Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (Mouthmark): 10

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If my mother contracted and died of the virus, I would not be able to forgive both myself and her for not working through our relationship”, I thought. My psychologist tried to counsel me into not jumbling funeral scenarios before they happen but it all fell on stone. This poem speaks of a foul sense of loss and longing. The type that one wears like a perfume but stinks like a sewer. It's not pretty. It's not the kind of sorrow anyone wants to hold, comfort or be associated with. That kind of heaviness means auto-ostracism. Shire presents that kind of ugly sorrow in this poem. What I love most about it are the last lines which make you think it may be ugly but damn it's beautiful. Book Genre: 21st Century, Adult, Africa, Contemporary, Cultural, Eastern Africa, Feminism, Literature, Nonfiction, Poetry, Race, Somalia, Womens

How about love? As a woman entering a relationship set yourself on fire in the same sense, do not become meek and docile: do not allow him to take over. This reading feels like one of the strongest. If you compare this to the ideas that are manifested in the spoken word poem For Women Who are Difficult to Love it becomes more evident. The ideas empower women and suggest that if you are volatile, if your personality is like that of a fire, do not quench yourself: carry on. Be yourself, he is not worthy if he cannot love you for you: keep that fire burning. Un approfondimento e uno spaccato sul tema dei diritti civili, nelle parole di una giovane poetessa somalo-britannica. Sex and relationships are often the centre of her poems. The women are desperate, they yearn for love, affection, pleasure. Instead they mainly receive violence, terror and rejection. But Warsan also talks about the trauma that war and having to flee one's home country brought upon the inflicted. What it means to be a refugee, the fear of deportation, the sense of not belonging, the despair of never being able to return.Poetry is difficult, almost impossible to review. It's actually tempting to not review this collection of poems, to not rate it. Today is a good day. Today is a wonderful day - any day that starts out like this is. I found a house full of words. Bold, fearless, silky, abrasive, wounding words. Warsan Shire is a house full of words. Words that don't cuddle you, words that envelope you. There's a deep sense of melancholy to her words and quite a lot of her poems contain explicit content - which I have absolutely no qualms about. If you don't do bold and abrasive, then this probably isn't for you. But personally, I love the way the words burn, sometimes sweet and silky is just too much of that - sweet and silky. I think that's the beauty of poetry, the creeping subtlety of it's power is you never know which line will sink or float you, make or mar you. You never know which line you'll latch unto and cling to for dear life. I've always thought that poetry emphasizes the delicacy of words and maximizes it's full utility. Where books might be pretentious, extravagant or redundant with fine literary sounding words, I've always thought, in a way, poetry thrives on it. But that's not to say it needs it, simply there's love to be found even in those that prove tedious. Maybe I feel this way because I knew poetry before I knew stories and novels. Some poems in this are more of 3's than 4's but on average, I rated this a 4 because it was a really good collection. The daily calls with my mother are lengthening these days. I reveal a bit about my heart and mind each other day and it is a shaking shallow pool. Sometimes I jump in and hit the ground, sometimes the swim feels like a baptism into loving and understanding my mother more as a woman than a mother. I am working through the peeling off the anxiety that metastasized from the experience and porosing through her trauma. My only wish is that when I can afford it, we can speak to a therapist and detangle the maternal dysfunctional lineage patterns as a progeny. I stumbled upon Warsan Shire's work after attending a spoken word event when I was in New York last summer. Not something that is so popular here in England, i was intrigued.

This is a slim debut chapbook of vivid, visceral, violent poems by a U.K.-based writer of Somali heritage who has already achieved widespread fame despite her young age (you may have seen her work featured in Beyonce's Lemonade). I was first drawn to her work some months ago after reading her poem "the birth name", which advises readers to "give your daughters difficult names.... my name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right." (that poem is not included in this chapbook, however). New realities of being constricted to a barren area with no opportunities nor chances of social progression would push my mother to seek out her father at about eighteen. She travelled to her birthplace of Venda, not speaking or understanding the language. A few years later she met my father, and then I was born – along with my younger sister and brother. What elevates ‘teaching my mother how to give birth’, what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire’s ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam; reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times – as in Tayeb Salih’s work – and translating to the realm of lyric the work of the likes of Nawal El Saadawi. As Rumi said, “Love will find its way through all languages on its own”. After stating that “ no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” from which you run only “when you see the whole city running as well” (st. 1) the speaker describes how dramatically home has changed: it has become unrecognisable ( the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body), so dangerous that it “won’t let you stay” (st. 2).One of my favorite poems in this collection is called "Beauty". In it, Warsan describes how her older sisters "soaps between her legs" and "stole / the neighbour's husband, burnt his name into her skin." She recounts her sister's "shameful" behaviour, since her sister loves sex and finding pleasure where it offers itself to her. I like the poem because it feels so real. I can imagine Warsan's relationship to her sister. I see the two of them in their flat when reading this poem. I know how Warsan must've felt as a younger sister. Excited, confused, envious, judgmental. It's 4 a.m. and she winks at me, bending over the sink, I know how hard it is to reach a safer heaven, I know the extent parents will go for their children, and when I see people being harassed for simply getting here in pieces, I wonder if it was better to risk their lives for a dream that might only keep them at bay but never will let them reach it.

These poems hit hard. I could only read one or two poems at the time because I had to stop and think about it, to let the feelings sink in. I was casually strolling by one of my friend's profile when I stumbled upon a poem. And it's titled For Women Who Are Difficult To Love. After reading and rereading it, I hopped on to Youtube to find a reading of it. And I did. I listened to it, again, and I fell in love with it, all over again. I can't tell you what I felt while I listened to it, it was like food to my soul. And those last lines...simply eye-watering and strengthening. So, Hayat didn't really recommend this to me directly, but I feel like she did and I'm so grateful for finding this poem(and writer) through her. This was cutting. From the title, I think it's fair to say that one knows what to expect from this poem. In this, the speaker's voice is cold, calm and resigned, but underneath that you can detect the anger. Anger at their misfortune. Anger at being run out of their homeland because of something so globally stripping as violence and war. Most of all, they're angry at being turned into a refugee - a symbol of superfluity.I have no idea how and why I added this poetry collection to my TBR since I rarely read anything in verse. However, I am thankful it happened because I would have missed an extraordinary experience. I’ve never been more touched, saddened and humbled by any poetry before. Most authors that I tried left me indifferent. There were a few that I liked but nothing comes even close to what I felt while reading Warsan Shire.