Poetry by Warsan Shire

I am working hard to add an acceptable number of poetry books on my reading list. Although I don´t see myself reading poetry any time sooner, I take the literary challenge as a smooth way to open up my mind and soul to different types of narratives. Poetry was not a constant presence into my life and I am happy to welcome it and the beautiful poets I had the chance to discover in the last months.

Kenyan-born London-based Somali poet Warsan Shire was on my reading list for a long time. Not only because I have never read something written by a Somali author, or because of her Beyoncé fame - as she collaborated to her Lemonade 2016 album - but due to the take on otherness and being an immigrant against one´s wish in the midst of a world that doesn´t want and like you. It´s the fate of the immigrant in general, no matter where, and I was curious to read her interpretation of this painful condition.

I got to know her writing through two particular collections.

Our Men Do Not Belong to Us

I am glad I started with this relatively less known collection. It stuck me as an intellectual earthquake. How one can read with such a bloody - full of blood, as in being hit by the fist of a skinhead - lucidity about the immigrant condition. The verse ´No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark´ is an ode to all those who left their homes fighting for their lives and their freedom and away from wars and religious police. 

´Look at all those bodioes foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate´ defines the new border encounters. Our old Europe without borders is bordered with refugee bodies desperate to be let in. Those ´wearing´ the war ´on their skin´ are not wanted, their existence is defined by the bureaucratic definition of their bodies and freedom. They are a number aiming at a request that soullessly can be rejected based on the legal text, not on the human intention. Reduced to a number, a piece of paper, the body evades, is missed in action. ´Sometimes, it feels like someone else is wearing my body´. 

Bless the Daugher Raised by a Voice in Her Head

The length poetry collection, I had access to as audiobook read by the author, continues the cruel wandering of a body forced to co-exist in the wrong place with all the wrongdoings did to its soul. There are short stanzas that do not avoid to say the truth, to open up the wounds of the immigrant existence, in and beyond the deportation centres and foreigner´s offices.

There are no success stories or models of co-existence, projections of societies that afford the denial of not acknowledging the individual heartbreaks. And indeed, there is something like a ´refugee heart´.

Most probably I need to read again and again Warsan´s poetry. Poetry in general, good poetry, needs to be repeated as each time it may bring to light more and more pieces of soul secrets.