Review of Home is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo

Book cover for Safia Elhillo's Home is Not a Country

 

About two weeks ago, I looked at the Young People’s Literature nominees for the 2021 National Book Award. I wanted to see which books I had read and which to add to my ever-growing reading list. Since I had been on the lookout for novels-in-verse, Safia Elhilo’s Home is Not a Country particularly interested me. Then, while browsing the stacks at The National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, I noticed we had a copy of it. This felt like fate! I knew this had to be my first review for the semester. 

Home is Not a Country takes place in the early 2000s and follows the story of Nima as she navigates loneliness, family dynamics, friendship, and nostalgia for a home she’s never visited. These complex issues are explored in only 224 pages. 

My reading of this book was hybrid, meaning that I read both the book and listened to the audiobook. The author’s narration of the audiobook enhanced my experience of the book. I could feel the emotions Nima goes through and the loneliness she experiences. Nima attributes this loneliness to her mother. This is the introduction the reader gets to Nima and her mother’s relationship. The organization of the poems itself tells you what parent she values more and points to the complicated relationship she has with them. Nima’s relationship with her parents, especially the one with her mother, was my favorite aspect of the novel. Her mother is Nima’s sole caretaker, and a lot of the resentment Nima feels is directed towards her. Their relationship reminded me of how children of single parents tend to glorify the parent that is absent from their lives, and this is definitely present in Home is Not a Country. 

There’s an instance in which Nima contemplates what her mother must have sacrificed to come to America:

I can’t help but imagine

that her life was enormous before we came here

loud & crowded & lively as any party...(36)

Nima talks about how her mother’s life became smaller with her move to America. She recognizes that her mother is as lonely as she is. I loved this because it made me realize something about my own family. As my world expanded due to moving to a different country, my parent’s world shrank. In the name of progress and opportunity, parents sacrifice lives they’ve built-in their home countries and say goodbye to social relationships they may have. They give away their support systems for their children. I think this was so important to include in the book, for Nima to understand how living in a different country has affected her parents as 

well as her.

Image of Home is Not a Country’s backflap which includes a picture of the author, Safia Elhillo by Aris Theotokatos

The novel has a bit of magical realism, which I was not expecting. However, it was a welcomed surprise. This element takes the form of self-doubt and realizing where you belong. One of Nima’s desires is to see her homeland through the eyes of her family, to experience it as they did. When Nima wishes for such, she gets to live it but at a cost. These moments highlight how important it is for us to view the whole picture instead of what we believe to be true. Sometimes truth isn’t present because it can hurt us, but knowing that truth allows us to see the world clearly and appreciate the life we have. This is what Nima experiences in those instances of magical realism. They are absolutely beautiful and poignant. The book uses magical realism for its climax, which wonderfully brings together all the threads of the story. I had read books where magical realism was in the narrative from beginning to end, but not one like this. That’s one of the reasons why this book became such a memorable experience. 

The writing is gorgeous and lyrical. Here’s an example from one of my favorite poems in the book “A Single Possibility”:

she isn’t my sister    we are opposite ends of a single

possibility   an only child    forming in 
our mother’s belly   waiting to be shaped by a name
once & for all...(155)

One thing that stood out to me was the formatting of the poems, the spacing within them allows the reader to breathe and ponder the lines carefully. The blank spaces in this piece drive the meaning of the words and tell the reader which words deserve a closer look. My favorite part of this excerpt is the line “we are opposite ends of a single/possibility.” The line stood out because it shows how Nima thinks only one version of her is possible. Her lack of consideration for change is put beautifully and succinctly. Elhillo writes about complex contemplations of the self in such a distinct manner and I’m excited to read more of her work. In Home is Not a Country, Safia Elhillo presents a magical exploration of family bonds and how understanding ourselves brings upon an understanding of those who love us.

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Highlights from Dr. Krystal Howard's Lecture:

Back in February, Dr. Krystal Howard graced the NCSCL and SDSU by giving a talk on verse novels and their pedagogical impact. Unfortunately, due to a busy semester, it is only now getting published. Nonetheless, please enjoy the highlights from the talk! There is also a special test-run/pilot podcast interview with Dr. Howard and our very own Professor Thomas following soon!

Dr. Krystal Howard graced SDSU students and faculty on February 27^th with a lecture discussing her current research interests. Titled “Form as Political Resistance,” her talk looked at verse novels for children and young readers that focus on the education of the young poet--specifically Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming and Kwame Alexander’s Booked, both of which “advocate for the value of stylistic imitation through the depiction of children who write influence or erasure poems.” She discussed how these novels “highlight model authors who emphasize racial tensions” and that “the influence of erasure poems within these novels reflects socio-cultural concerns and follows the long-standing tradition in children’s literature of using texts as pedagogical tools that model behavior, and, specifically in this case, writing behavior.”

Before beginning, she explained that she got into this area of focus by reading the verse novels Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson and Out of the Dusk by Karen Hesse in an undergrad creative writing poetry class and became interested in “the form of the book.” This interest lasted with her through her MFA, Master’s, and Ph.D. programs, where, in the latter, she focused on verse novels for young readers.

            Underway with her lecture, Dr. Howard stated that Brown Girl Dreaming and Booked “focus on the artist coming of age” and that “each of these texts advocates for the value of stylistic imitation through the depiction of children who write influence or erasure poems.” Defined by an audience member, erasure poetry is “taking someone else’s text and whiting out/blacking out some of the words in order to say things that combine into your own work.”

