Momtaza Mehri is a poet who works across criticism, translation, education, radio, and anti-disciplinary research practices. She is a former Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University (Los Angeles). Her latest pamphlet, Doing the Most with the Least, was published by Goldsmiths Press.
Warsan Shire is a Somali-British writer and poet. Her debut, bestselling pamphlet, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, was published in 2011. In 2014, she was appointed as the first Young Poet Laureate for London, and the following year released Her Blue Body, a limited-edition pamphlet. Shire wrote the film adaptation and poetry for Lemonade, a visual album by Beyoncé. Her first full collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, came out this year, and is currently shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
The two poets talked about nineties London, parentification and diasporic inheritances.
Momtaza Mehri:
In many ways, you are a trailblazer. There was no framework in the British poetry establishment for someone like you. There is no established set of reference points for what you write about and for the Somali diaspora at large. We are a relatively young diaspora in the Anglophone world. Our affinity with poetry is flagrantly confident, and at odds with our material conditions as working class people, a group typically denied the right to call themselves poets, writers and thinkers. Literary tastemakers don’t know how to contend with the abundant poetic traditions that permeate so many aspects of Somali life and seep into the consciousness of even the poorest and least literate of us.
Your own work is so expansive in a way that defies the imaginative borders of an England determined to make us see ourselves in the same crushingly provincial ways it sees itself. As Somalis, we’re always thinking of our cousins in Stockholm, our cousins in Cairo. We’re always thinking of who we could have been in some other hair-split of fate. At our best, we think expansively because our scattering has forced us to. But we’re made to contort ourselves into legible boxes.
Warsan Shire:
Hair-split of fate, that’s perfect. All of life is just that. Please put some respect on Jacob Sam-La Rose and Nii Ayikwei Parkes. Without them, God knows. The day I met Jacob at a poetry workshop he was holding at my local youth centre in Northwest London, he asked everybody ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I wrote down ‘poet’. The heavens must’ve been open. I was invested in, mentored, cared for, nurtured, guided, advised, critiqued, edited, workshopped, loved and supported by some of the finest writers and poets. My gratitude is eternal. I am in reverence of those whose shoulders we are standing on: Bernardine Evaristo, Malika Booker, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Roger Robinson, Kadija Sesay, Kwame Dawes, Chris Abani, Dorothea Smartt, Dzifa Benson, Lemn Sissay, John Agard, Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay, Benjamin Zephaniah, Nick Makoha, Anthony Joseph, Linton Kwesi Johnson, to name a few, paved the way.
Mehri:
The communal reach of influence is so real. Though sometimes, I think we can flatten people not just through careless ignorance but also through our love for them. I see this in how your work is received even by its Somali readers. A readership’s uncritical adulation is sometimes the last thing a writer needs. It’s a kind of love without rigour. Yes, your poems are very Somali. Yes, they speak to a particular Black experience. But they’re also yours. They’re very Warsan. It’s a distinctive voice. I can relish in seeing myself, my upbringing, and my worlds refracted in your poems without disappearing you from your own work. How do you deal with so many people gravitating emotionally to your poetry?
Shire:
When Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth was published in 2011, by flipped eye (Nii Ayikwei Parkes). There was a bit of confusion – what is this? some implied, and even worse, what might it inspire?
Recently, I was back in London for my book tour [for Shire’s debut collection Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022)], and there were so many instances of people who had found my first chapbook in their local libraries when they were teens, and who were now working on their own books. That gives me chills. I remember being thirteen and taking the bus from one Brent library to another, searching for meaning, for distraction from the hopelessness sprawled out ahead of me. I found Edwidge Danticat, Bernardine Evaristo, Alice Walker, Anaïs Nin, Toni Morrison, Tananarive Due, Miranda July, Leone Ross. These books changed the trajectory of my life. Shout-out to Willesden Green Library where I would sit and read all the books I wished I could buy.
Mehri:
I used to be bemused when I saw the various responses to your work. It has always seemed to me that both professional and armchair critics disregarded the divergent, knotty influences which actually colour your work. In Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, for example, I see shades of André Breton and Marie Howe.
Shire:
I stumbled across Breton in art class at the all-girls high school I went to. I was terrible at drawing, so our teacher, a hijabi, let me rummage through what I now recognise was her own personal collection of art books and films on VHS. I was allowed to take one book and one video home and that’s how I came across Dali. The first piece of art I traced over was ‘The Persistence of Memory’ and the first short film I felt myself drawn to was Un Chien Andalou (1929).
