Her poetry evokes longing for home, a place to call home, and is often nostalgic for memories not her own, but for those of her parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, people who forged her idea of her ancestral homeland through their own stories. The New Yorker wrote about her last month: “ The Writing Life of a Young, Prolific Poet.” Shire was something of a phenomenon well before this poem became famous, though. The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: “I wrote the poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way.” The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof. The group gave a “warm” welcome to Shire in their makeshift home at the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome, she explains, describing the conditions as cold and cramped. The young Nairobi-born, London-raised writer first drafted another poem about the refugee experience, Conversations about home (at a deportation centre), in 2009 after spending time with a group of young refugees who had fled troubled homelands including Somalia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan. Explaining, in short verses, the unthinkable choices refugees must take, Shire writes: “no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.” You only run for the border / when you see the whole city / running as well.” This evocative stanza from poet Warsan Shire’s Home hit a nerve online recently as the European public finally woke up to the reality of the refugee crisis. “No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark. An article in The Guardian provided some background: With the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, the poem has received a great deal of attention online and in the press. The music is by Renato Folgado, with the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire reading her poem “Home” in the soundtrack. This is Home is the barrel of the gun by Dutch filmmaker Paultje Piraat.
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