Warsan Shire Research Articles

From Rhetoric to Reality: Warsan Shire's “Home” and the Refugee Crisis

This paper examines Warsan Shire's poem "Home" within the context of the contemporary refugee crisis driven by civil wars in various countries. The paper also discusses how, despite the ideals of open borders and the right to seek safety advocated by globalization, human rights, and the United Nations, refugees frequently encounter difficulties such as humiliation, xenophobic aggression, and discrimination in host nations. Applying Emmanuel Levinas's "politics of hospitality" and Gordon Allport's "contact hypothesis" as theoretical frameworks, this study argues that genuine hospitality, marked by positive interactions and proper integration, is essential for bridging the gap between theoretical principles and the practical treatment of refugees in the domains of human rights discourse and globalization. This study makes a significant contribution by highlighting the challenges faced by asylum seekers in host countries and urging humanity to offer genuine hospitality to mitigate the fears of civil war, terrorism, and other forms of violence.

Eye to I: Panoptic Muslim Surveillance and Warsan Shire’s Poetics of Liberation

In 1786, French architect Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon, a structure in which prison cells surround an opaque tower where guards surveil the prisoners. In the panopticon, prisoners could be observed by guards without knowing when they were being watched, making them trained for constant vigilance. My research places this centuries-old theoretical model against contemporary Muslim surveillance, arguing that the panopticon is a way to more deeply and thoroughly understand the omnipresent surveillance weaponized against Muslim communities after 9/11. More broadly, I refuse to dilute the impact of internalized and externalized policing on marginalized communities. I investigate how post-9/11 surveillance in Nairobi places Muslim communities into a prison-like structure in which they are repeatedly watched, affecting their internal psyche— the art form of poetry written by these marginalized groups allows for a deeper viewing and dissection of this surveillance. Invoking French philosopher Michel Foucault, who drew from the panopticon in his literary theories on discipline, with first-hand ethnographic research on Muslim surveillance from contemporary scholars living in Nairobi, Kenya, I pose a literary-ethnographic stance regarding how we can view the lasting impacts of Muslim surveillance. In analyzing the detrimental conditions of surveillance in postcolonial Kenya, I also investigate how a key contemporary poet, Warsan Shire, breaks free from these boundaries through her artistic work, which focuses on the generational and haunting implications of surveillance in her own Muslim community. Shire herself was born in Kenya and migrated to the United Kingdom with her family when she was a young child. Her poetry, both spoken and written, has now reached global audiences in North America, Germany, and South Africa and has influenced the contemporary literary canon. Catechizing Muslim surveillance through meshing literary and anthropological research, I hope to dismantle the post 9-/11 prison-panopticon of inspection, emphasizing the role of artistry in liberation and resistance.

The Use of Homeland Voice in Warsan Shire's "Home" Poem: Analytical Study

This study deals with the diasporic poet Warsan Shire from the point of view of her use of country voice in her poem "Home", to address the horrible situation of refugees. Diasporic literary writers' depictions of home and its complexities are influenced by Africa's painful historical experience with slavery and racial oppression. Despite the host nation's influences on African migrants, the sordid effects of ethnic conflicts lead to writers' disillusionment, which leads them to indulge in sentimental nostalgia for their home of origin. Through studying Shire’s "Home" poem, to examine the country voice in the feelings of refugees' poets, there is a hidden voice of home in the lines of Shire's poem. This study aims to argue for the voice of home through the analysis of Shire’s poem "Home". Also, it will focus on similar situations when home is also running with the people, as if he senses their problem and farewells them to a safer place. In addition, this study looked at how diasporic poets identify with the voice of their nation by using Foucauldian theory of power and the qualitative method of analysis to shed light on how diasporic immigrants behave. Warsan shire argues that nostalgia is an internal feeling of hearing the voice of home and yearning for the native place. The study concludes that there is some hidden relationship between the refugees and their native home, both as an internal relationship and as a feeling of belonging to their native country.

