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Warsan Shire, "Home"
100
Transcript
Warsan Shire, "Home"
"Home" Recited
The Poem
Poem Overview
"Home" Summary
- The speaker discusses the circumstances under which someone would leave their homeland, especially when the act of leaving is itself dangerous.
- The speaker asserts that no one would leave their home unless "home" was the most violent place you could be; unless everywhere else is safer than home.
- The speaker attempts to give insight into the refugee and migrant experience by explaining that risking life, safety, and freedom elsewhere is the only option.
- The speaker especially dwells on family, motherhood, and the perspectives of migrant and refugee women.
Literary Devices
- Personification: the abstract concept of "home" becomes personified when Shire describes it as something aggressive, threatening, and actively in pursuit of those it houses.
- Metaphor: Shire compares "home" to several other things and actions--a shark, a raging fire, a burning blade, a gun, a desperate voice.
- Symbolism and imagery: Shire's poem is rife with symbols and imagery of violence--shark attack, guns, fire, blood, etc. There is also imagery of movement and journey (running, airport, boat, trains, trucks, etc.).
- Point of view: Shire uses second-person perspective (you, your, yours) to put the reader in the position of the one being chased, driven out, and assaulted. This achieves her goal of giving a glimpse of the migrant experience to people who don't understand it.
"Home" and Brah's Diaspora
Diaspora
- Location and dislocation: Shire focuses on the location of "home" but describes it as something that is itself dislocating because of its violence and uninhabitable nature. In this way, Shire flips the typical idea of "home" on its head.
- Placement and displacement: Shire repeats the phrase "No one leaves home unless..." to illustrate that the process of placement in the diasporic experience is a result of forced displacement. She directly connects the act of leaving with the act of being forced out.
- Diaspora space: Shire alludes to the racism, bigotry, and xenophobia that migrants and refugees often experience in their new "homes", which highlights the conflicting boundaries, cultures, and identities of a diaspora space where "natives" and "diasporians" both live.
Shire & Brah: Where is "Home"?
IN BRIEF
- We can see the connection between Shire's poem and Brah's ideas of diaspora and diaspora space in the way Shire depicts home as something terrifying, something that pushes out its inhabitants, and something to which its inhabitants cannot return.
- Shire, however, also depicts the future location of "home" as also inhospitable in the way it treats migrants and refugees. This aligns with Brah's idea that in the diasporic experience, migrants are suspended between two competing ideas of "home" and they don't seem to fully belong to either one.
- Shire's use of second-person perspective aims to draw the reader into the experience of the speaker. We can view this as Shire using language to draw us as readers into the diaspora space and diasporic experience that she describes.
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