Poetry isn’t new to the Somalia diaspora. The day I was born my grandmother wrote a poem for me. My mother still leaves couplets on the backs of receipts. We all have stories like these, those from the so-called ‘nation of poets’. I think they might be shook, babe. I think our work might be a threat to the white supremacist notion that not only are we inhuman, but illiterate and with exceedingly bad taste. Ultimately though, time will tell and the work will speak for itself.
Mehri:
Somali women stalk the long hallways of your poems. They are fractious and sacrificial, hurting and hurtful. They are both victims and victimisers. They nurture and they suffocate. Many of us will recognize the surveillance networks of aunties in your poem ‘Bless the Qumayo’, as well as the mothers feeding on the shame of their daughters in ‘Filial Cannibalism’. I feel like my entire life’s project as a Somali woman will be learning how to disentangle kinship from violence, how to differentiate between self-sufficiency and neglect, how to choose the kind of love that sustains the spirit and not that which diminishes it. We slip into martyrdom so easily, and it doesn’t necessarily make us better people. Has poetry helped you work through the difficult contradictions of community?
Shire:
I’ve always been obsessed with the secret lives of Somali women. The women and girls who raised me were bright, wild, full of life, bitter, cruel, supple, naive, deranged and hilariously unhinged, all in ways I still relate to. I was enchanted by their rituals, while also terrified of their triggers, neuroses and bouts of violence. I loved slipping into the cracks undetected, listening all night to their stories of scandal and sorrow until someone carried me to bed. In the same breath, I’m interrogating the family as a traumatising entity. Many of us have endured strange cruelty from loved ones, coerced by our culture(s) to keep quiet and move on. As James Baldwin said, ‘If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see’. War traumatises, patriarchy maims, religious abuse isolates, racism humiliates, poverty does what it does, and in the end, it’s always the children who pay.
I am drawn to disturbing cinema; the horror genre is my playground. I’m interested in human atrocity, depravity, taboo, cults, serial killers, and examining evil from a safe distance. Your work provides necessary respite, I’m soothed and calmed by your renderings.
Mehri:
I’m too cowardly to go into these woods. But somebody has to do it.
Shire:
As a child, I had inappropriate interests and would beg adults for stories about demonic infestations, cannibals, witches and exorcisms. I became preoccupied with death and the devil, hiding my curiosity behind religious virtue. Uncles and wayward older cousins shared the most horrific tales, I loved it.
Mehri:
You’re from Harlesden, I’m from Kilburn. We know those ends. Our ecosystem was a relentless pressure cooker. To paraphrase Jarvis Cocker, another poet, a lot of us weren’t raised up, we were dragged up. You get to a certain age and you see the consequences of that hidden crisis everywhere. It manifests in the women we know eventually buckling under decades of parentification and unendurable shame. In the men losing themselves in the streets. It’s our over-representation in prisons and psychiatric wards. In ‘one war giving birth to another / one war crawling out from between the / legs of another,’ as you write. Our diasporic condition is the changeling child of the war. The war itself is a tangible presence in your poems, one which sits under the nails, sleeps between us in bed, lathers our backs in the shower. It recoils across generations.
Shire:
I completely buckled under parentification. Raising my siblings as well as raising myself, all the while being berated for it. Then to be compared to your peers – to your age-mate, your fellow adultified, sleep deprived, emotionally unstable, possibly promiscuous daughter of so-and-so – who you were told was more beautiful, obedient, intelligent, pious, thinner than you. To invoke the poet Karlie Redd, it was all a lie. Meanwhile, the boys were let out to play, only to never be called back in, left to recover from their upbringings on their own, with no language for any of it but with so much fury and pain.
Mehri:
Hooyo, the mother, looms large in your debut collection. Saintly hooyo, hooyo full of grace, hooyo as a purveyor of psychological warfare. I’m thinking of the definitional tussling Tiphanie Yanique employs in her collection Wife, alongside your own deconstruction of a social role that is part category, part cage. The mother’s shadow is long, and it’s so easy to be trapped within its confines. Why did you turn your attention to this shadow?
