Published in 2011
37 pages
Warsan Shire is a 24 year old Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally — including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya — and her début book, teaching my mother how to give birth, was published in 2011. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology The Salt Book of Younger Poets (2011). She is the current poetry editor at Spook magazine. In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. She is a Complete Works II poet. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Warsan is also the unanimous winner of the 2013 Inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize.
What is this book about?
What elevates teaching my mother how to give birth, what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire’s ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam; reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times — as in Tayeb Salih’s work — and translating to the realm of lyric the work of the likes of Nawal El Saadawi. As Rumi said, “Love will find its way through all languages on its own”.
In teaching my mother how to give birth, Warsan’s debut, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly.
