Language, Naming, and the Inadequacy of Words in Girls That Never Die

The Thematic ClaimnIn Girls That Never Die, Safia Elhillo's speaker carries a partial Arabic that cannot name her own body and an English that cannot carry her grief. The theme of language, naming, and the inadequacy of words centers on a specific claim: inherited language both fails and shapes the speaker, and euphemism, translation, and the meaning of her own name stand in for what cannot be said directly. The speaker's name, Safia, means pure, yet purity is revealed across the book as an invention—a label that obscures rather than reveals. Language is not simply insufficient; it is also the only tool the speaker has, and the book traces her struggle to write within and against it. The book opens with borrowed words—an Ol' Dirty Bastard lyric and a Sappho fragment in Anne Carson's translation—establishing from the first page that the speaker's voice will be assembled from inherited and translated language.n n## The Unnameable Bodyn nThe most direct statement of the theme appears in Profanity, where the speaker confesses she knows ninety-nine names for God but none for her own body. Her Arabic is a mosaic of borrowed fragments—pop songs, childhood fluency, a few guarded swearwords kept like silver anklets. When a stranger blows a kiss through a taxi window, she can only deploy animal names as insults. The Arabic word for female genitalia exists for her only as a swear word, a hissing curse that traps the tongue between the teeth. She cannot name her innocent parts or her wounds without disgrace.n nThis failure is not a failing of the language itself but of the speaker's relationship to it. She is inarticulate, not polite. Yet the language also withholds: the Arabic she inherited has been cut by euphemism, as Infibulation Study puts it. The community never uses the word for cutting; instead, it says purified. The speaker was born uncut and remains uncut, but the very structure of the poem shows how difficult it is to say this plainly. The word for cut, conjugated, is the name of one of her grandmothers—the euphemism is built into her family's naming.n n## Euphemism and the Tradition of Naming for Absencen nIn Taxonomy (chapter 31), the speaker names her inability directly: she knows only euphemism for her tenderest part, so she names that absence in the feminine tense—lacuna, caesura. She connects this to a tradition of naming girls for absence: Safia means pure, and the grandmothers' grandmothers whose names she never asked remain silent. The word demur lives inside demure, and restive contains rest—language holds hidden meanings that both constrain and offer possibility.n nThe naming tradition is personal as well as cultural. In Final Weeks, 1990, the narrator is born and named Safia Yagoub after a dead great-aunt. The birth certificate records the anglicized surname Hilu, a transformation of the original. Her mother's name, Safaa, shares the first syllable, marking their connection. Names are inherited, translated, and altered—each step a small loss. The speaker's grandmother carries a name that, conjugated, is the word for cut, and the speaker will not ask her the question; she is told the grandmother does not remember. The grandfather, whose pixelated smile the speaker tries to replicate in For My Friends, represents another thread of inherited identity that language cannot fully carry. The father, called Yagoub in one register and Jack in another, embodies the same doubling—a name split between languages.n n## Translation as Immigrationn nHow to Say frames translation as immigration without irony. In the divorce, the speaker separates her books into English and her love songs into Arabic. Her angers and schooling are English; her long repeating name is Arabic. She dreams of a new fluent mouth, of alternate selves with faces borrowed from photographs of the girl who became her grandmother. She asks how she dares love a word without knowing it in Arabic—iris, crocus, inlet, heron.n nHarder/Border extends this: each name is a casing, a border. Her body, her mouth, her failing tongue are all borders. She lost a language and grew another border. She misplaces her homeland and mispronounces her mother tongue. The poem's refrain—say it, again, louder, harder—is both a command and a confession. Purity, she acknowledges, is an invention.n nIn Modern Sudanese Poetry, the speaker's hair is a knotted cursive language, a ligature, barely literate grief. Her amulets are knotted around neck and wrists. She reads books in translation and circles every word she knows—acacia, lupin, sandalwood, ash. She wrote the poem in translation, in the loophole, in cursive. When she reads the book in Arabic, she knows each letter and its sound but does not recognize the words for tallow or ululate. Her languages are ligatures, smoke in her loosened hair. Hair here is not decoration but script—a physical text she cannot fully read.n n## Silence and the Body's Languagen nIn