Poet Warsan Shire—The New Voice of the Refugee Crisis

The refugee crisis we are blind to.

The refugee crisis that was dominating headlines just a few months ago seems to be slipping out of the short attention span of the American media and public.  About all we hear now is about Donald Trump’s plan to keep ‘em all out, and semi-hysterical reports from Europe linking them with terrorism.  But the humanitarian catastrophe continues.  Thousands still flee war torn Iraq and Syria—tangled multi-sided conflicts which can trace their origins to American meddling and bombs.  Most end up in wretched camps in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.  Others are caught hopelessly in the ever constricting pipe line to the safety of Western Europe, starving on beaches, freezing in desolate muddy fields, held back by razor wire, and beaten by border police.  

News turns up in the unconventional media.  Just yesterday I discovered that Milana Vayntrub, the perky AT&T phone girl from all of those commercials and once a child refugee herself from Uzbekistan—who knew?—has shot a documentary on Syrian refugees in Greece on her cell phone and has founded #CantDoNothing, an organization dedicated to helping people find ways to become personally involved in helping refugees.  Good for her.  But we need more voices like her’s to wake us from our stupor.

Portrait of the artist as a young woman--Warsan Shire.

In Britain one of those voices has come from the combination of a young woman poet and Twitter.  Like Vayntrub, Warsan Shire was a child refugee.  She was born in Kenya in 1988 to Somali parents who fled that violence torn failed state.  He parents brought her to London when she was just a year old.  Despite the odds against her, she earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and was soon one of the most admired and widely read young poets in the United Kingdom, due in no small measure to her savvy use of the social media including Twitter and Tumbler.  Many of her poems seem to go instantly viral because as Alexis Okeowo wrote in the New Yorker, her poetry “will surface in one of your social media feeds and often be exactly what you needed to read, or what you didn’t know that you needed to read, at that moment.”

Shire has written clear eyed about the immigrant experience in her 2011 chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. Her work has been printed in numerous literary magazines like Poetry Review, Magma, and Wasafiri and has been included in book length anthologies.  She has also done readings not only in Britain but in Germany, Italy, Latin America, and this country.  Her work is translated into several languages.  Her first book of poetry is scheduled for release later this year.

Shire has already reaped important awards and recognition including being named as the first Young Poet Laureate for London in 2013 and won Brunel University’s inaugural African Poetry Prize the same year.  The next she was in Queensland, Australia where she was the state’s official poet in residence. While there she reached out to and worked with the marginalized aboriginal people.   

That’s quite a heady resume for a poet just 28 years of age.  But it is her haunting refugee poetry spread by the social media that has made her a literary superstar.

Home

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you

breath bloody in their throats

the boy you went to school with

who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory

is holding a gun bigger than his body

you only leave home

when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you

fire under feet

hot blood in your belly

it’s not something you ever thought of doing

until the blade burnt threats into

your neck

and even then you carried the anthem under

your breath

only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets

sobbing as each mouthful of paper

made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

no one burns their palms

under trains

beneath carriages

no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck

feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled

means something more than journey.

no one crawls under fences

no one wants to be beaten

pitied

no one chooses refugee camps

or strip searches where your

body is left aching

or prison,

because prison is safer

than a city of fire

and one prison guard

in the night

is better than a truckload

of men who look like your father

no one could take it

no one could stomach it

no one skin would be tough enough

the

go home blacks

refugees

dirty immigrants

asylum seekers

sucking our country dry

niggers with their hands out

they smell strange

savage

messed up their country and now they want

to mess ours up

how do the words

the dirty looks

roll off your backs

maybe because the blow is softer

than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender

than fourteen men between

your legs

or the insults are easier

to swallow

than rubble

than bone

than your child body

in pieces.

i want to go home,

but home is the mouth of a shark

home is the barrel of the gun

and no one would leave home

unless home chased you to the shore

unless home told you

to quicken your legs

leave your clothes behind

crawl through the desert

wade through the oceans

drown

save

be hunger

beg

forget pride

your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear

saying-

leave,

run away from me now

i don’t know what I’ve become

but i know that anywhere

is safer than here.

—Warsan Shire

what they did yesterday afternoon

They set my aunt’s house on fire

I cried the way women on tv do

folding in the middle

like a five pound note.

I called the boy who use to love me

tried “okay” my voice

I said hullo

he said warsan, what’s wrong, what happened?

I’ve been praying,

and those are what my prayers look like;

dear god

I come from two countries

one is thirsty

the other is on fire

both need water.

later that night

I held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

It answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.

—Warsan Shire