Forced displacement and mental health problems in refugees residing in Quetta for decades

IntroductionAs written by Warsan Shire, “no one leaves home until the home is the mouth of a shark”. UNHCR defines forced displacement as “displaced because of persecution, conflict, generalized violence or human rights violations"Objectivesto study the prevalence of common Mental health disorders among forcibly displaced people and comparing with the common mental health disorders among host community members.MethodsThe OPD of BIPBS in SPH and BMCH of Quetta attends 800+ patients per month the data of the OPD of both hospitals was collected for Jan-May 2022 and was analyzed to numerate both the host community and refugees. out of 4120 for 354 refugee patients identified using their POR card and for 3776 of host community using their CNIC, data was analyzed for the prevalence of mental health disorders among them.ResultsThis study states that Afghan Refugees presented to OPD services of BIPBS, 47% were diagnosed as MDD with/without psychosis, 19% with GAD, 5% diagnosed as BAD, 5% With schizophrenia, 4% as PTSD, 3% as migraine, 3% conversion disorder, 2% OCD, 1% somatoform disorder and 10% of them presented with other psychiatric disorders, while in host community 21% were diagnosed as MDD with/without psychosis, 24% as GAD, 12% as somatoform disorder, 10% as OCD, 8% as migraine, 7% as conversion disorder, 4% as BAD, 3% as Schizophrenia, 3% as MBD due to substance misuse and rest of 7% presented with other psychiatric disorders.ConclusionsThe conclusion of this study states that mental health disorders are more common among refugees than in other populations, the result of this study shows that there is a big difference in the prevalence of mental health disorders among displaced people and the rest of the population, some of the Mental health disorders are present in higher percentage among displaced people rather than among host community, while some other disorders are present in lower percentage among displaced people rather than among host community, this study also highlights that further studies are needed to determine, risk and protective factors within the host community.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Has Feminism Changed Women’s Realities in Africa? An Interrogation of the Poems of Ogundipe and Shire

African feminist movements of the 1960’s marked the starting point of debates from the origin of feminism in Africa to its impact on women and the society at large. Literature has from the go been used as a vehicle to reflect the life and its vicissitude on African women. African women writers have used literature as a platform to challenge and re-imagine gender relations within their societies and the continent as a whole. Yet, the question arises: despite half a century’s worth of literary production, has the reality of women, as reflected in literature, changed? This paper thematically interrogates the collection of poems by Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Sew the Old Days and Other Poems published in 1985, in comparison to Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth of 2011. Both poets are renowned for depicting current issues faced by women and their struggles in patriarchal systems. A thematic analysis allows for the inference of change: do these poets address the same struggles, or has almost thirty-year difference brought about discernible changes?

Making use of water: Safia Elhillo’s diasporic hydropoetics

This article engages with multivalent ways in which Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo employs water in her poetry. I argue that studying Elhillo’s use of water imagery and settings in her work offers valuable insights into her intertextual and metatextual poetic method, as well as her thematic concerns with identity, “race,” gender and migration. Her poems with oceanic settings resurface historical traumas associated with slavery, while other poems explore more recent oppressions, such as the flooding of Nubian people’s lands during the building of the Aswan Dam. Water is also used as a metaphor for the loss of language or blurring of identity entailed by migration. Furthermore, Elhillo’s participation in multimodality through creative YouTube videos contributes additional layers to the meanings of water in her work. Comparisons are made throughout the article with poets such as Warsan Shire and Koleka Putuma, underscoring Elhillo’s participation in a wider milieu of contemporary African women poets.

Forhandlinger af grænsens rum


 
 
 
 This article explores how, and in which ways, the poems “Home” by poet Warsan Shire and “Brev till Europa” by poet Athena Farrokhzad performs an aesthetic critique of contemporary borders by establishing the figures “the home” and “Europe” as imaginary utopian borderscape formations. Through an analysis of the function of the two figures, the article concludes that the poems offer ways to re-imagine bordered spaces as spaces of solidarity.
 Utopi, Dystopi, Borderscape, Grænseforestillinger, Grænseæstetik
 
 
 

