Published in Spring 2024 Online Folio
after warsan
at a gathering i laugh and say
i don’t believe in nationalism.
the first time i go to sudan
i arrive on a travel document,
green like the mountains
i’ve never seen,
green like the second layer
of the red sea.
i’m in a boat with my family
five miles off the coast,
my cousins point to the ranges
beneath the surface
& i think myself to be a mermaid,
otherworldly, like the feeling i felt
the first time my family meets me
not in sudan,
not even at the border, but in cairo,
on a boat just like this one
my hands, skin older,
still grazing the water.
i thought myself to be a mermaid then, too,
but not like the little mermaid,
like her darker sister with the black hair
like the women on my mother’s
side of the family. i wave
a flag with their faces on it,
the closest thing to home
looks like an immigrant,
like the creases in my father’s face,
like the sunset touching miami,
like every mural of malcolm x
in every diasporic city.
i never asked to leave, they took me.
every nation’s castaway.
mark of my mother’s prayers.
i sing songs to myself
in a dialect of arabic
i’m constantly defending.
i liberate myself in a dialect
i’m still defending.
even though the flag has failed me
i am still raising it.
More poems by Dalia Elhassan in MQR’s African Writing Online Folio:
This piece is from our Spring 2024 African Writing Online Folio, an online-exclusive extension of our special issue, “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations,” guest edited by Chris Abani. You can read more from our Spring 2024 issue, available for purchase in print and digital forms here.
Dalia Elhassan is a Sudanese-American poet and writer living in NYC. Her work has been featured in The Kenyon Review, The Oakland Arts Review, Rattle #59, and most recently in the New-Generation African Poets Series (Sita) with her chapbook, In Half Light (2019, Akashic Books and the African Poetry Book Fund). She is the recipient of the Hajja Razia Sharif Sheikh Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She can be found online @daliaelhassan.
