The poet Warsan Shire’s first collection, “Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head,” comes out in March. “These are anthems of resilience,” Shire said. “I just thought, ‘These are the songs for the refugee.’ ”
Shire’s father grew up in a family of nomadic herders, and became a political journalist in Mogadishu. Her mother, Shire told me, took care of the home. In the late eighties, her father was working on a book about political corruption, eventually published as “The Cost of Carnage,” when the government found out and threatened him with imprisonment. He and her mother left for Kenya, and had Shire there, in 1988; the family then moved to London, where her brother, Said, was born.
Eventually, the family got a spot in public housing. Shire’s mother often took in other Somali refugees, including friends, family members, and strangers, Shire told me. She even brought home a woman she met at a bus stop. Sometimes, Shire said, the experiences were “magical.” With one woman, she drank Italian coffee and painted her nails. But others took discipline too far, screaming at or hitting Shire and her brother.
At twelve, Shire read Chinua Achebe’s poem “Vultures,” which contains a passage about a Nazi officer giving his children candy, and was moved by the poem’s moral ambiguity. Soon she began writing poems of her own. When Shire was fifteen, she attended a poetry workshop at the Wembley Youth Center, near her house. She was surprised to find that the teacher, Jacob Sam-La Rose, a poet and an editor, was Black. “I was always just a mess, but he never, ever gave up on me,” Shire said.
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