Safia and her husband have since moved to Los Angeles and have purchased several beautiful pieces of furniture, including some antiques. But the blue chair remains special to Safia, and its extra-ness has, in part, influenced their subsequent furniture purchases.
Why?
Since purchasing the chair in 2019, it has become a staple for Safia. It is her portable throne, and she moves it from room to room in order to properly reign over her home. It is where she goes to write and revise, to rest and repose. For a long time, the poems in Girls That Never Die existed only in Safia’s apartment, with the blue chair being the only witness to the vulnerability within them.
“That book, in a lot of ways, is a pandemic book,” she says. “I was mostly writing and revising those poems alone, in my apartment, in that blue chair, without a sense of what those poems would feel like being out in the larger world outside of my apartment. That’s never really something I’m particularly thinking about. I’m just trying to write my poems.”
After Girls That Never Die was published, Safia went on an in-person book tour, which she hadn’t been able to do with her previous release, Home Is Not a Country. It wasn’t until she was reading her poems in front of rooms full of people while on tour that the vulnerability and rawness of them really started to hit her. “I feel like my inner self, and my life, and my body, and my personhood are all under the microscope. It really started to dawn on me that I’m telling people my actual business. Now that the book is done and no longer belongs to me, all my little secrets are out there in the world being read by strangers. I mostly just try not to think about it!”
But, when she’s participating in virtual readings and other events from home, the blue chair is her constant companion, a source of comfort and familiarity. It’s also often an icebreaker when she’s on Zoom; people are always asking her if she’s sitting on a throne. “I tell them that I’m sitting in my office chair,” Safia says. “But throne…office chair…both things can be true.”