Girlhood, for instance, is first and foremost characterized by abject loneliness, a loneliness born precisely out of knowledge encountered too soon and language acquired too late.
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Throughout the volume, loneliness trails people like ghosts it is unspoken though often shared, intimate, familial, corporeal, sticking to the skin like monsoon mosquitos. Here, loneliness is neither denied nor medicated, and therefore has the potential to be temporarily alleviated.
In the second translation, (where the uncle is addressing the niece), the uncle’s shrine to ghosts of dreams past is not necessarily a site of lament, but a source of refuge. And so, the first translation (where the niece instructs her uncle to be stronger than his loneliness) lends itself to a reading of a poet-and by extension a reader-repulsed by the scene into whose witness she has been conscripted. The noun “abti” can be used to address the niece as well as the uncle, so the line can be uttered by either party.
The stanza begins with the line “ cidlada ka aktaw, Abti,” which, in an unfortunate tendency of the text, translated as “ be stronger than your loneliness, Uncle.” But this is only one of two possible translations as it is much more ambiguous in Somali. In the last stanza, the absent presence of the poet is made explicit. I put “observe” in quotation marks because while the poem is told in the third person, the reader is nonetheless acutely aware of the presence and the look of another a sense of loneliness intruded upon. The speaker “observes” her uncle on a rainy afternoon as he chain-smokes, drinks strong Somali tea, and recalls a childhood spent on the beaches and streets of Mogadishu to the tune of Hassan Aden Samatar. One of my favorite poems in the collection bears the somewhat awkward title, “My Loneliness is Killing Me,” which captures the loneliness conveyed in the melancholic reminiscences of an older Somali man living in London.
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There is the loneliness of those who never learned how to properly leave a world behind. With this volume Shire’s poetry enters a new, more adult phase, experimenting with longer, formally inventive poems that cannot easily be accommodated by an Instagram caption or a refrigerator magnet.Ī phenomenon this collection defiantly and repeatedly engages, or more accurately, blesses, is the quiet loneliness that plagues immigrant lives. Shire first published her poems in 2011 as a chapbook called Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth. Although Shire herself is barely online these days, there remains an unsatiated eagerness for her online persona, evidenced by the fact that most reviews of her new book are profiles on her rather than critical engagements with her work. Yet, Shire was one of the early poets who had become famous within the “pop poetry” or “Instagram poetry” scene-featuring either short videos of original poems read by the poets themselves or social media posts quoting pithy verse. The inaugural Young Poet Laureate of London and the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature, she became widely known for her collaboration with Beyoncé. Shire is a British-Somali poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. It is as if in this act of unsanctioned witnessing that the young poet also discovers her voice-the poet as not only the one who looks but she who names and addresses what gazes back. It creates an environment of a young poet eavesdropping on private outrage and public shame, walking in unannounced on family secrets and immigrant dreams transported in the wrong language.
The collection tackles a wide range of subjects from mental health issues in immigrant communities, to botched sex education, to femicide. Warsan Shire’s first full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, is a kind of a prayer for losses unmourned.
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