Both these texts also “engage directly with the relationship between an artist’s creation and an artist’s environment” which “leads to emotional maturation for the characters within the text, while serving as evidence that learning to write poetry can be accessible to young readers situated outside of the text.” She also noted how both Brown Girl Dreaming and Booked “highlight model authors who emphasize racial tension,” with Brown Girl Dreaming looking at life growing up during the Civil Rights era and the influence of Langston Hughes on the young writer and Booked showing a contemporary young author erasing parts of Huckleberry Finn. As such, “the influence of erasure poems within these verse novels reflects socio-cultural concerns and follows the long-standing tradition in children’s literature of using texts as pedagogical tools that model behavior, and, specifically in this case, writing behavior.”

Dr. Howard emphasized that “the inclusion of fragments of the protagonist’s writing within the pages of the narrative underscores an emphasis on formal experimentation, collage, and the politics of form.” She defines collage--loosely--as “the layering and linking together of miscellany within a single work,” but, according to scholars such as Rona Cran and Rachael Fairbrother, collage in literary texts “moves beyond the assemblage of fragments, bringing ideas into conversation with one another, encouraging a sense of defamiliarization in the reader or viewer in order to fix attention on uneasy realities in contemporary culture, and, ultimately, emerging as a powerful site for political resistance.” Collage in the two focus texts, then, serves to “give voice to the difficulties experienced by the protagonists and to explore the issues of both confession and crisis.”

She focused specifically on the power of collage as a form of subversion and art, arguing that “in contemporary children’s and young adult literature, collage is used in order to unsettle the traditional artist coming of age narrative, and to make visible the political and social forces that help shape the writer’s developmental process” before moving on to discuss how “the verse novel is uniquely situated to address pain and healing because its form draws attention to itself as a created artifact.” An example of this is “the lyric’s emphasis on emotion, as well as poetry’s general use of space on the page, [that] invites the reader to linger over language, breaks in line and stanza in between poems,” which, considering that Woodson’s and Alexander’s verse novels contain poems within them written by young protagonists, “calls on the reader to hold space in the narrative and slow their pace further in order to consider the writing of the characters separately.”

She elaborated on what constitutes a verse novel, speaking of them as “a popular hybrid genre that engages with multiple genres, including poetry, prose, and drama” that “focuses on the emotional event and shows the reaction before and afterwards,” and is “characterized by hybrid construction.” She clarifies further that her definition of verse novels is “…a series of poems linked by a narrative thread” that involve fragmentation and white-space to make the reader pause to contemplate the “gaps created by a collage of line, language, poem, scene, and para-text” which “creates an intimacy between the reader and the speaker of the poem.” The importance of this is that, “by weaving together narrative and the confessional voice, the verse novel provides the structural space necessary for reader contemplation and becomes a mode in which young readers can actively participate in the making of meaning by putting together the fragments of someone else’s life and then parlaying those resulting insights into a deeper understanding of their own experience.”

Continuing, she moved on to discuss verse novels that focus on the growth of the young writer, and how they “are unique because they present the child writer learning aspects of craft through influence, both by revering and parodying various source texts.” She quotes Tom Hunley in how poets gain their individual voice by imitation of other poets and Harold Bloom’s argument about how “‘poetic history is held indistinguishable from poetic influence, and an individual becomes a poet when she first discovers or is discovered by the dialectic of influence, first discovers poetry as being both external and internal self.’” She adds to this Dr. Joseph T. Thomas Jr.’s ideas of how child poets are “influenced through reading official school poetry, the dominate mode of poetry in schools, the kind of poetry written by adults and taught to children in the classroom” and that “‘certainly there are children who strive to emulate the adult poets they encounter, but more common are those who specialize in the sometimes bawdy playground poetry. These child poets reveal that children have a poetic tradition all of their own. A carnivalesque tradition that signifies young adult culture.’” All of this, according to Dr. Howard, is apparent in Woodson’s and Alexander’s texts. She states “While Woodson relies on poets typically associated with official school poetry, with whom her child poet speaker forms an artistic connection, Alexander draws on the childhood tradition of found poetry in order to emphasize play and humor as well as his character’s general distaste for his educational environment as a catalyst for his protagonist’s poetic tact.”

Concluding her talk, Dr. Howard expressed that Woodson’s and Alexander’s verse novels “draw connections between the education of the poet and elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions, linking pedagogy in the classroom and narratives directed at young readers” while also noting that “the act of inserting a creative protagonist’s own poems into a narrative is inherently pedagogical as it models for young readers how a poet might begin his or her own writing practices” serves as a powerful rhetorical move on the behalf of the author. Additionally, their verse novels are groundbreaking due to the fact “they draw on various traditions in order to illuminate contemporary issues surrounding racism in artistic expression” as well as “put forward influence, imitation, and writing response as key developmental practices” with Woodson’s protagonist “employ[ing] a method of influence that utilizes source texts by imitating structure, line, and style and Alexander’s by “use[ing] the erasure poem as a form of play and subversion in the educational setting.” These practices instilled, therefore, are an imperative aspect in the development of the young writer, states Dr. Howard,  and they “provide a map for, and a window through which, young readers can see themselves becoming poets through sustained close-reading of model poets, and a crafting of response poems that are inspired by the works of other writers that they read.”

After the talk, Dr. Howard answered a myriad of questions from faculty and students alike, and each left feeling they had learned something important about the nature of verse novels, whether that be in their construction or application. We at the NCSCL and the faculty of the English and Comparative Literature Department are grateful for Dr. Howard’s visit and look forward to seeing more of her research in the future.

For more info on that, check out Dr. Howard’s website and the next NCSCL blog for a follow up podcast conversation between her and our very own NCSCL Director Dr. Joseph Thomas Jr.!

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