Session V

November (date TBC), 18:00 SAST
Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study
With Sudanese-by-way-of-Washington, DC. poet Safia Elhillo
Hosted by Maneo Mohale

Sudan, TX
Safia Elhillo

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.

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link to the poem on Project Muse