Safia in Girls That Never Die: Character Analysis

Overview

Safia is the narrator and protagonist of Girls That Never Die, a verse collection in which her life unfolds in fragments rather than conventional scenes. She is born Safia Yagoub in December 1990 in a Maryland house, the daughter of Sudanese immigrant parents; her mother, twenty-three, is still called “the bride” eleven months into her marriage, and her father, twenty-seven, is called Jack. The birth certificate records the anglicized patronymic Hilu, and she is named for a dead great-aunt. Her name, she tells us, means “pure” — “all my life it’s been true even in my clouded arabic” (How to Say).

Because the book is a poem sequence, Safia’s character emerges through testimony, memory, and recurring images. She is at once a specific person — an American-born daughter of Sudanese immigrants, a poet, a former wife, a survivor — and a representative figure, one of many “girls that never die” whose stories the collection gathers.

Role in the Collection’s Arc

Safia is both subject and witness. The poems move between first-person accounts of her own life and choral poems about girls in general — girls buried to the chest in red earth (Girls That Never Die), girls carried from their father’s houses, girls governed by reputation. This double role is central: her individual story is always framed as one instance of a collective condition. When she says “i was a girl & like the girls i knew / i bruised i bled i died,” she collapses the distance between autobiography and communal testimony.

The arc is not linear in the manner of a novel. It begins with her birth, moves through childhood and adolescence, a marriage and divorce, a long relationship in New York, and settles into a present tense of reflection and survival. The final poems turn toward reclamation: “nowhere, ever again, is there a dead girl.”

Motivations and Traits

Safia’s central motivation is to find language adequate to her experience. She knows “ninety-nine names for God” but lacks a word for her own body in Arabic (Profanity). She writes things down to avoid forgetting words and the suffixes marking her identity. The poems themselves are the work of that search.

Her defining trait, by her own account, is resourcefulness. In therapy, when asked for compliments she would give herself on behalf of loved ones, she “could only name resourceful” (Orpheus). That self-assessment is borne out in her actions: she cuts her own hair to preempt the cutting of “disgraced girls,” she leaves the New York apartment she loves “escaping with her life,” and she keeps going through daily motions even when she is “not okay.”

She is also self-protective to the point of silence. She loved a man for years “without revealing the secret.” She kept quiet about nearly dying at twenty-four because she “knew what they would think.” She avoids asking for anything that would make her long. The collection repeatedly shows her choosing silence as a strategy for survival — and then breaking that silence in the poems themselves.

Chronological Arc

The arc begins before her birth. In “Final Weeks, 1990,” the night before she is born, her mother plays cards in a Maryland house; by morning the baby has not come. She is born at 1:39 PM, a “pomegranate creature” with a full head of wet hair. Her grandparents wait in the hospital, both older than the independent state of Sudan.

Childhood appears in fragments: pulling her sleeves over her hands before touching doorknobs or coins, ruining her sweaters. As a teenager she loiters, “urgently lonely,” and accepts her first cigarette on a fire escape, telling her whole story “without using direct words.” She believes herself in love with Orpheus, a musician — loving what she could make if freed from what happened to her body.

Adulthood brings a marriage and a divorce. In “How to Say,” she divides her possessions into two piles: English love songs and Arabic books. Later, in “Memoir,” she pierces her nose in winter, moves to a city to become an artist, adopts a new name, and meets a man at a diner at seven in the morning, the day she returns from Cairo. She lives on the twentieth floor and loves him for years without revealing the secret. After six years to the day, she leaves the apartment she loves, “escaping with her life.”

The present-tense poems find her older, reflecting. She cannot drive at thirty, associating the machine with violence (Sudan, TX). She spends hours in the bath, watches cooking shows, sleeps twelve hours nightly, and dreams of fleeing war. The final poems shift from testimony to declaration: she is “sistered but never again to a dead girl.”

Relationships

Safia’s relationships are marked by distance and by the difficulty of naming. Her mother, Safaa, shares her first syllable — “noun form of my adjective” — but the poems do not show easy intimacy. In “Memoir,” she reflects on her mother’s unspoken knowledge and what she herself will not tell. Her father is a “specter,” someone she cannot picture in the room, though she notes that her mother called him Jack, “my only proof they were in love.”

Her grandmothers appear as figures of beauty and exile: “enormous coifs of blackened hair,” tattooed eyeliner, “suited to exile.” She imagines alternate selves with faces borrowed from photographs of the girl who became her grandmother. Her great-aunt, the dead woman she is named for, is present only as a name.

The romantic relationships are central but oblique. Orpheus, the musician she loved as a young woman, represents the possibility of being remade by art. The unnamed man in New York — the relationship of six years — is one she leaves “escaping with her life,” and she still checks his name periodically for an obituary.

Her cousins appear in the Cairo apartments of childhood, playing hide-and-seek across three floors and a roof. She returns to Cairo years later and cannot find them; the city “belonged to me has gone, was never mine, I dreamt it, I wrote it down, invented it, made all of it up.” Her brother carries a faint scar down his palm from a childhood injury she did not look up from her book to see.

