Dancing with Trauma
A poet reclaims her experience through performance
By Sam McCann
“Cat” Safia Elhillo repeats, gesturing to a picture on the worksheet spread across the table. She gulps her coffee before proceeding.
“Apple,” is next. She guides her finger across the worksheet. Her student, an elderly Arab man, sounds the word out. He’s new to English, and struggles with a worksheet full of basic vocabulary. Together, he and Safia move down the page, encountering more and more new words. The work is tedious. After class, Safia feels frustrated at her own teaching methods. She wants to figure out a way to engage a man in his sixties, from a culture that reveres its elders, with something other than worksheets “aimed at kindergarten students.” However, when she approaches the other teachers at the program, she’s stunned by their response: they dismissively call the students “the illiterates” while chattering irreverently amongst themselves. |
The encounter left Safia disgusted. At 21, she’s a renowned poet ranked seventh in the Women of World Poetry Slam. She’s shared the stage with some of the biggest names in the poetry world: Gil Scott-Heron, Sonia Sanchez and members of The Roots, among others. However, she feels as though her work with the English for Speakers of Other Languages program—a requirement of one of her classes at New York University—was disrespectful of her Sudanese heritage. Despite her success as an English-language poet, she’s leery of privileging the tongue above others, about dismissing the people and cultures she loves as somehow lesser. For instance, she treasures her relationship with her grandfather, a man who can barely speak English, but is “one of the smartest men I know.” How, then, could she continue to volunteer with people who treated those unfamiliar with English as inferior?
“I just felt like it was a betrayal of where I’d come from,” she said. “Most of the smartest people I know do not speak English, and to be in this environment where you not speaking English is treated like you have some kind of disability, or ‘Maybe one day you’ll be smart, but first let’s teach you the vocabulary of intelligence.’ I mean, English is not the language of intelligence. There’s no such thing.”
Safia didn’t quit the program—it was too late to withdraw from the class that required it—but finishing it had it’s benefits: “If I’m going to be a hater, I may as well be an informed hater” she says, her lips curling into a defiant smile. Plus, because the teacher liked her critiques of the program, he put her in touch with a group working with another ESOL program. This time, she would edit a magazine, Literacy Review, publishing the creative works of students learning English in New York City.
“This is cool. This is kind of more up my alley, because we’re talking about creative writing,” Safia thought. “My final paper for that class had been on the role of poetry in teaching literacy, so I was like, ‘okay this is cool, maybe I can give it one more shot, maybe the angle is wrong.’”
“I just felt like it was a betrayal of where I’d come from,” she said. “Most of the smartest people I know do not speak English, and to be in this environment where you not speaking English is treated like you have some kind of disability, or ‘Maybe one day you’ll be smart, but first let’s teach you the vocabulary of intelligence.’ I mean, English is not the language of intelligence. There’s no such thing.”
Safia didn’t quit the program—it was too late to withdraw from the class that required it—but finishing it had it’s benefits: “If I’m going to be a hater, I may as well be an informed hater” she says, her lips curling into a defiant smile. Plus, because the teacher liked her critiques of the program, he put her in touch with a group working with another ESOL program. This time, she would edit a magazine, Literacy Review, publishing the creative works of students learning English in New York City.
“This is cool. This is kind of more up my alley, because we’re talking about creative writing,” Safia thought. “My final paper for that class had been on the role of poetry in teaching literacy, so I was like, ‘okay this is cool, maybe I can give it one more shot, maybe the angle is wrong.’”
“I fucking hated being on that editorial board.”
The Literacy Review editorial process turned out to be “all the things that I hated about the ESOL scene just concentrated into this group of like five people.” English was once again prized as the language of beauty and achievement, and not all the students were given an equal shot to get published. Rather than sharing the entire program’s work, the editors weeded out the less “poetic” content in favor of highly polished works by more experienced English speakers. Safia felt the editorial selections defeated the entire point of the project. It didn’t celebrate the learning process, or the people involved, but singled out the greatest technical feats.
“You need to figure out if the aesthetics or the message are more important in what you’re doing.”
Safia finally dropped ESOL programs for good at the end of the semester, but she had a problem: “I was not happy last semester at all…I was really unhappy.” The experience “made me angrier, made me bitterer. I was much nicer before I came to college. I was such a nice person before I came to college.”
