes of the season,limes split & salted to eat like we did in childhood, collectedas cousins, faces always sticky with fruit. our parents in forgotten shapesamong their siblings, wearing their first faces, bickering at the table.the way i tell the story i am outside looking in, but in the photographswe are indistinguishable, us children, enormous eyes & unbrushed hair,a drooping sock, dressed in each other’s clothes. in the memory we are a single organism, our hundred legs& arms shining with vaseline, our feet the color of dust,in motion. when we meet again it will be as strangers,& i will offer my story about persimmons to show my absent mind,my great forgetting, & i imagine you are polite as we have allgrown up to be, laughing into the air between us [End Page 13] Sudan, TX Land of the Blacks, they named my country—at the driving school my instructor seized the wheelwhen I continued to drift into the left lane, not yet taught to regardthe great machine as more of my body. My first years here I would growalert, as if called, thinking it was that name I heard being spoken,of our dark concentration of bodies, only to learn it is a kind of car,the sedan, blackening the air with exhaust, waste gases I imagineto be named for the act of depletion, tired lungs of the car sighing for rest. I say they who named my country & don’t know to whom I refer—British, Ottoman, Egyptian, crossing the threshold & declaring, This land.Black. Everywhere the smell of metal, known to me only as the copper smellof blood. I did not pass that test & have since forgotten what I learned,30 years old & still unfit to drive, to drive as in to thrust, to plunge,to learn the responsibility of great violence. Machine in which I sit & becomea hazard, meaning danger but also meaning chance or venture or fate. Its etymologies claim Arabic, al-zahr defined as chance or luck thoughI only know it as flower. The Arabic which also names my country,Jumhuriyat al-Sudan: Republic of the Blacks. In the elevator a womandraws her child closer to her side, handbag flattening between them,when my brother & I enter & smile, threatening great violence. I learnof a Sudan in Texas, population 958, named by its postmaster, who neversaid why, & without the prefix Bilad, meaning land of, the name of the cityis Blacks. In the photographs it could be anywhere, long flat stretchof road, power lines & grass. But I want what I am promised. Thick coughof exhaust, then the great machine arriving, my body sighing for rest. [End Page 14] Safia Elhillo safia elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children, Girls That Never Die, and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. Copyright © 2022 Safia Elhillo
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