Shire:
Tiphanie Yanique is brilliant. We were taught: after God, there’s Mother. The gates of heaven could be found beneath her feet. Although it would take me a long time to find the words for it, I felt maternal detachment early on. This maternal detachment is, of course, inexplicably linked to a mother’s unaddressed trauma. The mother is the poem, and I have mothered these poems. Poetry creates space for empathy and forgiveness, for the conversations we were otherwise unable to have. Were I to simply relegate the mother to sainthood, my mother wound would dictate the kind of person, mother, daughter, and lover I would be. Seeing hooyo as a full person has allowed me to honour her as a woman.
Mehri:
Alongside the detached mother, there is the overbearing mother who lives vicariously through her daughters. That kind of love can also be punitively debilitating. You have to scratch out a personhood from that. Recognising that even within one household, you experienced a specific version of your mother that may be alien to everyone else is also heartbreaking. As the firstborn daughter, I’m always reckoning with the fact that I got the best of my mother. That has been my biggest blessing and impediment.
Shire:
I have two boys. I’m weary of overcorrecting to the point of suffocation. I don’t want to pass on this low-level hum of constant anxiety that I live with. I just want to raise kind people.
Mehri:
Your poetry captures the heartbreaks and disappointments of the elders without letting them off the hook. I keep thinking of the poem ‘My Loneliness is Killing Me’, of men weeping with homesickness to the sounds of Hassan Aden Samatar. Of bus drivers on London’s streets who raped women during the war, in what seems like another life. You liken your writing process to an excavation of all that we have experienced in this great tale of science fiction otherwise known as diaspora. We don’t only inherit the stories we want. We get everything. How do you deal with the weight of people placing their stories in your hands?
Shire:
It started so young. Guests upon guests. These were the babysitters looking after us. I started eavesdropping on stories that were deeply inappropriate for children to hear. These women would forget that we were there. They had no filter. I was soaking it all up and realizing that I was fascinated with this shit. Hearing them open up among themselves about their experiences, who they saw around the corner the other day who had committed a terrible act back home, their tales of fleeing on foot from Somalia to the UK, people who had been raped so many times in so many countries on their journey that they were pregnant by the time they reached the UK. I remember hearing these stories as a young child and wondering when we were going to call the police. It was deeply frustrating to realise that there would be no justice, especially if these survivors were children, or women, or from less powerful tribes. I even began asking about the laws of blood money.
If I couldn’t write, I wanted to be a social worker or child psychologist. One of the earlier sessions I recorded was with an aunt who ended up in a male prison in Bulgaria. She casually shared stories of defending herself and hoarding sesame seeds. The uncle who walked through Russia, the scar on his leg apparently caused by a polar bear. That generation of Somali women workers subjugated in Italy by decrepit, elderly fascists. Those who became models and were broken down by that industry. Life is a movie, baby. All these sorrowful, vibrant lives I carry around in my head. These people were surprised that I was interested in their stories. Outside of the immigration officers who decide whether you’re worthy of life or not, I don’t think anyone had ever asked them about themselves. Ceeb, or ‘shame’, also silenced them. I wasn’t a threat or capable of holding their vulnerabilities over their heads. I didn’t have any real power in the community.
Mehri:
We come from women who embody unfathomable depths of resilience and tenacity. I remember being a pre-teen and watching those circulated VHS wedding tapes. My mother would point out that the people ululating and dancing onscreen had once fled towards the Kenyan border, leaving behind their grandmother who had fallen into quicksand. She had begged them to go on without her. I was transfixed by the scene of her descendants’ joy. In my youth, I couldn’t understand how they could ever dance again. But you have to keep dancing. I know that now.
Shire:
I find life more bearable when I’m exploring what terrifies us. I have survived so far by confronting it.
Mehri:
That’s an intense level of insight into the human condition acquired at such a young age. In various ways, I think that both prepared and destroyed us. Why do you think you have a high threshold for holding all this? Many would be left exhausted.
Shire:
For one thing, I lean on our humour. Top-tier, life-altering comedy. Remember the films Qabyo and Flight 13?
Mehri:
Hits that stick like grits! Humour is a thread we hang onto. It punctures through the fog of guilt. Speaking of transformation, your widely shared poem ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ was prompted by a life-changing trip to Italy.
Shire:
A young man had jumped from the roof of the Somali Embassy in Rome a few days before I had arrived. The Italian embassy was a dilapidated building where Somali and other African refugees stayed, and it had no running water, no electricity and no future in sight. I wrote the poem after spending the day there, feeling sick with guilt, powerlessness and rage. The poem’s meaning has been co-opted and has moved away from the original experience I wrote about.
