Read Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth Online
Authors: Warsan Shire
Tags: #Warsan, #Africa, #Poetry, #Shire, #migration, #Warsan Shire, #Somalia
his sobs as he held Italian linen between her legs.
His face is a photograph left out in the sun,
the henna of his beard, the silver of his eyebrows
the wilted handkerchief, the kufi and the cane.
Your grandfather is dying.
He begs you
Take me home yaqay,
I just want to see it one last time;
you don’t know how to tell him that it won’t be
anything like the way he left it.
My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want To Be Touched
My wife is a ship docking from war.
The doctor maps out her body in ink,
holding up her breast with two fingers, explains
what needs to be removed, that maybe we can keep
the nipple. Her body is a flooding home.
We are afraid. We want to know
what the water will take away from us,
what the earth will claim as its own.
I lick my lips and she looks at the floor.
Later, at home, she calls her sister.
They talk about curses, the evil eye, their aunt
who drowned, all the money they need
to send back. It is morning when she comes to bed
and lets me touch her. I am like a thirsty child
against her chest, her skin
is parchment, dry and cracking.
My wife sits on the hospital bed.
Gown and body together: 41 kilos.
She is a boat docking in from war,
her body, a burning village, a prison
with open gates. She won’t let me hold her
now, when she needs it most.
We stare at the small television in the corner of the room.
I think of all the images she must carry in her body,
how the memory hardens into a tumour.
Apathy is the same as war,
it all kills you,
she says.
Slow like cancer in the breast
or fast like a machete in the neck.
Ugly
Your daughter is ugly.
She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly.
As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.
She was splintered wood and sea water.
She reminded them of the war.
On her fifteenth birthday you taught her
how to tie her hair like rope
and smoke it over burning frankincense.
You made her gargle rosewater
and while she coughed, said
macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell
of lonely or empty
.
You are her mother.
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?
What man wants to lie down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?
Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things.
But God,
doesn’t she wear
the world well?
Tea With Our Grandmothers
The morning your habooba died
I thought of my ayeeyo, the woman
I was named after, Warsan Baraka,
skin dark like tamarind flesh,
who died grinding cardamom
waiting for her sons to come home and
raise the loneliness they’d left behind;
or my mother’s mother, Noura
with the honeyed laugh, who
broke cinnamon barks between
her palms, nursing her husband’s
stroke, her sister’s cancer and
her own bad back with broken
Swahili and stubborn Italian;
and Doris, the mother of your
English rose, named after
the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys
the Welsh in your blood, from the land
of Cymry, your grandmother who
dreams of clotted cream in her tea
through the swell of diabetes;
then your habooba Al-Sura,
God keep her, with three lines on
each cheek, a tally of surviving,
the woman who cooled your tea
pouring it like the weight of deeds
between bowl and cup, until the steam
would rise like a ghost.
In Love and In War
To my daughter I will say,
‘when the men come, set yourself on fire’.
Notes
Surah Al Baqarah
— A chapter in the Qu’ran, used to ward off evil.
Habooba
— Arabic word meaning beloved woman, used as the word for grandmother in Sudan.
Ayeeyo
— Somali word for Grandmother.
Macaanto
— Somali term of endearment, meaning sweetness.
Inna lillahi Wa inna ilaihi Rajioon
— Arabic; To Allah we belong and truly, to Him we shall return.
Baati
— Long cotton Somali nightdress.
Ounsi
— The somali tradition to burn frankincense and myrrh over hot coal, releasing aroma through smoke.
Istaqfurulah
— Arabic, Allah forgive my sins.
Yaqay
— Somali word used to emphasise emotion/urgency in speech.
Haram
— Legally forbidden by Islamic law.
Kufi
— A brimless short rounded cap worn mainly by African men.
Baraka
— Blessings
Alhamdulilah
— Praise be to Allah.
Table of Contents
What Your Mother Told You After Your Father Left
Things We Had Lost in the Summer