Within the Shadow of Displacement

Within the Shadow of Displacement Jamaica Baldwin (bio) The following pieces constitute the response of a wide variety of writers to my invitation for work on "home and displacement." While I have always gravitated to writing that navigates displacement on some level, spending time with these poems and stories has led me to an even deeper appreciation of the rage, grief, longing, and desire that is often carried simultaneously, the way these writers weave them into poems and stories that honor the fullness of their histories, that honor how they find ways to love and be loved within a society built on narratives designed to contain and harm so many of us. I often think of displacement and home as parallel universes. I find it difficult to talk about displacement without aching for home, or to talk about the safety of home without acknowledging, if only tangentially, the shadow of displacement in which homes are created. So many of the pieces included in this issue engage this shadow in some form. The authors are giving voice to the delicate, capacious, brutal, and complicated reality of occupying this space. One of the joys of my guest editing journey has been the solicitation process. It's the ability to reach out to writers I admire and invite them to share their work while discovering new (to me) writers along the way. I began by soliciting writers I've read who deal deftly and intimately with what it means to live in exile far from their country of birth, or what it means to long for the country of your parents' birth, or what it means to exist in community and comfort when those left behind face the daily realities of war, the daily realities of colonization—poets like Ruth Awad, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Su Hwang, and others. I also reached out to writers whose work I've admired for its ability to engage the intimate realities of living in the generational shadow of empire and conquest, of being displaced in one's homeland, of living in diaspora, in that in-between space—Romeo Oriogun, Anjanette Delgado, Ana Portnoy Brimmer, to [End Page 42] name a few. I also wanted to place alongside these works pieces that engage other forms of displacement, other ways of complicating the idea of home. For example, poet Carla Griswold navigates what it is to feel displaced and rootless without leaving home, when one's lifelong partner becomes unrecognizable to you, and you to them. These are just a handful of the writers and stories that make up this issue. I began writing this introduction the day after the Buffalo, NY supermarket shooting earlier this year. Tried again not long after the Uvalde, TX massacre. Each time I found myself mute and restless. Words seemed insufficient. I didn't foresee such recent violence shadowing my thoughts on this project, and yet I chose this topic precisely because displacement is a kind of violence—I should have seen it. Mass shootings have become a consistent, unsurprising part of life in the United States. Making a home here is a risky endeavor. Warsan Shire said, "no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark." What happens when you leave the mouth of one shark only to end up in another? What happens when the local elementary school where you send your kids becomes a war zone? The answer, as these writers have expressed with such fierce honesty and grace, is that we begin with what we've lived, with what's been passed down to us, and what we decide to pass on to others. "One wrong history giving way to another / until you find yourself stranded / at home," (Joan Kwon Glass). We begin with acknowledging the truth. "Violence has always lived here" (Julia Alekseyeva). We begin with our children. "What does it mean that my only justice has been on the page, and that life, for you, will be different," (Terese Marie Mailhot)." We begin with the bravery to articulate what we need to replace the silences built around us. "all i want / is a kind hand / recognizing my spine," (Quenton Baker). [End Page 43] Jamaica...

Blessed and Banned: Surveillance and Refusal in Somali Diasporic Art & Literature

This essay examines the work of twenty-first century Somali Anglophone writers and artists, analyzing how they confront the connected experiences of displacement, migration, and surveillance. I interpret the work of Warsan Shire, Diriye Osman, Ladan Osman, and Ifrah Mansour as embodying place-based transnationalisms that resist stereotypical media and political representations of Somali refugees as invasive and dangerous, especially gendered clichés of Somali, Muslim men as inherently violent and Somali, Muslim women as universally oppressed. Through writing, art, and performance, these works reveal how the state prevents communities from caring for one another through state apparatuses, and articulate instead a right to mutuality and care-taking.

“No One Leaves Home Unless Home Is the Mouth of a Shark”: Dwelling and the Complexities of Return in Warsan Shire’s Poetry

Africa’s bitter historical experience of slavery and racial discrimination influences diasporic literary writers in their representation of home and its exigencies. This is due to the sordid effect of racial conflicts culminating in disillusionment of writers, who engage in the nostalgic longing for their country of origin, notwithstanding the influences of the host country on African migrants. By exploring Warsan Shire’s poetry, this study, through the lens of modernity and globalization, examines the concept of home while x-raying locations of the African immigrant in diaspora. The research utilised the Postcolonial theory and the qualitative method of analysis to examine how diasporic immigrants, particularly female subalterns struggle to grapple with the intricacies of dwelling in a hostile clime which situates the “Us” and “Them” binary opposition on their lived conditions. It analysed Shire’s poems as a product of the transcultural identity formation of the poet, illustrating her migratory experiences through the notion of “unhomely” (in her home country) and “Homeliness” (in her host country) as dilemmas that bisect her quest for return home because of war. The study, thus, submits that globalization alternates the idea of situating home as a place of origin.

When Home Is the Mouth of a Shark: Navigating the Academy as the Self in Black and Brown Skin

As transnational women living in Jamaica and South Africa, we came together in Brazil to employ collaborative autoethnography to deconstruct and make sense of our experiences in academia. In this article, we compare our identities in the academy with that of refugees and juxtapose Warsan Shire’s poem Home, where she describes the forced reasons why people leave their country of birth and the psycho-emotional labor of the refugee crisis. Borrowing from an autoethnographic ontology, we recognize ourselves as the unit of measure, and the concerted effort to continuously interrogate the self and each other’s lived experiences. This article challenges the colonial epistemologies of knowing and knowledge as we interweave our individual narratives throughout the article, grappling with our search for an elusive home in the academy, and a sense of belonging within postcolonial, onto epistemological frames of the academy.

