ABSTRACT

This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Arab, African, and diasporic literary circles. It explores the chronotopic use of metre, repetition, keywords, and mise-en-abyme in Elhillo’s works to think through the ontological stakes of postcolonial verse. It consequently proposes fractals as a non-binary way of conceptualizing hybridity, linking these to a polychronic logic, where the poems’ form and content foreground temporality as a recursive, self-repetitive contemporaneity. Further, through a sustained focus on how Elhillo creates a network of intertextual links between her poems, the article shows how recursive structures that highlight time-space dialectics cast scale as the main link between the various building blocks of the poems. By linking these chronotopic fractals to patterns of orature that draw on both Arabic and African traditions, the article gives an aesthetic reading of the betweenness of Elhillo’s American Sudanese positionality.

摘要

本文涉及苏丹裔美国诗人萨菲亚·埃尔希洛 (Safia Elhillo) 的作品，她是阿拉伯、非洲和海外文学界的后起之秀。它探索了Elhillo 作品中节拍、重复、关键词和mise-en-abyme的计时使用，以思考后殖民诗歌的本体论风险。因此，它提出了分形作为一种概念化混合性的非二元方式，将它们与多时性逻辑联系起来，在这种逻辑中，诗歌的形式和内容将时间性视为递归的、自我重复的同时期性。此外，通过持续关注 Elhillo 如何在她的诗歌之间创建互文链接网络，文章展示了突出时空辩证法的递归结构如何投射规模作为诗歌的各个组成部分之间的主要联系。通过将这些时空分形与借鉴阿拉伯和非洲传统的神谕模式联系起来，这篇文章给出了对 Elhillo 的美国苏丹人定位的中介性的审美解读。