Warsan Shire: Activism Through Words

Many writers have a process. They sit and plan out their words and then put them on paper. Others just sit down and write. Whatever comes up is written or typed but somehow, it works. Warsan Shire is the latter. A quick Google search gives a potential reader access to scores of poems and prose. A biography is hard to come by but to tell the truth, it isn’t needed.

Shire lets her work do the talking. Born in Somalia in 1988, Shire was initially inspired to write in a very unconventional way. “My early writings were …erotica (laughs) when I was like 12,” she told Hornlight, a blog. “Everyone says her name in a different way but…Anais Nin, I started reading her quite early on so my first venture into writing was erotica. I loved Judy Blume. I don’t know if she was inspiration.”

Shire has a pretty interesting life. She has been an immigrant and a refugee and she is a child of divorced parents. Love is a persistent theme in her work and her parents’ breakup and its effect on her is another unlikely source of inspiration. “For a long while, I was obsessed about the breakdown of my parents’ marriage. Because I admired both of them so much separately, I couldn’t understand or make sense of how it couldn’t work,” she admitted. “And as I grew up, the more I learned and the more I realized that sometimes it just doesn’t work out. The more I saw them as human beings and as people who have feelings and have memories, secrets and all the rest of it, I definitely made peace with it.  I learned what I want from what I don’t want.”

Although Shire is a lover at heart, she also uses her writing for a bigger cause. She considers herself an “artistic activist” and often uses her words to promote consciousness. Her home country of Somalia has been plagued with famine and she uses her words to bring awareness to that plight. She also likes to promote a message of hope and optimism about the future of her country. “I think the Horn of Africa needs love! If the world had more love…I know I sound like a hippie…but if we had more love then we’d have less problems,” Shire mused. “I just look at it like, a lack of love makes people stagnant and its stunts emotional growth. So it breeds people that are capable of the horrors that we see taking place every day.”

One of her more poignant works is a piece of prose simply called “the water.” In it, she expresses her frustration for what is happening in Somalia and although it is a release of emotion, it educates the reader. “I’ve been angry for a while. Some days I try to write it down. Things like ‘I’m bloated with salt water’ or ‘there is a sink in the middle of my chest and it’s flooding.’ 11 million people in the horn of Africa are thirsty. And hungry. And dying. 11 million people,” she writes. “ I chew on the insides of my cheeks until I draw blood. The spit in my own mouth humiliates me. There has not been a drought like this in 60 years.”

In addition to hurting for her country, she describes the ignorance and discrimination her family has experienced as immigrants in the United Kingdom. “A few weeks ago a tipsy guy leaned into me after a reading and asked ‘so where are you from?’. When I tell him, he says ‘you know, of all the Africans to be in the UK, that one is the worst’,” she continued.

“An eight year old boy at school calls my six year old sister a ‘smelly Somali bastard’. She comes home crying. I taste copper in my mouth. Press my face into her hair, she is a small beautiful thing with curls down to her waist.”

Although these words are an eye opener,  there are so many other words written by Shire that are just as poignant and stunning. A simple Google search will give a potential reader access to thousands of those words. In a world where so many art forms, including writing, lack passion and become commercialized, Warsan Shire proves people with inarguable talent still exist.

–Ashleigh Atwell