Feminino indelével nas palavras poéticas de Warsan Shire, Upile Chisala e Safia Elhillo

A primeira observação relativa à escrita literária relaciona-se ao próprio ato físico de escrever, condicionado a uma tensão corpórea que só é aliviada, acabada, quando a escrita é terminada. Esta, em si, liga-se profundamente a uma conjuntura histórica, visto que não é atemporal, tampouco impessoal (SPILLERS, 2015, p. 58). Soma-se a isso o fato de que o escritor, ao conceber noções de pertencimento em meio à sociedade que o cerca, não pode isolar-se de tudo o que, de alguma forma, o sensibiliza. Considerando, portanto, que homem e sociedade coadunam-se sobremaneira, analisamos atentamente a escrita poética de Warsan Shire (Quênia), Upile Chisala (Maláui) e Safia Elhillo (Sudão), que está demasiadamente associada às suas vivências pessoais, bem como ao passado histórico de seus países de origem e às heranças culturais de seus antepassados, uma vez que a própria escrita carrega em si uma carga de urgência assaz relacionada ao momento sócio-político-cultural da sociedade contemporânea.

The poem as meme? Pop video poetry in the digital age (Warsan Shire/Beyoncé)

The adaptation of texts by contemporary British-Somali poet Warsan Shire for Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, released in 2016, raises several questions about poetic representation in the twenty-first-century mediascape. Shire’s poems, which have been composed for a variety of media, ranging from print distribution to audio recordings to online circulation, serve as transitions between the musical tracks in Lemonade, thus accompanying the overarching narrative of black female empowerment. Frictions between image and text present the starting point for an enquiry into the changes that contemporary lyric poetry undergoes when it “becomes pop.” Shaped by processes of circulation and reappropriation, Shire’s poems emerge as “memetic media.” Does this “meme-ification” of poetry, the digital mobilization and de-contextualization of poetic form, in turn affect the dynamics of poetic representation? A close reading of the texts as they are integrated into the visual album shows how Shire’s poems enter into a dialogue with Lemonade’s imagery, while remaining impervious to the narrative of positive transformation. In becoming “meme,” these poems retain their refractory qualities, thus presenting a design of lyric poetry for the contemporary mediascape.

Lampedusa: Migrant Tragedy

Tragedies about the suffering of migrants are not a new phenomenon. So this article quickly turns to texts from classical antiquity by Aeschylus and Euripides. It focuses, however, on poetry written over the last decade. Following the routes taken by asylum seekers from Africa and Asia through such transit points as Lampedusa and across Europe to Calais, it looks at depictions of the suffering associated with travel, disaster, and problematic arrival, and at the interaction in tragic writing between old motifs and conventions (tragedy as understood by Aristotle or Hegel) and current issues and resources. Fresh insights are offered into the work of poets from migrant backgrounds (Warsan Shire, Ribkha Sibhatu) and into a range of modes from lyric (James Byrne) through experiments with translation and performance (Caroline Bergvall) into the late modernism of Geraldine Monk, J. H. Prynne, and Jeff Hilson.

Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” to First-Year Students

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.

From Venus to “Black Venus”: Beyoncé’s I Have Three Hearts, Fashion, and the Limits of Visual Culture

In 2016, Lemonade was lauded as “Black girl magic” for the ways the hour-long HBO special (and subsequent album) celebrated Black women and the Southern gothic tradition. It also was the first hint of Beyoncé paying homage to West African Yoruba traditions. At the 2017 Grammys, her performance was both an invocation of the sacred in Western art history and further homage to Yoruba. The performance opened with poetry by Warsan Shire, and snapshots of her daughter, Blue Ivy, but the highlight was Beyoncé’s gold gown, and crown, and gold accessories, all of which symbolized the African goddess Osun. Released just before her Grammys performance, the I Have Three Hearts photo-series circulated as pregnancy images (she was pregnant with twins), but it also functioned as a repository of Beyoncé’s invocation of the sacred in Western culture, as embodied in Venus, and the African goddess, often labelled as “Black Venus.” This article is an examination of three images in the I Have Three Hearts series, taken by Awol Erizku, and the series’ accompanying poetry by Shire. I argue that it raises important questions about the role of visual culture in fashion and popular culture. Is Beyoncé the Venus of the twenty-first century? Does this photographic series remap Western visual culture to reimagine Black womanhood in the discourse on sexuality? Or, it is an example of pastiche in postmodern culture wherein truncated information is authorized, making everyone an expert without the demand for historical context?

