2023-06-12 09:30:00
Every week, a look at the poetic news. Find all the articles of this meeting ici.
To open the first collection of Warsan Shire is to be rocked by arms made of shards of glass. Translated by Sika Fakambi, who is not at her first attempt with the work of the British-Somali author (she translated in 2017 Where I teach my mother to give birth), the book requires a time of silence after reading: impossible to talk about it, you have to welcome it in all its contrasts, without rushing. It is perhaps through this impression of contrast that one first enters the poems. Warsan Shire recounts the exile (“No one leaves home unless home is a shark’s mouth“), tells his parents, sexuality and nubility, memory, complicity and violence, deep loneliness: diversity of subjects, plurality in the approach. Contrast, again, of language and references, where Somali mixes with English, with pop culture (“My loneliness is killing meand we have Britney in mind), to literature and Islam with repetition, comforting as a mantra, blessings to all around him, and frequent appeals to God.
To mitigate the dizziness caused by the harshness of the subjects, Warsan Shire deploys all her aesthetic intuitions in her poems: she sometimes draws her inspiration from the photo, as from the poem Photographs by Hooyo (“mother” in Somali). From this initial inspiration is born a gesture: her eye seizes the details which she transforms into salient, strong images, which imprint themselves immediately in the minds of readers (“[…] her mole / above the lip“). His poetry mobilizes us even in our most intimate senses, it solicits our nose. To browse the collection, we will make do with “rose lotion” and a “sweet guava breath» in heart notes, of «spices(incense) in the base notes.
“A shrill cry”
But between beauty and violence there is an immeasurable need for reunion. The loneliness she recounts is in fact plural: the poetess assembles intimate elements of her life with the stories of others, she unites experiences. Warsan Shire carries in its voice all the voices of those we do not hear or no longer hear, carries the dead, the victims, the unsaid troubles, the secrets and the unspoken. The verses are places where the past constantly surfaces, clothed in magical realism. A dead child haunts his mother (how not to remember Beloved by Toni Morrison?) in Blessed be the ghost : «In the shower, he soaps her back / sometimes he hugs her / from behind, pressing / with all his weight on her» ; a ball of hair, residue of trichotillomania, comes to life in the eponymous poem: “When she sat up she had the pitch of a shrill scream“. Everything is a trace, metaphorical or real, of a passage from one world to another which could not be done entirely, of a partial transition: through its interweavings and this porosity, Warsan Shire recounts the impossible mourning of his exile.
Warsan Shire, Blessed is this child that a voice in her head has raised, translated from English (UK) by Sika Fakambi. Globe Editions, 208 pp., €19
The extract
Gold in the boys mouth
The girls look out the window at the boys
who ride BMX as if God
in person propelled them with a flick.
A front wheel rises in salute.
Rage ferments like camel’s milk,
rage appears like mist. Girls
lean out of the windows with their chests protruding, and look
the boys show off their gold teeth, their shine
24 carats. Beni be gold in the mouth of the boys.
Blessed be their dilated eyes.
Blessed be their naked torsos, which smell of the outside.
Blessed be the inner sweetness of boys, this darkness
of stretching velvet,
then dissipates into smoke.
#Warsan #Shire #plural #loneliness #Liberation