But what could she do with her bitterness, with her ambitions as a “poetry therapist?” She got into the medium her freshman year, as a way to avoid pure aestheticism, to engage the world through her poetry and avoid a stuffy, removed life.
“I mean, I’m an artist but that can’t be, like, my occupation. That’s like first world as fuck.”
However, her first two plunges into language therapy failed, leaving her alienated by those trying to “teach.” Determined to find a constructive, respectful outlet for her poetry, she turned to a place no language is privileged, where language itself fails: trauma.
The Literacy Review editorial process turned out to be “all the things that I hated about the ESOL scene just concentrated into this group of like five people.” English was once again prized as the language of beauty and achievement, and not all the students were given an equal shot to get published. Rather than sharing the entire program’s work, the editors weeded out the less “poetic” content in favor of highly polished works by more experienced English speakers. Safia felt the editorial selections defeated the entire point of the project. It didn’t celebrate the learning process, or the people involved, but singled out the greatest technical feats.
“You need to figure out if the aesthetics or the message are more important in what you’re doing.”
Safia finally dropped ESOL programs for good at the end of the semester, but she had a problem: “I was not happy last semester at all…I was really unhappy.” The experience “made me angrier, made me bitterer. I was much nicer before I came to college. I was such a nice person before I came to college.”
But what could she do with her bitterness, with her ambitions as a “poetry therapist?” She got into the medium her freshman year, as a way to avoid pure aestheticism, to engage the world through her poetry and avoid a stuffy, removed life.
“I mean, I’m an artist but that can’t be, like, my occupation. That’s like first world as fuck.”
However, her first two plunges into language therapy failed, leaving her alienated by those trying to “teach.” Determined to find a constructive, respectful outlet for her poetry, she turned to a place no language is privileged, where language itself fails: trauma.
“The ultimate act of claiming something is naming it, is choosing the words you associate with that thing and identifying it with that word,” Safia explains, her dark eyes lighting up against the unseasonably sunny March day in Washington, D.C. “That’s what people have been doing for all time, that’s how colonialism works, right? You see something, change it’s name and it’s yours.”
Safia now focuses both her poetic and therapeutic work on reclamation through words. Trauma, she explains, occurs when certain, often painful, memories encode themselves differently from the rest of our experiences. As we grow older, we understand our memories verbally, but the traumatic refuses this medium—it pushes its way to the pre-verbal, creating a space language cannot penetrate. Psychoanalytic theory calls this space the “real.”
“At the end of the day, everything wrong with us comes from the human fear of the unknown. I think the reason trauma memory is able to capture people this way and victimize them this way is that it’s a little piece of the unknown that’s rammed inside your head,” Safia explains. “When you assign language to something you’re able to encode it into your own process and it’s not as much of a trip-up.”
A lot of her work now centers around attempts to understand memories through poetry. “Art doesn’t have to be an aesthetic thing, that it doesn’t have to be a decoration,” she insists. “This idea of naming things is what poetry is all about…you’re choosing the set of words that identity this thing, and that gives you ownership of your experience.”
Safia is studying to guide others to this reclamation—she’s currently taking a class on trauma (“it’s at 9:30 Tuesday mornings in a basement and it’s about childhood and adolescent trauma, so I leave thinking there’s just no hope in the world at all, everybody sucks and does bad things to everybody”)—and hopes to blend the beauty and utility of language in her work.
Of course, she’s not only a therapist, but an accomplished poet in her own right. So last spring, when her family was swept up in the Egyptian uprising, when her cousins were kidnapped and she lost contact with her mother and brother an ocean away, she found an opportunity for a bit of auto-therapy.
Safia now focuses both her poetic and therapeutic work on reclamation through words. Trauma, she explains, occurs when certain, often painful, memories encode themselves differently from the rest of our experiences. As we grow older, we understand our memories verbally, but the traumatic refuses this medium—it pushes its way to the pre-verbal, creating a space language cannot penetrate. Psychoanalytic theory calls this space the “real.”
“At the end of the day, everything wrong with us comes from the human fear of the unknown. I think the reason trauma memory is able to capture people this way and victimize them this way is that it’s a little piece of the unknown that’s rammed inside your head,” Safia explains. “When you assign language to something you’re able to encode it into your own process and it’s not as much of a trip-up.”
