“‘Everything in this new world, a wound’: hospitality and violence in Jamila Osman’s poetry.”

Abstract

There is a new generation of Somali poets in the United States and Europe, mainly women, writing about home, war, migration, and diaspora. This paper examines the Somali American poet Jamila Osman’s critiques of hospitality and sexual violence against women. The aim of this article is twofold: I first examine Osman’s poetic representation of hospitality, dramatized by an encounter between a Canadian border official and a female African refugee at the airport. In exploring the intersections of home, migration, and borders in Osman’s poetry, I draw insights from Jacques Derrida’s and Mireille Rosello’s discussions of hospitality and the immigrant. I then analyze Osman’s portrayal of sexual violence against female refugees: violence at the border, violence in the nation, and violence at home. Although Osman demonstrates that sexual violence silences women and undermines their selfhood in their new countries, underlining the transborder character of violence, she highlights women’s capacity to reclaim their voices and reassert their sovereignty within the domestic and communal spaces.

Keywords:

• Somalia
• Jamila Osman
• refugees
• hospitality
• sexual violence

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Lahoucine Ouzgane, Chielozona Eze, and the anonymous reviewers of JALA for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Warsan Shire is the most popular Somali poet. In October 2013, she became the first young Poet Laureate of London. In 2016, she was featured in Beyonce’s Lemonade album. Her poem “Home” has been extensively referenced in conversations on refugees and migration and widely examined. See Bridget Grogan, “Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy” (2020), Kevin Potter, “Centrifugal Force and the Mouth of a Shark” (2019), Jennifer Leetsch, “Ocean Imaginaries in Warsan Shire’s Afro-Diasporic Poetry” (2019), among others

2 Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani are the editors of the African Poetry Book Series, managed by the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) of which they are also board directors. The APBF was founded in 2012. This series, one of the several Pan-African projects of the APBF, which aims mainly to platform emerging African poets who still need to publish a full-length collection, produces the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box sets and has published at least eight box sets or more. 

3 See entries on Jane Freedman’s extensive scholarship on gender-based violence against African and racialized female migrants and refugees in Europe (2022; 2016; 2012). See also Elsa Tyszler’s research on African female migrants and refugees along the Morocco-Spain border.

4 In her talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie critiques reductive narratives that homogenize people as a stereotype, effacing their complexities and histories. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/cin

5 In “The Emergence of a Somali State: Building Peace from Civil War in Somaliland,” Michael Walls writes that there have been sixteen major, externally funded peace conferences for Somalia, which have mostly achieved nothing.

6 I have argued that “Borders delimit relations mainly around access and identity” (qtd. in Pulé and Hultman 467). See my chapter on “The Eco(Centric) Border Man: Masculinities and the Nonhuman in Jim Lynch’s Border Songs.” (Umezurike 2021).

7 Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014) discusses the affective power of nationalist rhetoric directed at immigrants and foreigners. Ahmed contends that “Such narratives work by generating a subject that is endangered by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject. The presence of this other is imagined as a threat to the object of love” (43).

8 Helga Tawil-Souri describes the Qaladiya checkpoint as a “nonplace,” which is “involved in making Palestinians mobile yet immobilized, connecting places and people to each other, while distancing those that are not connected” (5).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty of Arts, University of Calgary.

Notes on contributors

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is an assistant professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Canada, and the 2021 winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literary Criticism. His teaching and research interests include African and African Diaspora literatures, postcolonial literatures, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, and creative writing. His critical works have been published in journals such as Metacritic, Men and Masculinities, Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Text, amongst others. An award-winning creative writer, Umezurike is the author of literary works such as there’s more (2023), Double Wahala, Double Trouble (2021), Wish Maker (2021), and a co-editor of Wreaths for a Wayfarer (2020).