HOME WARSAN SHIRE PDF FULL

Ich muss das schon so sagen, die Heimat hat mich ausgespuckt, die Stromausfälle, Ausgangssperren wie eine Zunge, die an lose Zähne stößt. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second and the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. I hear them say, go home, I hear them say, fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.

The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the 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.

HOME WARSAN SHIRE PDF FULL

I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck, I did not come out the same. I’m the colour of hot sun on my face, my mother’s remains were never buried. Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with brown bodies broken and desperate. I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running and running. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I wouldn’t have put my children on the boat unless I thought the sea was safer than the land. They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies shot in the face for trying to enter, the Gulf of Aden bloated with immigrant bodies. I’m bloated with language I can't afford to forget. Allah Ceebta, I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language.

No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.

God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth.

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