“‘Everything in this new world, a wound’: hospitality and violence in Jamila Osman’s poetry.”

Abstract

There is a new generation of Somali poets in the United States and Europe, mainly women, writing about home, war, migration, and diaspora. This paper examines the Somali American poet Jamila Osman’s critiques of hospitality and sexual violence against women. The aim of this article is twofold: I first examine Osman’s poetic representation of hospitality, dramatized by an encounter between a Canadian border official and a female African refugee at the airport. In exploring the intersections of home, migration, and borders in Osman’s poetry, I draw insights from Jacques Derrida’s and Mireille Rosello’s discussions of hospitality and the immigrant. I then analyze Osman’s portrayal of sexual violence against female refugees: violence at the border, violence in the nation, and violence at home. Although Osman demonstrates that sexual violence silences women and undermines their selfhood in their new countries, underlining the transborder character of violence, she highlights women’s capacity to reclaim their voices and reassert their sovereignty within the domestic and communal spaces.