Mehri:
I think there’s a marked difference in how your poetry has been taken up by various publics. Of course, there’s a real NGO-ification of your work at the hands of advocacy bodies who reduce it to its topicality. Beyond them, however, the centrality of the refugee in your poetics does so much more for so many. The nineties was a period of diasporas swelled by different ruptures, a time when many Somalis, Bosnians, Rwandans, Iraqis, and others were spat out into refugeehood. I have friends from differing backgrounds who have been so moved by your interrogative approach towards the inner lives of refugees. They constitute a whole other readership fraught with its own intimacies. An Iraqi friend of mine once described it in a way I’ll never forget: he said that he had seen what happens to people who love a land too much and was not prepared to repeat that mistake. To him, refugeehood was a doorway into major trust issues. In ‘Assimilation’, you write ‘We never unpacked, dreaming in the wrong language, carrying our mother’s fear in our feet . . . unable to excise the refugee from our hearts’. This profoundly diverges from the reductive child-of-immigrant woes which diasporic poetry is often riddled with. Frankly, the immigrant is an ambiguous spectre. Immigrants sometimes possess coveted work visas. They can be well-educated. They can arrive on a plane psychically and materially cushioned by their social positions as elites in their respective motherlands. The immigrant can want nothing to do with the refugee. The refugee suffers from corporeal excess. She is sensationalised in degradation, disease and death. Her inner life is dismissed as secondary to the political reality of her divisive presence. The refugee is denied a sense of humour, the right to be insolent, desirous, maladaptive and thankless – all those characteristics which make human beings so luminous. You refuse to deprive the refugee of these needs, and that means so much.
Shire:
Thank you for framing that for me. I’ve always had an affinity with refugeehood and the despised nature of the very term. Even other immigrants don’t want to be affiliated to that desperation. The refugee has been stripped of everything we cling to.
Mehri:
To me, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head captures the beautiful scrappiness of Londoners. Harlesden is invoked through clouds of uunsi. I read poems like ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ and know these women in leopard print dirac who laugh so hard they weep. They paint their hands with henna while singing along to Tracy Chapman. They rise to the dizzying task of becoming familiar with marmite, Paul Gascoigne and Patsy Stone’s blonde beehive. London is such an unforgiving place for them, but there’s a real tenderness to how you write about it. It lends me some perspective when I’m sifting through the detritus of my own hatred as I try to survive what it has become.
Shire:
London is my first love, specifically 90s to early 00s Harlesden. A time of being stuck at home all day inventing choreography, Spice Girls colliding with Björk beaming from the dodgy satellite box, Kelis screaming ‘I hate you so much right now’, Cilla Black, Notting Hill Carnival, school dinners and it’s raining, it’s pouring. Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Goosebumps, Eerie, Indiana, the sweet nostalgia of youth. The Chelsea football team visiting the children’s ward, pirate radio, spotting your crush at Wembley market, Nokia bricks, baby hairs, and More Fire Crew, Only Fools and Horses, Tracy Beaker, my first relaxer at Claudia’s hair salon in northwest London where she spoke beauty over me and helped strengthen my relationship to my hair, the wind chill, curry goat, Astroturf, the London skyline captured from the top of a Kilburn block of flats, Sam’s 2 for 2, the bendy 18 bus reflecting how sure we were of the future. We were young and everything was waiting for us.
Mehri:
Besides London, who and what are you thinking with right now? What’s moving you in unexpected directions?
Shire:
As a consequence of motherhood. I feel tougher, more patient, more loving, fearful, alert, anxious, emotional, exhausted. I can’t stay up writing until 4 a.m. like I would in the past. Instead I write in the morning, under a grapefruit tree, the natural world slowly edging into my writing, adding new textures. I’m loyal to what I love. I’ve been rereading Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer, one of my favourite story collections. Whenever I want to feel more alive or inspired I go to Terrance Hayes and Pascale Petit. More recently I’ve been working my way through New French Extremity. I always write to music, and this month Mach-Hommy has been on loop. Alice Smith is my constant writing companion. I try to watch at least one horror film every day. Last night I watched What Josiah Saw (2021), a slow burn southern gothic exploring family abuse, trauma and sin. It was right up my street.
