January Children - (African Poetry Book) by Safia Elhillo (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets
2018 Arab American Book Award Winner, Poetry

"A taut debut collection of heartfelt poems."--Publishers Weekly

In her dedication Safia Elhillo writes, "The January Children are the generation born in Sudan under British occupation, where children were assigned birth years by height, all given the birth date January 1." What follows is a deeply personal collection of poems that describe the experience of navigating the postcolonial world as a stranger in one's own land.

The January Children depicts displacement and longing while also questioning accepted truths about geography, history, nationhood, and home. The poems mythologize family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan's history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Several of the poems speak to the late Egyptian singer Abdelhalim Hafez, who addressed many of his songs to the asmarani--an Arabic term of endearment for a brown-skinned or dark-skinned person. Elhillo explores Arabness and Africanness and the tensions generated by a hyphenated identity in those two worlds.

No longer content to accept manmade borders, Elhillo navigates a new and reimagined world. Maintaining a sense of wonder in multiple landscapes and mindscapes of perpetually shifting values, she leads the reader through a postcolonial narrative that is equally terrifying and tender, melancholy and defiant.

Review Quotes

"A taut debut collection of heartfelt poems that speak to people who can claim multiple cultural identities, and whose identities reflect multiple geographies. The book is both personal and political, a love letter to Sudan and a memoriam for ghosts of happiness past."--Publishers Weekly

"Elhillo is a mesmerizing performer at slams and has garnered tens of thousands of views on YouTube, but her poems work equally well on the page. And they speak not only to people of color or African émigrés but to those of complicated heritage form anywhere in the world, strangers in strange lands, strangers even in their own lands, in their own skins."--Alex M. Frankel, Antioch Review


"In its best moments-and there are many--and across poems, one feels the plummet of alienation that comes from partial belonging, and therefore, from not really belonging at all. . . . Throughout the book, Elhillo matches the formal choices of individual poems with a compelling voice. In unpunctuated lines with extra internal spaces that mark pauses, drags, and absences, Elhillo's language tumbles and accumulates; it points and then emphatically points again; it betrays a relentless awareness of audience, and thereby reveals at least one psychological reality of betweenness. . . . And it is Elhillo's consistent reaching across gaps--like Whitman's soul '[c]easelessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them'--that is most moving of all. Despite the omnipresence of the Sudanese Diaspora, the movement of the book is from absence to presence . . . . The book, in the end, is shot through with a faith in human communion despite immense communal and individual loss."--David Thacker, The Rumpus

"Safia Elhillo's The January Children offers the reader a galaxy of Sudanese voices engaging individual and collective memory in a manner that not only introduces readers to the nuances that animate that ancient land of layered diversity, which lends this collection a collage-like quality that is as sublime in its coherence as it is revelatory in its execution."--Post No Ills Magazine-- (11/8/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"Safia Elhillo's triumph is not that she sings about novel love and heartbreak, but that she does so in an unforgettable voice."--Irene Mathieu, Muzzle

"The first sound of what will be a remarkable noise in African poetry. Safia Elhillo has already laid out in this collection a complex foundation for a rich and complex body of work. What is unmistakable is her authority as a poet--she writes with great control and economy, but also with a vulnerability that is deeply engaging. Above all, her poems are filled with delight--a quality of humor that is never trite but always honest and insightful."--from the foreword by Kwame Dawes-- (9/8/2016 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Safia Elhillo is a Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly. Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. She is the author of The Life and Times of Susie Knuckles.