Shire also wrote recently that “you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the boat is safer than the land.” Anybody could have been less lucky and anybody could be fleeing their homes. The aggression in this poem is not misplaced and the idea of “I was once like you” shows how we should not dehumanise refugees, since we are not inherently better people for not being born in a war-torn country. Germany had refuged 10,000 people in a single day.
Home warsan shire meaning how to#
Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth was released in 2011, but the exact date that this was written is not known however, it was definitely written before the first few days of this September, when the mass media finally started publicising the refugee crisis, and before the wider UK public began to organise large demonstrations, one of which I attended in London, petitioning David Cameron to allow more than the mere 20,000 Syrian refugees he agreed to over the next five years. All I can say is, I was once like you, theĪpathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a Lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency, waiting for its return. They not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second the next you are a tremor I hear them say fucking immigrants, fucking refugees.
Home warsan shire meaning full#
Drawing on her experiences as a Kenyan-born Somali poet now living in London, Shire often writes about the experiences of female immigrants and refugees, which will strike raw with anyone who has experienced a sense of cultural entrapment or a violent clash in cultural identities.Īlthough I commend the whole collection and recommend reading it back-to-back to get the full sense of the progression of the poetry and to see how the poems fit together, I have selected two extracts from the prose-poem ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’. Her writing carries an attractive sense of hyper-realism, cutting to the root of the pain behind her words and making them almost writhe on the page. Shire’s 2011 collection Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth is, in the best possible way, unlike anything I’ve ever read. A mainstream media who suddenly jumped into action after the crisis was personified in the viral image of the drowned Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi. A crisis that, if we are to judge by the reactions of mainstream media, only emerged at the start of this month. Warsan Shire has been writing about immigration and refugees since long before the majority of the UK registered the true, disturbing realities of the refugee crisis.
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