A lot of her work now centers around attempts to understand memories through poetry. “Art doesn’t have to be an aesthetic thing, that it doesn’t have to be a decoration,” she insists. “This idea of naming things is what poetry is all about…you’re choosing the set of words that identity this thing, and that gives you ownership of your experience.”
Safia is studying to guide others to this reclamation—she’s currently taking a class on trauma (“it’s at 9:30 Tuesday mornings in a basement and it’s about childhood and adolescent trauma, so I leave thinking there’s just no hope in the world at all, everybody sucks and does bad things to everybody”)—and hopes to blend the beauty and utility of language in her work.
Of course, she’s not only a therapist, but an accomplished poet in her own right. So last spring, when her family was swept up in the Egyptian uprising, when her cousins were kidnapped and she lost contact with her mother and brother an ocean away, she found an opportunity for a bit of auto-therapy.
“That poem was never supposed to be a poem, first of all,” Safia blurts out. She’s talking about “Egypt,” written in the midst of the uncertainty she felt early last year, a poem which she still performs today.
Last January, Safia found herself completely out of sync. Though she’s from D.C., all of her family is from Sudan, and most of them still live there. Shortly after she graduated high school, her mother and brother moved just outside Cairo. Finding herself alone in New York for college, an ocean away from her entire family, she grew disoriented. “I felt like all the context through which I’d been able to identify myself had just been uprooted, and I’d been sent off to a city that I’d never lived in before. My family was in a different part of the world. So where is all my context? And memory is context.”
Throughout college, she called her mother “maybe once a week,” taking the check-ins for granted. Communication has been a “huge sore spot” for her and her mother because “we love differently. She’s very expressive with it, I’m just, like, ‘You know I love you so you don’t need me to tell you all the time, right?’ But she’s like a single parent with two grown-up kids, it’s nice to hear it sometimes, you know?” It was her mother who told her about the mounting tension during one of their regular chats, but Safia dismissed it at first, thinking it was unlikely to affect her family—they were in the suburbs, after all.
Then the phone and Internet lines were cut and worst-case-scenarios began to dance in her head.
“I have a super-active imagination, so I’m like watching the news and stuff, and, you know, my brother’s not very political. So I doubt he would be out in Tahir or anything,” Safia remembers. “But what if something happens to him on the way back from school? There’s like looting and stuff going on. I don’t know what’s going on. They could be okay or they could not be okay, but I don’t know.”
Around the same time the protests in Egypt swelled, unrest in Safia’s native Sudan reached a critical mass. One day, while still awaiting word from her mother and brother, her grandmother phoned her from Sudan with news: two of her cousins had been kidnapped. Complicating matters, their father was the head of one of the nation’s leading opposition parties, and Safia feared the worst.
“The [family] name is known and everything, so they’re not just going to be arrested, get a slap on the wrist and sent home. The government wants to make an example out of them,” she recounts with remarkable calm. “I don’t know how long they held them. It was at least a week but nobody knew where they were. We thought they were dead, we didn’t know what was going on with them.”
While her family was suffering, torn apart a continent away, Safia remained tucked in her college home in New York City, enjoying the privileges life in a Western metropolis afforded her. The guilt drove her mad.
“I feel guilty a lot, just generally speaking. There’s this perpetual guilt—my mom, my brother and I are the only part of the family that’s in the U.S. We have family that’s in England, but they all end up going back to Sudan, but we’re the only ones that left and never came back,” Safia says. “It’s one of those things that, after 12 years, would die down, but every little thing. Like I’m sitting outside, on a spring day, wearing what I want, drinking coffee, wearing lipstick, being able to sit with a man in public and not have to worry about being fucking stoned to death or something.”
“I’m way too lucky to be here, but what’s the point? What did I do to deserve this, what do I do to continue to be deserving of this? A lot of the guilt I’d been carrying around to that point just collapsed on me… it really fucked with me. I was not able to function for like two or three days.”
Last January, Safia found herself completely out of sync. Though she’s from D.C., all of her family is from Sudan, and most of them still live there. Shortly after she graduated high school, her mother and brother moved just outside Cairo. Finding herself alone in New York for college, an ocean away from her entire family, she grew disoriented. “I felt like all the context through which I’d been able to identify myself had just been uprooted, and I’d been sent off to a city that I’d never lived in before. My family was in a different part of the world. So where is all my context? And memory is context.”
