They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the city of Rome with no jacket… I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running From “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)” Shire’s poems, while written as the British woman she is, are sympathetic to others in search of solid ground. So one is not only a Kenyan, British, Somali, Muslim, refugee, poet, writer (and a slew of other categories that splinter the self) but all those things at the same time. Osman Diriye, another Kenyan-born Somali-British artist speaks, writes and draws of the ways multiple identities teach one to shapeshift through various geographies while retaining a sense of the core self. Warsan Shire, born in Kenya to Somali parents, comes to poetry from a Somali culture rich in poetic practice. Shire’s poetry has been translated into several languages and she has performed her poems on international stages as far away as Australia where she was a poet resident in 2015. While Shire makes poems as if she’s been doing it for a long time she is, in fact, a true millenial, born in 1988, though the honors have come early for her: in 2014, she was named the Young Poet Laureate, London’s first, and the year before she won the African Poetry Prize given by Brunei University. Though Shire’s poetic narrator is not always a sister’s voice, not always a woman, there is a consistently keen observer taking in the fractal nature of a violence suffused with beauty, pain and love.Ĭarry loss around until I begin to resemble Something that not everyone knows how to love You are terrifying and strange and beautiful Warsan reads like a fierce sister, one with whom you can share in the frailties of your family, beginning with your parents, and the grandparents who used to be as young as you are now. A dying grandfather who remembers the names of every man he has ever killed will still wrench out your heart when he wants to be buried at home. Shire’s poems are provocative, often biting, but maintain a gentleness that carries the poem through to the end. Her poems, and lines from her poems, have been shared and retweeted thousands of times, most recently a line from “Home,” which is most closely associated with the wave of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean: “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” Actor Benedict Cumberbatch and Caitlin Moran, for instance, recited lines from “Home” in a 2015 Save the Children appeal. Yes, I answered, echoing the many others who respond to Shire’s work on social media and across the Internet, and waited for the punch line that was as devastating as it is beautiful.
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