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. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home.
#HOME WARSAN SHIRE POEM FACEBOOK FULL#
I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here.
Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck, I did not come out the same. I’m the colour of hot sun on my face, my mother’s remains were never buried. Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with brown bodies broken and desperate. I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running and running. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I wouldn’t have put my children on the boat unless I thought the sea was safer than the land. They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies shot in the face for trying to enter, the Gulf of Aden bloated with immigrant bodies. I’m bloated with language I can't afford to forget. Allah Ceebta, I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home until home is a damp voice in your ear saying leave, run now, i don't know what i've become.Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home tells you to leave what you could not behind, even if it was human.
The dirty looks in the street softer than a limb torn off, the indignity of everyday life more tender than fourteen men who look like your father, between your legs, insults easier to swallow than rubble, than your child's body in pieces - for now, forget about pride your survival is more important. No one would choose to crawl under fences, be beaten until your shadow leaves you, raped, then drowned, forced to the bottom of the boat because you are darker, be sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, be pitied, lose your name, lose your family, make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten, stripped and searched, find prison everywhere and if you survive and you are greeted on the other side with go home blacks, refugees dirty immigrants, asylum seekers sucking our country dry of milk, dark, with their hands out smell strange, savage - look what they've done to their own countries, what will they do to ours? Who would choose to spend days and nights in the stomach of a truck unless the miles travelled meant something more than journey. Migrants hang onto flotation tubes in the sea after jumping from an overloaded wooden boat during a rescue operation 16 kilometres off the coast of Libya.
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