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Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

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BLESS THE DAUGHTER RAISED BY A VOICE IN HER HEAD, Warsan Shire. Random House, New York, 2022, 93 pages, $17.00 paper, https://www.randomhousebooks.com.

“No one leaves home unless one’s home is the mouth of a shark” writes Warsaw Shire in her powerful and explosive poem, “Home.” This line sounded so familiar to me that I thought Shire must be quoting someone. But, no. In fact, people are quoting poet Warsan Shire, and the line has become a rallying cry for refugees, immigrants, and human rights advocates. Born in Kenya to Somali parents, Shire has lived in Britain and the U. S. The poems are often shocking, always authentic.

Consider the fourth stanza of “Home”:

No one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten until your shadow leaves, raped, forced off the boat because you are darker, drowned, sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied. No one would choose to make a refugee camp home for a year or two or ten, stripped and searched, finding prison everywhere. And if you were to survive, greeted on the other side—go home Blacks, dirty refugees, sucking our country dry of milk, dark with their hands out, smell strange, savage, look what they’ve done to their own countries, what will they do to ours? 

Roxane Gay wrote of this book: “Warsan Shire electrifies. The beautifully crafted poems in this collection are fiercely tender gifts.” And in every review, the praise echoes and continues: “fierce and compelling,” “exquisite, memorable,” “full of ferocious love and truth.” And music. Poet Terrance Hayes says of it:

“It is not overstatement to say Shire writes the way that Nina Simone sang. All the brilliance of her lean, monumental Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth is magnified in this remarkable new book.”

This was another book whose cover (and its provocative title) grabbed me as I browsed bookstore shelves for something else. Despite our cultural differences, it was a book I eagerly read straight through. A book of mothers and daughters, wombs and vaginas and silenced mouths: “Infants swaddled in blood, the bees / bring messages of postpartum grief. / Your girlhood an incubation for madness” (Hooyo [mother] Full of Grace”). And healing, too, or if not healing, holding out the promise of a devouring wholeness:

Under your feet, the trapdoor to heaven
opens its mouth, its teeth
grazing your toes.

Fathers and brothers infiltrate (read the long poem “Backwards” to see for yourself), as in this poem, which could be ripped from the headlines in any U. S. city. A note adds, “In Islam, Azrael is the angel of death who separates souls from their bodies,” which increases the menace.

Bless Our CCTV Star

Ma’am / is that your brother /
being breastfed / by hooded
goons / are those your brother’s
teeth / caught on speed cameras /
eroding in real time / is that your
brother’s face / marred by pixelation /
you say you’re able to recognize
him / from any distance / and from this distance
you say the figures appeared to be /
swaying / under the moon’s cordial light? /
And you say one of those dark
figures / may have been Azrael /
with his scythe tucked / under his
chin / like a violin / and the notes
he played / you say you already
heard in a dream?

—Warsan Shire

Shire now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children. Read more about her at Poetry Foundation, here,

You can hear Shire read “Home” here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI9D92Xiygo, and I recommend that you do.

Terrence Hayes’ Lighthead

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I was privileged to attend Seattle Arts & Lectures three years ago when Terrance Hayes read from his 2010 poetry book Lighthead. It was a performance to remember, and in a rush of gushing enthusiasm I stood in line to buy his book and get it signed by the poet his own dazzling self.

Lighthead is jazz and verve and sex and no-holds-barred, come-at-you-swinging stuff. Hayes plays and dances with language and gets very very serious about race and politics. It’s a book-length elegy for an American Dream of justice, liberty, and equality that died before it was born. He lets no one off the hook, not even himself.

You kind of have to read it–oh taste and see!–to know it. Like a couple other of the books I’ve read this month, this one at times had me wanting to swap it for something simpler. And I admit that sometimes I felt the poems were washing over me, knocking me off my feet. Then, the magic began to work.

Here is just a sample, the first poem in the collection.

Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,
I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.
This hour, for example, would be like all the others
were it not for the rain falling through the roof.
I’d better not be too explicit. My night is careless
with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra
in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.
Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight
drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life
doing no more than preparing for life and thinking,
“Is this all there is?” Thus, I am here where poets come
to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,
something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables
of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words
and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.
The small dog barking at the darkness has something to say
about the way we live. I’d rather have what my daddy calls
“skrimp.” He says “discrete” and means the street
just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:
that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement
of derangements; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.
I wish I glowed like a brown-skinned pregnant woman.
I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us
Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes. When I kiss my wife,
sometimes I taste her caution. But let’s not talk about that.
Maybe Art’s only purpose is to preserve the Self.
Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires
upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction
of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word
like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don’t quit opening. I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights
out on a limb, there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.

The wisdom of this poem–Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, Not what you see but what your perceive: that’s poetry, an arrangement of derangements–is uncanny and weird (and maybe this is just my own ignorance speaking), but it’s not going anywhere. You should take a closer look.