Many members of Shire’s extended family are refugees of a war that began in 1991 and continues to rage. “Alhamdulillah, all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, a truckload of men who look like my father-pulling out my teeth and nails.” In the less politically serviceable prose of the final section, the speaker thanks God for saving her from war, despite the humiliations and abuse of life in exile. Shire tells a similarly excruciating tale of one woman’s violated body carrying the pain of collective violation in “Home,” the poem that brought her international attention when the New York Times editorial board, a British parliamentarian, and actor Benedict Cumberbatch all quoted it to highlight the worldwide plight of refugees. The shocking opening line of “Your Mother’s First Kiss” marks a child rapist as a symbolic perpetrator of violence against all women in the Somali conflict: “The first boy to kiss your mother later raped women / when the war broke out.” In the gauzy horror that unfolds, years after a rape initially masquerading as a kiss, mother and daughter sight the man driving a public bus and together realize by facial resemblance that he is the girl’s father. Maladaptive daydreaming, / obsessive, dissociative.” Her poems often read like lineated dream diaries or urgent whispers to a silent confidante.īut one individual woman’s wounded self also bears the injuries of women collectively, as well as those of the Somali community that endures ongoing civil war. She opens the volume transparently with “Extreme Girlhood,” declaring her troubled mental state to the divine and to us. Via the body, she wrenches us into sensuous and traumatic narratives that express hunger for love, rage at violation, the turmoil of illness, and an exquisite wish for restoration.Īs she has in her earlier chapbooks, from which this collection often draws, Shire flows organically between confessional poet and documentarian. While the thirty-three-year-old Somali British poet listens attentively to her inner voice and those of the Somali refugees she often portrays, she works most deeply through a language of body.
Ultimately, the title becomes a prayer to the voice of poetry itself, affirming that spoken word, like a mother’s love, might rescue us. We hear the inner voice of mental illness hovering, but also an empowering spiritual presence speaking.
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head suggests both the mature woman fierce enough to spiritually conceive herself and the vulnerable girl surviving a mother’s abandonment. Inside the title of her debut poetry collection, out this past March, Warsan Shire nests slivers of multiple poetic obsessions.
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