Key Decisions and Consequences

Several decisions structure her life. She cuts her own hair — repeatedly, with scissors carried everywhere — after learning that “they cut the hair of disgraced girls so I cut it myself.” The consequence is a kind of self-purification, though the poem notes the hair returns in dreams, “the same puffed braid I wore throughout my girlhood.”

She leaves the New York apartment after six years, “escaping with her life.” The consequence is survival, but also a permanent vigilance: she still checks his name for an obituary.

She keeps silence about the harm she has experienced. At twenty-four she “almost died & nobody knew.” The consequence is that she keeps her name — “i [could not] name it [& keep my name]” — but at the cost of isolation. The poems themselves are the breaking of that silence.

She stays gone from Cairo when the others go home, loving exile “enough to stay gone.” The consequence is that the city is lost to her, “was never mine,” and she is left with invention instead of memory.

She refuses to drive, having failed the driving test and associating the machine with violence. The consequence is a limitation — she remains unable to drive at thirty — but also a refusal of a certain kind of American mobility.

Themes and Symbols

Safia’s character is inseparable from the collection’s central themes. Her name, meaning “pure,” is both a gift and a burden — a truth she carries even with her imperfect Arabic, but also a demand placed on her body. The theme of language and naming runs through everything: she cannot name her own body in Arabic, she knows “only euphemism for her tenderest part,” and she notes that “demur lives inside demure while rest resides inside restive” — language itself carries the trap.

The policing of girls’ bodies is the collection’s most urgent theme, and Safia is its primary witness. In “Girls That Never Die,” she lists the demands placed on her — cover your shoulders, maintain your weight, never cut your hair, stop wearing red — and the refrain “people will talk.” The word /sum’a/, reputation, shares a root with hearing: “i heard that man’s daughter…” The consequence is that her name “shrouds my body magnifies its every act.”

Silence and shame are her inheritance. The mothers’ warning — never enter a room alone with anyone — is kept for years, and the shared experience of harm emerges only “when the silence broke.” In “Infibulation Study,” she calls her cousins to ask a question about the clitoris, and finds that “the Arabic, cut by euphemism,” does not allow the word; the word used instead is “purified.”

Displacement and the search for home shape her sense of self. She is “three coasts away from the airport road and seven countries from their garden city.” She dreams of speaking fluent Arabic and wakes “to the usual borderlands.” Sudan, Texas — population 958, named by its postmaster — offers a strange mirror: without the prefix meaning “land of,” the city’s name translates to “Blacks.”

Survival and intergenerational inheritance are her eventual answer. The final poems declare that “nowhere, ever again, is there a dead girl,” and the closing image — a girl buried to the chest in red earth, stones rising like fireworks, a flock of birds carrying the stones away in their beaks — is an image of collective rescue. Safia’s survival is not only her own; it is the survival of all the girls she is “sistered” with.

Questions and Answers

What does Safia’s name mean, and why does it matter?

Her name, Safia, means “pure.” She tells us this in “How to Say,” adding that it has been true “all my life… even in my clouded arabic.” The name matters because it connects her to her mother (Safaa, “noun form of my adjective”), to the dead great-aunt she is named for, and to the tradition of “naming girls for absence.” It also places a demand on her: purity is the standard by which her body is judged.

Why does Safia cut her own hair?

In “Girls That Never Die,” she explains that “they cut the hair of disgraced girls so I cut it myself.” She takes a razor to her own hair, wanting “to feel the bone, its hardness.” The act is a preemptive self-discipline — she performs the punishment before it can be imposed on her. The poem notes that the hair returns in dreams, suggesting the gesture cannot fully free her.

What happens in the relationship described in “Memoir”?

She meets a man at a diner at seven in the morning, the day she returns from Cairo. She lives on the twentieth floor and loves him for years “without revealing the secret.” After six years to the day, she leaves the apartment she loves, “escaping with her life.” She still checks his name periodically for an obituary. The poem does not name the secret, but it connects the relationship to the mothers’ warning never to enter a room alone with anyone, and to the harm that emerged “when the silence broke.”

Why can’t Safia drive?

In “Sudan, TX,” she describes failing her driving test and remaining unable to drive at age thirty, “associating the machine with violence.” At a driving school, an instructor seized the wheel when she drifted into the left lane. The refusal is both a limitation and a choice: driving represents a kind of mobility and control she does not trust.

What does the final poem mean for Safia’s character?

The closing poem, “Girls That Never Die,” imagines a girl buried to the chest in red earth while a crowd stones her — each stone small enough that no single throw can be named as the cause of death. A father raises his pebble first. But the girl remains untouched, and a flock of birds carries the stones away in their beaks. For Safia, the image is one of collective survival: she is one of the girls who never die, rescued not by individual heroism but by a community of witnesses. The earlier poem makes the claim explicit: “nowhere, ever again, is there a dead girl.”

For more on the collection’s ending and other questions, see the ending explained and questions and answers pages.