Throughout college, she called her mother “maybe once a week,” taking the check-ins for granted. Communication has been a “huge sore spot” for her and her mother because “we love differently. She’s very expressive with it, I’m just, like, ‘You know I love you so you don’t need me to tell you all the time, right?’ But she’s like a single parent with two grown-up kids, it’s nice to hear it sometimes, you know?” It was her mother who told her about the mounting tension during one of their regular chats, but Safia dismissed it at first, thinking it was unlikely to affect her family—they were in the suburbs, after all.
Then the phone and Internet lines were cut and worst-case-scenarios began to dance in her head.
“I have a super-active imagination, so I’m like watching the news and stuff, and, you know, my brother’s not very political. So I doubt he would be out in Tahir or anything,” Safia remembers. “But what if something happens to him on the way back from school? There’s like looting and stuff going on. I don’t know what’s going on. They could be okay or they could not be okay, but I don’t know.”
Around the same time the protests in Egypt swelled, unrest in Safia’s native Sudan reached a critical mass. One day, while still awaiting word from her mother and brother, her grandmother phoned her from Sudan with news: two of her cousins had been kidnapped. Complicating matters, their father was the head of one of the nation’s leading opposition parties, and Safia feared the worst.
“The [family] name is known and everything, so they’re not just going to be arrested, get a slap on the wrist and sent home. The government wants to make an example out of them,” she recounts with remarkable calm. “I don’t know how long they held them. It was at least a week but nobody knew where they were. We thought they were dead, we didn’t know what was going on with them.”
While her family was suffering, torn apart a continent away, Safia remained tucked in her college home in New York City, enjoying the privileges life in a Western metropolis afforded her. The guilt drove her mad.
“I feel guilty a lot, just generally speaking. There’s this perpetual guilt—my mom, my brother and I are the only part of the family that’s in the U.S. We have family that’s in England, but they all end up going back to Sudan, but we’re the only ones that left and never came back,” Safia says. “It’s one of those things that, after 12 years, would die down, but every little thing. Like I’m sitting outside, on a spring day, wearing what I want, drinking coffee, wearing lipstick, being able to sit with a man in public and not have to worry about being fucking stoned to death or something.”
“I’m way too lucky to be here, but what’s the point? What did I do to deserve this, what do I do to continue to be deserving of this? A lot of the guilt I’d been carrying around to that point just collapsed on me… it really fucked with me. I was not able to function for like two or three days.”
After those couple days of paralysis, one of Safia’s friends urged her to get out of the apartment and participate in their regular Sunday ritual, a public jazz show in a Harlem living room. Riding the subway uptown, a realization overtook her: “I remember being like, ‘I should write something down’ because I was thinking so much that my head was buzzing. And I was like ‘This is stupid, I feel like I’m going to implode if I don’t do something about it.’”
Safia quickly jotted down some notes on a piece of scrap paper before disregarding it. It was just “basic language” on things she was thinking. A couple days later, she found out her mom and brother were okay, and went about her life. When she went to practice for her slam poetry team later that week, she explained the situation to the team during a pre-practice check-in. Her coach, “who loves to see a poem in everything, everything is an opportunity to write a poem” encouraged her to write about her stress. Dreading the invitation, she told him she already did—“thank god for that, I didn’t want to write it again.”
But the coach pushed her, asked her to see the poem. She yanked out the piece of scrap paper and “this incoherent journal entry,” handed it to him, and he asked her to type it up.
“I’m like, ‘look dude, I really don’t want to work on this poem.’” But he persisted, and soon he had a skeleton of a poem in his inbox.
That skeleton’s morphed into one of Safia’s signature poems. She delivers it with an anguished vigor, the result a powerful meditation on guilt, distance and an encounter with trauma. It’s also one of the poet’s least favorite works.
“As a piece of language art it’s very basic,” she says derisively. “But you know, there are some things where it’s bad taste to use heightened language, heightened flowery language to describe something that is the opposite of that. So I made peace with it and now I use it a lot.”
Its place in Safia’s rotation is significant for a poet who compulsively rotates her selections in spoken word performances.
