Ocean Imaginaries in Warsan Shire’s Afro-Diasporic Poetry

Abstract

The following article posits the ocean as a connective, affective space. This notion of oceanic relationality lends itself to analyses of the work of Somalian-British poet Warsan Shire. In her work, we can find renditions of specifically located transoceanic trajectories which reach across various different water spaces: her poems connect the East African diaspora via the Northern Indian Ocean first to Northern Africa and the Middle East and from there via the Mediterranean to Europe. Shire’s poetry can thus be placed within a triadic structure as it forcefully speaks towards three different water spaces: the Indian Ocean; the Mediterranean; and, less directly so, the Black Atlantic. The simultaneously violent and transformative potential of these three water spaces take root in her oceanic imaginaries and thus the ocean emerges as a troubled but enabling site of multiple exchanges. I argue that Shire’s poetry constitutes the ocean not only as a deathly space, but also as generative: it offers up the possibilities of passage and movement, however dangerous they may be.

Keywords:

• Warsan Shire
• Indian Ocean
• Mediterranean
• Black Atlantic
• East African poetry
• African diaspora
• refugee geocorpographies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Forensic Architecture is an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Their interdisciplinary team of investigators includes architects, scholars, artists, filmmakers, software developers, investigative journalists, archaeologists, lawyers, and scientists (“Project”). The Forensic Oceanography project was launched in summer 2011 to support a coalition of NGOs demanding accountability for the deaths of migrants in the central Mediterranean Sea while that region was being tightly monitored by the NATO-led coalition intervening in Libya (“The Left-to-Die-Boat”).

2 For all its invaluable insights, Gilroy’s concept has rightfully been scrutinized for disregarding Africa as the point of origin for diasporic movements, for universalizing and oversimplifying the experience of the Middle Passage, and for not looking beyond the Anglo-centric, African American world. As Paul Zeleza remarks in his critique on Gilroy, “the largest African diaspora population is in Brazil and speaks Portuguese” (37). While attuned to the complexities of race and class, Gilroy’s work also fails to pay attention to its own gender hierarchies and androcentrism. For further critical engagement with these issues, cf. the Africa and the Black Atlantic special issue of Research in African Literatures.

3 These entanglements are echoed in literary works, ranging from South Asian authors such as, most prominently, Amitav Ghosh, to novels from writers in the African Asian diaspora like M. G. Vassanji, to East and South African writing by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nadifa Mohamed, Mia Couto, Praba Moodley, Nuruddin Farah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, or Aziz Hassim, to island literature written by authors like Lindsey Collen, Khal Torabully, or Ananda Devi from Mauritius.

4 It is already here, in Shire’s publishing history, that we can find connections to the transcultural and transoceanic space of the Black Atlantic. The importance of connection across the water and the notion of cultural fusion Gilroy had brought to the forefront in his discussions, is mirrored in the way Shire’s texts are disseminated: Our Men Do Not Belong to Us appeared within the eight-piece Seven New Generation African Poets boxset, edited und published in the U.S. by the Nigerian American author Chris Abani and Ghanaian American poet Kwame Dawes.

5 In contrast to most of the other poems in the volume, this one does not follow a verse structure with line breaks but is written in a much more conversational style in keeping with the prose-poem’s title.

6 Shire herself has described the origin points of the poem in an interview with The Guardian: according to the article by Bausells and Shearlaw she wrote it “after spending time with a group of young refugees who had fled troubled homelands including Somalia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan. The group gave a ‘warm’ welcome to Shire in their makeshift home at the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome, she explains, describing the conditions as cold and cramped. The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof. The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: ‘I wrote the poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way’.” (“Poets Speak Out for Refugees”)

7 Like the Somali-Italian author Cristina Ali Farah, Shire delineates Rome as one of the most important stations on the refugees’ way north or west. Similar to Shire, Farah, in her novel Little Mother, writes about refugees “arriving on those illegal boats. They land along the Sicilian coast, they are crammed into temporary reception centres. A few are allowed in for humanitarian reasons, they are released with very little money and no place to go. […] I don’t think one can write about the Somali community in Rome without starting from the Roma Termini train station, the crossroads, the scene of our longings” (25–26). Other contemporary authors who belong to the Somali diaspora in Italy are Ali Mumin Ahad, Sirad Hassan, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel and Igiaba Scego. (cf. Chambers and Curti 393)

8 As there is no definite version of “Home” available online, I am using a voice recording of Shire herself reading the poem, which is incorporated into a Youtube video, as my reference.

9 See not only the New York Times documentary cited at the outset of this article, but also the case of Lampedusa, in which on October 3, 2013 a reported 360 migrants drowned when their boat sailing from Libya sank and no help was provided – one of the many humanitarian cruelties committed by Europe. (cf. Leurs and Ponzanesi) In the words of Jenna Brager: “The oceans are full of bodies – the waters speak of the necropolitical creation of disposable classes that are subject to vanishing. The boundaries are made clear, between the privileged class of the human and its other. The ritual of body disposal, which prevents or makes ghosts, is at the foundation of political community. The Middle Passage, as global capitalism’s constitutive act, filled the waters with the ghosts that imbricate the civilization slavery built. The ocean is still where capitalism leaves its refuse, swirling gyres of trash and the sediment of corpses.” (“Bodies of Water”)

10 Continuing this line of argument, Chambers argues further that “inevitably, this leads to apprehending how this region [of the Mediterranean], however fuzzy its limits and definitions may be, is a composite locality that is simultaneously part of a wider world – today, in the epoch of globalization, just as it once was in the extensions of Alexander’s empire from Macedonia and Egypt to Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush or in the thirteenth-century world system overseen by Islam, which connected Spain and Sicily, via Cairo and Baghdad, to China, southern India and the Asiatic steppes.” (680–1)

11 “But Alhamdulilah all of this / is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen / men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his / manhood in my mouth.” (30–34)

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Jennifer Leetsch

Jennifer Leetsch, PhD, is a researcher at the department of English Literature and British Cultural Studies at Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg, Germany, where she works on the intersections of affect and space in contemporary diasporic women's writing and where she teaches seminars on migration, literary geography, and Black British prose and poetry. Her research interests include, amongst others: the interrelation of gender and disability, black autobiography, and feminist ecocriticism.