Geneva, the speaker recalls a school bus in silence, a song listing names of women. She did not speak the language, a trait that found her in early countries and remained. In gym class, her body understands her language—she says run and it unfurls roots. Basma grieves for their younger selves, the cloistering, the cosmic silence. The belief was that if they were told in any detail what they weren't allowed to do, they would take instructions for the doing. So they were told only don't. never. good girls don't. To ask for help would be to speak, and they never spoke. The body becomes the only language that works.n nThis connects to Orpheus, where the speaker tells her whole story without using direct words. She believes herself in love with Orpheus, a musician, which means loving what she could make if freed from what happened to her body. All she knows of Eurydice is that she died—a name without a story, like so many of the women in her family.n n## Complexity and Contradictionn nThe theme resists a simple reading. Language fails the speaker, but it also shapes her—her name, her inherited Arabic, her dreams of fluency are all part of who she is. The poem is written in translation, in the loophole, which suggests that the inadequacy of words is also a kind of freedom. The speaker can write around what cannot be said directly.n nThe contradiction is sharpest in Infibulation Study. The speaker wants to proceed without euphemism, but the Arabic does not allow it. The language that fails her is also the language that connects her to the women before her. The grandmother who cannot remember, the grandfather whose smile she tries to copy—these figures are both present and absent, named and unnamed.n nIn Red Note with a Line by Ol' Dirty Bastard, the speaker addresses a reader directly: reading in red does not mean she did not survive. She goes missing daily, walks in and out of rivers, wears good silk with a clean, unburnt body. She is sistered but never again to a dead girl. The poem ends with a song that names her with each touch of a needle to a shining black surface—the record, the page, the body itself as a surface for naming.n nThe final poem, Girls That Never Die, imagines a girl buried to the chest, stripped of her name and lineage, her photographs removed. A father throws the first pebble. But the birds come—partridge, nightjar, sparrow, avocet, lapwing, plover, ibis, heron, gulls—each carrying a stone in its beak. The girl remains untouched. The stripping of name does not kill her; the stones do not land. Naming can be taken away, but the self persists. The blood that marks family honor in the body of the girl, the water of rivers she walks in and out of—these elements carry meaning beyond what words can hold.n n## Study Questionsn n**1. How does the speaker's name, Safia, function as both inheritance and limitation?n nSafia means pure, a name given in the tradition of naming girls for absence. The speaker inherits it from a dead great-aunt, and her mother's name Safaa shares its first syllable. Yet purity is revealed as an invention in Harder/Border, and the name cannot protect her from the inadequacy of language. The name connects her to her family while also labeling her with a quality she cannot fully claim.n n2. Why does the speaker describe her Arabic as cut by euphemism in Infibulation Study?n nThe community does not use the word for cutting; instead, it says purified. This euphemism shapes what can be said about the body. The speaker wants to proceed without euphemism, but the language itself has been shaped by the avoidance. The word for cut, conjugated, is the name of one of her grandmothers—the euphemism is built into her family's naming.n n3. What does the speaker mean when she says she wrote the poem in translation?n nIn Modern Sudanese Poetry, the speaker describes writing in translation, in the loophole, in cursive. This suggests that her poetry is always a mediation between languages, a writing around what cannot be said directly. Translation is not a failure but a method—the loophole through which she can approach her subject.n n4. How does the Geneva chapter connect silence to the body?n nThe speaker did not speak the language in school, a silence that followed her across countries. In gym class, her body understands her language even when her mouth cannot. The silence was enforced by the belief that details would become instructions—so girls were told only don't and never. To ask for help would be to speak, and they never spoke. The body becomes the only language that works.n n5. What is the significance of the birds in Girls That Never Die?**n nThe girl is stripped of her name and lineage, and stones are thrown at her. But the birds—partridge, nightjar, sparrow, avocet, lapwing, plover, ibis, heron, gulls—each carry a stone in their beaks, removing the weapons. The stripping of name does not destroy her. The poem suggests that what cannot be named—the self, the body, the girl—persists beyond language.