In New YA Novel: Untangles What It Means To Belong: Novelist Elhillo
Sudan Events
Despite her lifelong obsession with fiction, Elhillo felt like maybe she should just stick to poetry. Fiction writing was an elusive mystery to her after years of being a poet. “I was a writer who was prepared to spend the rest of my life staying deeply, deeply in my lane,” she says with a laugh.
According to Local Coverage ,Elhillo may not consider herself a novelist(yet), but you would never know it after reading her book. She masters the free verse technique and uses poetry to build characters and landscapes so vivid and real that at times, reading the book feels like watching a film. Her characters have flesh and bone and the spaces she creates with just a few lines of poetry exhale and inhale with sounds and smells.
Equal parts ghost and love story, “Home Is Not a Country” (out now) breaks open what it means to lose home and find it again. While the book is not autobiographical, many parts of it reflect Elhillo’s own experiences growing up as a Sudanese American.
Split into four distinct parts, the novel follows teenager Nima, who is grappling with her sense of belonging.
She lives alone with her mother, Aisha, who left the “old country” (which is never named) to start anew in the United States. Nima deifies her father, who died before she was born in what her mother describes as a “car accident.”
Nima spends most of her time wishing she was invisible — at school where Islamophobic students tease her, in Arabic class where she stumbles over conjugations and even at home, where her tired and overworked mother sits on the couch after finishing her shift. In the time Nima isn’t wishing herself into nothingness, she’s spending it with her best friend, Haitham, the son of her mother’s friend who also immigrated from the “old country.”
Throughout the novel, ghosts are resurrected over and over again. Nima clings to the memory of her father while the identity of Haitham’s father is still shrouded in mystery.
This magical realism is carefully threaded throughout “Home Is Not a Country” but Elhillo points out (while referencing a Toni Morrison quote) that for many people of color, especially African and Afro Diasporic peoples, magical realism “is a part of our everyday life,” Elhillo says. “I’m from a culture where discussing things like jinn is casual and common.”
That search for home is perhaps the biggest ghost in the novel. Nima clings onto an idealized vision of what her mother’s country is like, the family she never met and what things would be like if her father hadn’t died.
Home isn’t a country. But Elhillo’s novel will help you pry your own heart open, in hopes that maybe, you, the reader, can find a home in yourself.
