Warsan Shire Research Articles

Ocean Imaginaries in Warsan Shire’s Afro-Diasporic Poetry

The following article posits the ocean as a connective, affective space. This notion of oceanic relationality lends itself to analyses of the work of Somalian-British poet Warsan Shire. In her work, we can find renditions of specifically located transoceanic trajectories which reach across various different water spaces: her poems connect the East African diaspora via the Northern Indian Ocean first to Northern Africa and the Middle East and from there via the Mediterranean to Europe. Shire’s poetry can thus be placed within a triadic structure as it forcefully speaks towards three different water spaces: the Indian Ocean; the Mediterranean; and, less directly so, the Black Atlantic. The simultaneously violent and transformative potential of these three water spaces take root in her oceanic imaginaries and thus the ocean emerges as a troubled but enabling site of multiple exchanges. I argue that Shire’s poetry constitutes the ocean not only as a deathly space, but also as generative: it offers up the possibilities of passage and movement, however dangerous they may be.

Unsafe to Return, Dangerous to Stay: Eritrean Refugees Trapped Between Home and a Hard Place

Warsan Shire’s phrase ‘no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark’ is a staggering reminder that under normal circumstances, people would prefer home to alien lands and uncertain futures. Those driven out of their countries by war and persecution are also keen to return to their homeland as soon as the political situations in their country of origin change, and they tend to do so with little or no assistance from repatriation schemes. With repatriation in mind, Eritrean refugees had accepted the refugee camps in Sudan for its true meaning-temporary waiting place. But that was before the beginning of the Mediterranean Sea journey, which is relatively a new phenomenon. This paper intends to explore the reasons behind the re-emigration of Eritrean refugees from their countries of first asylum, and the practicality of EU’s reactive measures of deterrence without addressing the underlying problems that led refugees to Libya and the Mediterranean Sea. The European Union is adopting severe measures and questionable deals that largely focuses on keeping the crisis away, and less on the origin and solution of the problem. Therefore, this paper argues that the strategies of endless confinement in the countries of first asylum, premature repatriation to their country of origin, the relocation to less stable African countries and the policy of interception, return to and torture in the country of transit can only create secondary and circular migration that compromises protection and complicates the situation, thereby further exposing the vulnerable refugees to more vulnerabilities.

Introduction: The Performance of Pan-Africanism

Introduction:The Performance of Pan-Africanism Tsitsi Jaji, Martin Munro, and David Murphy In recent years, animated debates about African literature have continued to unfold. The heated questions engaged include who may or may not be an African writer; what geography, lineage, and citizenship have to do with this question; and whom such writers write for. The field of African literary studies, then, increasingly incorporates a plethora of structures well beyond the world of text. Authors are not only in close collaboration with their editors and publishing houses, but also with a panoply of promotional structures whose best function is to connect writing with reading and, most importantly, writers with their readers. To publish a book with Cassava Republic in Nigeria, Kwani in Kenya, Modjaji in South Africa, Becky Ayebia Clarke in the UK, or the African Poetry Book Fund/Nebraska in the US may signal success, but publishing with traditional presses alone no longer secures the visibility that prizes, festivals, conferences, and other sites of literary sociality do. And at the same time, the renewed vitality of such structures on the African continent has drawn out new controversies over the status of well-established awards in the Global North. It is certainly the case that, nearly twenty years after its introduction, the Caine Prize for African Fiction remains deeply influential even as some of its very own laureates call into question its relevance. Rather than a choice between legitimacy and cooption, however, the most hopeful result of such debates is the rise of other awards like the Kwani Book Award and the Etisalat (now 9mobile) Book Award. Alongside these we have seen a vast expansion of book events, extending the history of the fifty-year-old Cairo International Book Fair into new territory with events like the Aké Arts and Book Festival in Abeokuta, Babishai Niwe Poetry Festival in Kampala, Storymoja, Writivism, Time of the Writer, and more. At the same time, African writers, particularly women, are finding unprecedented welcome and headline-making advances from major publishing houses of the US and Europe, with presses like Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Norton; Knopf; Random House; and others. When we find Chimamanda Adichie on the cover of Ms. Magazine, or Warsan Shire not only sampled, but in fact providing many of the lyrics for Beyoncé's most successful album, Lemonade, we know that African literature has entered a new era. Or has it? The articles in this dossier emerged from a conference convened on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the First World Festival of Black Art and Culture (Le Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres) in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.1 When co-organizers David Murphy, Martin Munro, and Tsitsi Jaji issued [End Page vii] the call for papers for Performance of Pan-Africanism: From Colonial Exhibitions to Black and African Cultural Festivals, we invited participants to think about the long history of such arts festivals, to reflect on the sometimes unsettling continuities between colonial exhibitions, world's fairs, and other large-scale spectacles of culture and later cultural festivals, but also to consider the ways that local histories and practices of gathering for durbars, masquerades, and other community rites reverberated in the state-sponsored arts festival of 1966. Because that festival was organized by the founding editor of Présence Africaine, Alioune Diop, and sponsored by Senegal's poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor, Dakar '66 has proven an especially rich vantage point from which to consider earlier efforts at collocating African writers and locating them within broader frameworks, particularly in relation to others in the African diaspora. The festival also serves as a frame through which to think about the performances that authors and artists engage in today in the many spaces where their presence translates to an excess beyond their oeuvre, producing forms of distinction, celebrity, and marketability that challenge our more text-based methodologies. From a literary standpoint, Dakar '66's most obvious predecessors include the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists also convened by Alioune Diop, in Paris, and its second iteration in 1959 in Rome. For Anglophone writers and scholars, the Makerere conference for writers of English-language expression in...

