Solid Objects: Sadia Hassan
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This edition is written by Sadia Hassan.
On the window of a dilapidated storefront in Athens, Georgia the words: “You Are Alone.”
& I am. It is summer again and I worry I am see-through, all my grief legible to passersby.
[ I ] lonely the space between.
Opposite the window, on the brick wall of the locally (read: white) owned co-op, someone has
scrawled in white paint: “Soul is You.”
I doubt it. Some mirrors face away from us, the image distorted.
*
On the topic of shared intimacy with strangers, Gen Del Raye writes: “graffiti is a private grief
/ committed in public.”
This, after the speaker recognizes the word Shintai painted under the Cedar Avenue bridge in
Minneapolis.
On the walk back from my brother’s hospital room in Downtown Columbus, LED lights curl
over the central letters “L-U-M-B” in a mural and create a new word: LOVE.
Rain pools under the letters in a procession of neon stripes: purple, then pink, then orange
and finally aquamarine.
Love teaches me what I run from does not run from me, it runs alongside me. I write to keep
up.
*
Four years ago, when I moved to Northern Mississippi after a failed relationship, the first
thing I noticed was how gracefully the land held its own hand. And how despite the years of
accumulated humiliations, the land still sang. Everything from the switchgrass whispering
well into the night to the bullfrogs croaking till autumn, was alive and fecund.
I wanted more than anything to be alive this way, to sing the way a Mississippi summer might.
But grief is a song only you can hear. Neither are you allowed your sadness nor are you
allowed to express it where others might see.
*
Recently, I have been returning to Adrienne Brown David’s portraits as a portal to my own
black southern girlhood. In each of her paintings, a black girl, usually one of David’s
daughters, punches through the southern landscape in mundane and magical ways, holding a
mirror to my own girlhood shot through with electric greens, murky creekwater, and a bevy of
sister cousins making a riotous mess of every home we shared.
*
In my favorite, a young girl swings on a rope swing as the sky and land below her melt into
complementary shades of blue. The sky a muffled turquoise, the ground a darker teal, an
electric body of water reflecting back to her the strong roots of the oak tree holding her up.
My second favorite: a little girl in a bright red dress stands in the middle of a field and screams
so forcefully black birds scatter like marbles across a chlorine blue sky.
Despite the many narratives of Mississippi’s terror and our refusal to see black children as
deserving of play, rest or access to the full range of their emotions, David offers us the promise
of water, of home on the horizon, of the natural world as a place of future understanding.
*
In a year of constant change and transition, David’s vision of resonant blues has served to
revive me. Blue is the portal I chase into other worlds; teal blue of grief, cobalt blue of moon lit
nights, powder blue of my girlhood crushes. Blue the altar I ask to deliver me a dream world
from which I can build “ordinary heavens.”
“This existence in the Diaspora is like that,” Dionne Brand says, “ dreams from which one
never wakes.”
In my dreams, I return to my many homes the way a hummingbird might, flitting from blossom to beebalm blossom.
*
It’s been a full year since I’ve lived in Mississippi. Still, I write my way through its landscape
and the landscape of all the places my loved ones have loved ones. Oakland, Columbus,
Atlanta. I lug my alter-archive of mongrel essays and half poems from airport to airport until
it is time. When it’s time, I sit, collect my refuse into a pile and begin.
[ I ] people the space between.
—————
Notes:
Gen Del Ray, To the Person Who Painted Shinitai Under the Cedar Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, MN; Poetry NW Winter/Spring 2022.
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 2001.
Ladan Osman, “Ordinary Heavens,” Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony, 2015.
Sadia Hassan is a southern-raised Somali writer whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, BRINK, Georgia Review, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. Her chapbook Enumeration was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani as part of the New Generation African Poets series. Hassan is currently working on a debut collection of poetry.