Post 5: Warsan Shire

c: Afripopmag

Warsan Shire is a 29 year old poet and writer who was catapulted to international fame when Beyonce recited her poetry on her album Lemonade. Soon Warsan's books were selling out everywhere as people began to delve into the powerful words Warsan put into pen.

Warsan was born in Kenya to Somali parents but spent most of her life in London, where she never felt she completely fit in. She carried with her a constant feeling of being an outsider stuck between two dual identities. Much of her poetry evokes this feeling, often speaking from the marginalized perspective of refugees, immigrants, and black women. Warsan has made it clear her focus lies in giving a voice to those who are often silenced or wrongly depicted. "Inaccurate recognition is painful not only to the psyche but also to the political self, the citizen self." (Harris 38).

Her writings are certainly influenced by her own experiences and that of her family, resulting in a powerful intimacy that goes beyond touching us skin deep. It reaches us emotionally in places that are deep and private. It's courageous. As Audre Lorde wrote, "...the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger." (42).

Give your daughters difficult names
give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue
my name makes you want to tell me the truth
my name doesn't allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right

C: beautyisinside

In 2011 at the age of 23 Warsan was already a published author, her collection of poems titled "Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth" are full of writings that are seductive, compelling, and mournful. Raw image of women's bodies displaced by war and violence. This was followed by "Our Men do not Belong to Us" (2014), and "Her Blue Body" (2015). Her storytelling is powerful, authentic, and elicits a strong emotion from her readers. Of this she says her aim is to, "preserve the names of the women who came before me. To connect, honor, to confront."

One of her most well known poems, "For Women Who areDifficult to Love", pertains to a topic Warsan often speaks on; love. She highlights female/male relationships from the female point of view, many times depicting men as being filled with a violent masculinity and lust that can be threatening to women. Yet the way these narratives are told are anything but simplistic. 

Warsan also tackles gender and womanhood intertwined with identity as shown in her poem "Things We had Lost in the Summer": 

One of my cousins pushes my open knees closed.

Sit like a girl. I finger the holes in my shorts, shame warming my skin

In the car my mother stares at me through the rear view

the leather sticks to the back of my thighs

I open my legs like a well-oiled door, daring her to look at me

and give me what i had not lost: a name 

It conveys images of forced femininity and questions of what it means to be a girl, a woman, a person who does not fit a particular gender role. And doesn't necessarily want to. She does so by creating a scenario many of us can relate to, a girl simply being herself without restrictions being told to act a certain way. Sit a certain way. Think a certain way. For women the script has already been written, but it is the courageous rebels like Warsan Shire who write their own story on their own terms. 

Works Cited

Harris Perry, Melissa. "Crooked Room". Sister Citizen: Shames, Stereotypes, and Black Women in 
     America. Yale University Press, 2013.

Lorde, Audre. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. n.p. 1977.