“I have crazy new toy syndrome, especially with poems. When I write a new poem that’s all I want to perform…As a result of that I’m not able to perform them as well, or not as well, but not able to connect with them as much. I just feel like I’m reciting.”
But “Egypt” is different. Its emotions linger with Safia, perhaps because the poem itself offered her a chance to claim those experiences.
“Even though the actual event is over, the circumstances that led up to it are very much here. The poem is not about Arab Spring, it’s about my relationship with my family and distance and privilege, which still exist. And the really deep-rooted guilt that I have, that’s still there,” Safia insists. “So I’m still able to tap into this place of super-super guilt and perform the poem. Which I guess is good, which I guess is unhealthy as well, but hey what can you do?”
“It’s still a poem I enjoy performing. How fucking masochistic is that?”
Safia quickly jotted down some notes on a piece of scrap paper before disregarding it. It was just “basic language” on things she was thinking. A couple days later, she found out her mom and brother were okay, and went about her life. When she went to practice for her slam poetry team later that week, she explained the situation to the team during a pre-practice check-in. Her coach, “who loves to see a poem in everything, everything is an opportunity to write a poem” encouraged her to write about her stress. Dreading the invitation, she told him she already did—“thank god for that, I didn’t want to write it again.”
But the coach pushed her, asked her to see the poem. She yanked out the piece of scrap paper and “this incoherent journal entry,” handed it to him, and he asked her to type it up.
“I’m like, ‘look dude, I really don’t want to work on this poem.’” But he persisted, and soon he had a skeleton of a poem in his inbox.
That skeleton’s morphed into one of Safia’s signature poems. She delivers it with an anguished vigor, the result a powerful meditation on guilt, distance and an encounter with trauma. It’s also one of the poet’s least favorite works.
“As a piece of language art it’s very basic,” she says derisively. “But you know, there are some things where it’s bad taste to use heightened language, heightened flowery language to describe something that is the opposite of that. So I made peace with it and now I use it a lot.”
Its place in Safia’s rotation is significant for a poet who compulsively rotates her selections in spoken word performances.
“I have crazy new toy syndrome, especially with poems. When I write a new poem that’s all I want to perform…As a result of that I’m not able to perform them as well, or not as well, but not able to connect with them as much. I just feel like I’m reciting.”
But “Egypt” is different. Its emotions linger with Safia, perhaps because the poem itself offered her a chance to claim those experiences.
“Even though the actual event is over, the circumstances that led up to it are very much here. The poem is not about Arab Spring, it’s about my relationship with my family and distance and privilege, which still exist. And the really deep-rooted guilt that I have, that’s still there,” Safia insists. “So I’m still able to tap into this place of super-super guilt and perform the poem. Which I guess is good, which I guess is unhealthy as well, but hey what can you do?”
“It’s still a poem I enjoy performing. How fucking masochistic is that?”
Safia’s work—both her poetry and her therapy—indulge that “masochism” for the sake of catharsis.
“There’s a lot of catharsis in the performance of a poem. It’s like a therapy session almost, where you’re working to this point where you’re checked out and disassociated,” she explains. “You have to be brave to get to that point in a performance, and I can’t do it often because I’m not brave enough for that shit, it’s terrifying.”
While “teaching” left her angry and bitter, spoken word promises performers an opportunity to grapple with trauma on their own terms. It’s not a fight she can stage all the time, but when she works up the courage, the rewards are immense.
“To do it, there’s this awesome feeling of triumph, that I like overcame my trauma. I danced with it for like three minutes, and I won, and I’m still here and I’m okay and it’s over there on that stage. And I won, because I’m the one that walked out alive.”
“There’s a lot of catharsis in the performance of a poem. It’s like a therapy session almost, where you’re working to this point where you’re checked out and disassociated,” she explains. “You have to be brave to get to that point in a performance, and I can’t do it often because I’m not brave enough for that shit, it’s terrifying.”
While “teaching” left her angry and bitter, spoken word promises performers an opportunity to grapple with trauma on their own terms. It’s not a fight she can stage all the time, but when she works up the courage, the rewards are immense.
“To do it, there’s this awesome feeling of triumph, that I like overcame my trauma. I danced with it for like three minutes, and I won, and I’m still here and I’m okay and it’s over there on that stage. And I won, because I’m the one that walked out alive.”