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.

Paperback: 90 pages
Series: African Poetry Book
Publisher: Nebraska
Date Published: March 1, 2017
Subjects: Poetry African American

About the Author: Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children, which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award; Girls That Never Die (Random House, 2021); and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Random House, 2021). Her work has been translated into several languages and commissioned by ballet and fashion companies. Named by Forbes Africa as one of 2018’s “30 Under 30,” Safia is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.