Together, they lead readers into a feeling of unworthiness and abandonment. The work begins with two epigraphs - one by Hiromi Itō and one from a Somali children’s lullaby. While Shire’s presentation of powerful narratives can draw a deep reaction from readers, her straightforward structure and often disconnected tone makes the collection feel incomplete. She does so through vignettes of her own family and community members in a way that blurs the boundary between blood relations and a greater cultural history. In “Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head,” Shire boldly weaves together a narrative of what it means to be displaced, disconnected from home, and incredibly vulnerable. In this way, sounds and noises reveal important information on migrant identities and are central to narratives of inclusion and exclusion.Trigger Warning: Mentions of abuse and violence.Īfter releasing two chapbooks and collaborating with Beyoncé on two of her biggest multimedia projects, expectations were high for Warsan Shire’s debut full-length poetry collection. Whilst sound appears as something constructed and orderly, noise – embodied by these accents, repetitions and hesitations – holds negative connotations of being disruptive and pointless. These mediums capture the emotions, accents, repetitions and hesitations that are often lost in other means of research, but that are given value in poetry and music. Indeed, Somalis use technological mediums, including social media, YouTube and cassette tapes, to disseminate their poetry and communicate across the diaspora. It emerges as a form of resistance with the ability to restore voice to those who feel like they have lost it. Sound has the potential to cross and dismantle borders through space and time, where the mobility of people is increasingly blocked by security controls and xenophobic policies. Internationally, migrants and stateless/ racialised people are largely excluded by a focus on nation states and their citizens, where overlapping layers of oppression render them voiceless – without access to platforms for expressing their experiences and concerns. The impact on the speaker’s identity is found in her rhetorical question – “ Can’t you see it on my body?” Changing laws and regulations mean the threat of deportation is constant, and migrants remain stuck in both/ either mobility and/ or immobility: this is the condition of exile. These include the structural and racist complications migrants encounter once they reach their “final” destination, aligning with ideas of migrants as non-belonging and undeserving. In Conversations about home (at the deportation centre), her most famous poem, Shire recounts the reasons for leaving, the journey itself and the discrimination and state of precarity encountered within the host nation, supporting the notion of internal borders. Focusing on journeys thus gives voice and agency to migrants and legitimises their experiences of mobility and lives in exile. Journeys appear as formative, contrasting the common perspective in policy, media, and academia which focus on the causes and outcomes of migration and construct journeys as linear and as an in-between phase. Shire’s work highlights the instrumental role played by journeys in the formation of “hybrid” identities – the condition of “double consciousness” that develops in the liminal space between departure and destination.
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