Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (Mouthmark): 10

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This was cutting. From the title, I think it's fair to say that one knows what to expect from this poem. In this, the speaker's voice is cold, calm and resigned, but underneath that you can detect the anger. Anger at their misfortune. Anger at being run out of their homeland because of something so globally stripping as violence and war. Most of all, they're angry at being turned into a refugee - a symbol of superfluity.

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 pamphlet, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly. Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer who is based in London. Born in 1988, she is an artist and activist who uses her work to document narratives of journey and trauma. Warsan has read her work internationally, including recent readings in South Africa, Italy and Germany, and her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire – eBook Details In the poem "Ugly", she speaks to a mother (maybe her mother?) who has a daughter who is considered ugly because she "reminded them of war." In the poem, Warsan reprimands the mother: You are her mother. My god, Warsan Shire writes beautiful poetry! And I mean it when I say that. This is beautiful poetry. Brutally beautiful.Through Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth the empowerment of women becomes like a burning tempest kindled up by the rawness of Warsan Shire’s words. The poems are also about reality, the horrors that some people have to face in a word driven by war. They carry with them such human depth, none more so than the poem In Love and In War. Here you can think of all the hurtful names you can call cancer, and it wouldn't stop killing. It wouldn't stop taking.

Shire speaks in here not only of girls that lost their virginity and lied about it, or that were forced into female genital mutilation, but that were raped and violated, and deemed unworthy just the same. These are their tales, and they all have value, and there is always something to learn, something to understand. After stating that “ no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” from which you run only “when you see the whole city running as well” (st. 1) the speaker describes how dramatically home has changed: it has become unrecognisable ( the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body), so dangerous that it “won’t let you stay” (st. 2). One of my favorite poems in this collection is called "Beauty". In it, Warsan describes how her older sisters "soaps between her legs" and "stole / the neighbour's husband, burnt his name into her skin." She recounts her sister's "shameful" behaviour, since her sister loves sex and finding pleasure where it offers itself to her. I like the poem because it feels so real. I can imagine Warsan's relationship to her sister. I see the two of them in their flat when reading this poem. I know how Warsan must've felt as a younger sister. Excited, confused, envious, judgmental. It's 4 a.m. and she winks at me, bending over the sink, Book Genre: 21st Century, Adult, Africa, Contemporary, Cultural, Eastern Africa, Feminism, Literature, Nonfiction, Poetry, Race, Somalia, Womens The daily calls with my mother are lengthening these days. I reveal a bit about my heart and mind each other day and it is a shaking shallow pool. Sometimes I jump in and hit the ground, sometimes the swim feels like a baptism into loving and understanding my mother more as a woman than a mother. I am working through the peeling off the anxiety that metastasized from the experience and porosing through her trauma. My only wish is that when I can afford it, we can speak to a therapist and detangle the maternal dysfunctional lineage patterns as a progeny.There, in 1980, she would drop the children to her mother and go off to Pretoria, the capital city of Racism. There, she became a maid whose knees grew callous from scrubbing their floors and whose belly would grumble from spending hours cooking in hotels and households owned by white racists who would pay her with three slices of bread and orange squash. None of her children knew the taste of her breast milk. It rarely got physical, but the emotional wounds grew gangrenous as years went by especially because every part of my body got sensitive to the words and behaviour. I stopped attempting to confide in her. The sense of being unable to trust the woman whose body formed me added to my depression. I felt mentally displaced, as if I was navigating the world without a GPS.

The summer my cousins return from Nairobi, we sit in a circle by the oak tree in my aunt’s garden. They look older. Amel’s hardened nipples push through the paisley of her blouse, minarets calling men to worship.” What we never see, however, is how it makes some people’s minds fidget and hearts sink, including my own. For me, Mother’s Day is revisiting the five stages of emotional distress, yearning yet mourning the perfect mother-daughter relationship that never was. The poetry I read is a bit of a mixed bag. I have collections by Rabbie Burns, Edgar Allen Poe, Banjo Patterson and e.e.cummings. I like what I like but there is poetry which I know is great that really doesn't do anything for me...Allen Ginsberg for example.Un approfondimento e uno spaccato sul tema dei diritti civili, nelle parole di una giovane poetessa somalo-britannica. New ideas and activities to involve your students in presenting and debating mindfully in English Lessons