teaching my mother how to give birth by warsan shire

We’re always thinking of who we could have been in some other hair-split of fate. As Somalis, we’re always thinking of our cousins in Stockholm, our cousins in Cairo. Your own work is so expansive in a way that defies the imaginative borders of an England determined to make us see ourselves in the same crushingly provincial ways it sees itself. Literary tastemakers don’t know how to contend with the abundant poetic traditions that permeate so many aspects of Somali life and seep into the consciousness of even the poorest and least literate of us. Our affinity with poetry is flagrantly confident, and at odds with our material conditions as working class people, a group typically denied the right to call themselves poets, writers and thinkers. We are a relatively young diaspora in the Anglophone world. There is no established set of reference points for what you write about and for the Somali diaspora at large. There was no framework in the British poetry establishment for someone like you. The two poets talked about nineties London, parentification and diasporic inheritances. Her first full collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, came out this year, and is currently shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Shire wrote the film adaptation and poetry for Lemonade, a visual album by Beyoncé. In 2014, she was appointed as the first Young Poet Laureate for London, and the following year released Her Blue Body, a limited-edition pamphlet. Her debut, bestselling pamphlet, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, was published in 2011. Warsan Shire is a Somali-British writer and poet. Her latest pamphlet, Doing the Most with the Least, was published by Goldsmiths Press. She is a former Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University (Los Angeles).

Momtaza Mehri is a poet who works across criticism, translation, education, radio, and anti-disciplinary research practices.

Teaching my mother how to give birth by warsan shire