Poetics for a Black Revolt

This essay is written as a response to the compounded crises of police brutality and the Covid-19 pandemic, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement reignited by the death of George Floyd in 2020. It aims to show how anti-blackness and capitalism are the common denominators contributing to mass death in both crises. The essay explores the possibilities for poetry as radical practice, particularly the work of Black women poets such as Audre Lorde, Ericka Huggins and Warsan Shire. What becomes evident is the centrality of the Black body in reimagining the future, despite its historical emergence from the slave body. I argue that we must return to and reaffirm the bodies that Judith Butler calls abject within theory and poetics, in order to better protect the lives that inhabit them.

Why do Refugees have to Leave their Sweet Home “Unless home is the Mouth of a Shark”? An Analysis of Warsan Shire’s Poem Home

This paper analyses in Warsan Shire’s poem Home why refugees have to leave their home. In so doing, it first explores the root causes behind particularly the displacement of Somalians, which becomes an inspiration for the poem and also argues that these causes may actually be similar ones which could be seen one way or another behind any act of the displacement anywhere across the world. Secondly, the paper responds to the criticisms which accuse refugees of leaving at once their home when they face any difficulties in life. In this sense, the poem becomes the voice of “refugees” and tells the world that “refugees” will not take all the risks in very dangerous and difficult journeys without any reasonable causes. As the paper discusses, what is also equally important is that “refugees,” though exposed to very hard conditions of living during the journey and in the host country, are also labelled as “Other,” which immediately brings about a negative condition, in which they are humiliated, discriminated and categorised as “us” and “them, making it difficult for refugees to integrate and eventually belong to the indigenous society. Finally, the paper debates that it is not the guilt of refugees who leave their home but the ones who create intolerable causes for their displacement from their home. The paper suggests that we are all responsible - United Nations, politicians, world leaders, writers, intellectuals, and academics and so on all over the world - not only for revealing the root causes behind the displacement of people from their home but also for annihilating them all together for a humanely world and living.

Beyoncé’s Soft Power

This article charts Beyoncé’s multimedia intervention into the politics of the Trump presidency as she draws on the work of black Muslim and Latinx artists to challenge white monopolies on representation in the Breitbart era. It specifically looks at the political interventions Beyoncé staged through collaborations with Warsan Shire, a British poet born in Kenya to Somali parents; Awol Erizku, an Ethiopian-born American artist raised in the Bronx; and Daniela Vesco, a Costa Rican photographer. This collective of artists forge a black aesthetics at a heightened level of visibility, using new performative technologies to intervene in the politics of #BlackLivesMatter, crackdowns on Muslim and Latinx refugees and immigrants, the proposed wall with Mexico, and neo-Nazi mobilization. Focusing on Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement, the article explores the politics of representation of black bodies and black lives, as she transforms the trope of suffering black mothers and their martyred black youth into a celebration of black motherhood and the pregnant body. These images are consciously rooted in a genealogy of black women’s representations of black women’s bodies. Despite the political power of these interventions, accusations were leveled at Beyoncé of cultural appropriation and exploitation of suffering by the neoliberal entertainment machine. By mentoring these artists, Beyoncé sought to convey the fertility of creative foment across borders and power hierarchies, even if her star power ultimately eclipsed the message as well as the marginalized artist that she sought to highlight.

Questioning Representation: Testimonials, Witness Accounts and Literary Migrant Narratives

This article rethinks contemporary approaches to asylum by examining literary accounts of human displacement to problematise representations and authenticity. A believable testimonial of asylum seekers’ experience is key in the asylum application process and the pursuit of such truth by Europe’s border forces usually entails a celebration of authenticity. Yet, the emphasis on migrant testimonials as the definitive source in understanding the migration ‘crisis’ is deeply problematic. This essay argues that literary representations of displacement are equally valuable in helping us understand contemporary migration. This paper engages with the poetry of two exiled poets, Warsan Shire and Yousif Qasmiyeh, to illustrate the importance of literary accounts of migration, and to demonstrate that the intimate and traumatic stories of the borderline condition should be shared on migrants’ own terms, not by the demands of the European border forces. By drawing on John Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and its representation of the current approach to human displacement, this paper also explores the role of fiction to 'narrativize' the nuances of migratory experiences.