‘when the men come, set yourself on fire.’ While the content of the poem is very heavy, I think there are vivid and beautiful images within them, being bloated with a language so that nothing else can get in, home as the mouth of a shark, being covered in a redundant old currency that only serves to remind what has been lost.Īnother that I find desperately sad and that never fails to catch my breath and make me cry is ‘In Love and In War’. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, they pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. I hear them say go home, I hear them say fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget. I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel once. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. No on leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.
God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise a longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces.
Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. Two sections out of her poem ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ have stuck with me. While the majority of her poems are centered around the experience of women and women’s bodies there were some in here that explored otherissues such as the meaning of home, and of being isolated. You don’t know how to tell him that it won’t be The last stanza of this poem sums up beautifully what it means to grow old in a country not your own and to never hope to return home. I was pleased to see one of my favourites, ‘Old Spice’, which I had seen on her blog a while ago and which I have used in my thesis. I think it is a beautiful collection of poems, each of which I thought were fantastic and difficult at the same time. So when it was published a month or so ago I bought a copy and have been pondering over it ever since.
I have followed Shire on her blog ( ) for a few years now and was really excited to hear she was releasing a book.
But I make an exception for Warsan Shire because her poetry is so beautiful and raw and because she articulates the nature of being Somali in diaspora in a way no one else does.
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