Home by Warsan Shire
I
No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only
run for the border when you see the whole city running as well. The
boy you went to school with, who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin
factory, is holding a gun bigger than his body. You only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
No one would leave home unless home chased you. It’s not
something you ever thought about doing, so when you did, you
carried the anthem under your breath, waiting until the airport toilet
to tear up the passport and swallow, each mournful mouthful making
it clear you would not be going back.
No one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than
the land. No one would choose days and nights in the stomach of a
truck, unless the miles travelled meant something more than journey.
No one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten until your
shadow leaves, raped, forced off the boat because you are darker,
drowned, sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied.
No one would choose to make a refugee camp home for a year
or two or ten, stripped and searched, finding prison everywhere. And
if you were to survive, greeted on the other side— Go home Blacks,
dirty refugees, sucking our country dry of milk, dark with their hands
out, smell strange, savage, look what they’ve done to their own
countries, what will they do to ours?
The insults are easier to swallow than finding your child’s body in
the rubble.
I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the
barrel of a gun. No one would leave home unless home chased you
to the shore. No one would leave home until home is a voice in your ear
saying— leave, run, now. I don’t know what I’ve become.
II
I don’t know where I’m going. Where I came from is disappearing. I am
unwelcome. My beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the
shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and
the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink
full of blood. The lines, forms, people at the desks, calling cards,
immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into
my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home.
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. All these men between my legs, a gun, a promise, a lie,
his name, his flag, his language, his manhood in my mouth.
This is one of the most visceral poems, and so painful, and yet a very necessary reality to be open to. “No one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than
the land.” As an immigrant myself, this punched me in the gut the first time I read this, and I thought of my mother’s mother who crossed a sea in a boat with losses I can barely know but I know them somewhere in my being, and I’m also so grateful for the parents who risked so much for me to leave their home. Warsan Shire wrote this Shire Home for her 2011 chapbook in her early twenties, drawing on her own family's history of displacement from Somalia and on her work with refugees in London. The poem became globally circulated during the 2015 European refugee crisis, when no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark was quoted on protest signs, vigils, and news coverage. This is also the most extraordinary testament to survival and what was traded for it.
