A line resonates with me from Safia Elhillo’s collection of poetry which traces her journey as a January child. 

Elhillo describes the January children as “the generation born in Sudan under British occupation, where children were assigned birth years by height, all given the birth date January 1.”

In a raw collection, Elhillo addresses being Sudanese-American, and her constant feelings of not belonging to either. She delves into postcolonial Sudan, and how she no longer recognizes the Sudan her mother and grandmother relayed to her through tales and trips when she was a child.

This is a book that continues to mean something to me because of Elhillo’s unabashed usage of Arabic terms. She weaves them in with English in a way that reminds me a lot of how my brain works, expressing myself in a tongue that is neither Arabic nor English. 

But what first drew me to grab a copy of “The January Children” was the poet’s relationship with everyone’s beloved Egyptian singer, Abdelhalim Hafez, and how she seemed continuously to converse with him, seeing herself in his lyrics — as we all do; it reverberated with me as I’ve had a childhood filled with his music, and I’ve grown to listen to him even more as an adult.