Centrifugal Force and the Mouth of a Shark: Toward a Movement-Oriented Poetics

“No one leaves home unless / Home is the mouth of a shark” read the opening lines of Warsan Shire’s poem, “Home.” Connecting this powerful poem to the migrant/diasporic literary tradition, this article will introduce a new interpretive framework for the study of migrant literature—one which I call “kinopoetics.” I modify here Thomas Nail’s (2015) concept of “kinopolitics,” or a “politics of movement,” which suggests that “regimes of social motion” have historically created the material conditions for social and political formation (24). Kinopolitics, in turn, recognizes the migrant as the primary constitutive figure of social history and transformation. Extending from a politics to a poetics, kino-poetics takes a non-representational approach (derived from Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Nigel Thrift) that treats literary texts as aggregates of sensible experience and affective maps of migrant mobility. I will explore, then, how these texts depict the migrant experience of disenfranchisement and expulsion and the “pedetic social force” (Nail, Figure 124), or active political power, that migrants are able to enact. I emphasize how migrant literature reconfigures the static, place-based poetics built into a regime of borders and nationhood. I will conclude with a kinopoetic reading of Shire’s poem, showing not only how it foregrounds the centrifugal forces that coerce refugees into exile but also how the migrant’s poetic voice confronts and undermines nationalistic hostilities.

Sound, Vision, and Embodied Performativity in Beyoncé Knowles’ Visual Album Lemonade (2016)

In 2016, Beyonce published Lemonade, a work of art that exists in various manifestations: as a music album that includes twelve songs, as live performances (including her world tour and her appearance at the Superbowl halftime show), and as a “visual album,” an art film that consists of the music video clips for each individual song and visually and auditorily complex “chapters” which feature the poetry by Warsan Shire. This article focuses on the visual album as intermedial artwork that can be described as a soundscape in which the intermedial constellations fulfill a number of functions: Firstly, intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album. Secondly, intermedial references result in a transcultural signature of the artwork. Thirdly, through intermedial references Beyonce locates Lemonade within the cultural history of the United States and American music history in particular. Finally, intermediality acquires cultural-critical functions which in particular pertain to race relations and structural forms of discrimination against people of color in contemporary America.

Between ‘home’ and migritude: Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite and the poet as migrant

Abstract What is the relationship between migration and poetry? By examining poetry by Caribbean writers Louise Bennett and Kamau Brathwaite, this article provides historical context and alternative ways of answering this question. Theoretically speaking, this article embarks on the conceptual path of Aimé Cesairé’s use of négritude as a ‘compass of suffering’. It does so by adopting Vijay Prashad and Shailja Patel’s term migritude or an aesthetic attempt to live within the idea of the migrant subject. The article begins with a sketch that examines Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home’ in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. It then looks into the archive of Bennett’s and Brathwaite’s poetry to see how poems written by migrant authors help to shape visions of migration and migrant subjects.

Affective Alienation: Diasporic Melancholia in Warsan Shire's "Home"

Affective Alienation: Diasporic Melancholia in Warsan Shire's "Home"

Affective Alienation: Diasporic Melancholia in Warsan Shire's "Home"

Affective Alienation: Diasporic Melancholia in Warsan Shire's "Home"