Through a gendered lens: Figurations of loss, longing and loneliness in Warsan Shire's poetry

Abstract

Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali-British poet, writer, editor, and scholar whose mélange of allegiances and loyalties embosses the postmodern condition of both unbelonging and displacement, on the one hand, and an excess of belonging, on the other. But, more crucially, the multiplicity of subject positioning and a complex sense of identity which her unique situation represents supremely foreground the subject of transculturalism in the so-called “New Diaspora”. An apologue of women's empowerment and a storyteller of her war-ravaged Somali compatriots, Shire seizes upon poetry as an institutional site for the gendering of war and conflict with the corollaries of misogyny, rape, mutilation, killings and loss. What, ultimately, comes through in her poetry is the thematic figurations of loss, longing and loneliness, especially from the viewpoint of female war survivors now resident in the United Kingdom as refugees and migrants. this paper, therefore, among other things, examines and assesses the role of gender in the “post-mortem” poetic disquisition of the Somalia war, analyses the portrayal of women and girls under patriarchal or phallocratic regimes of meaning and evaluates the poet's treatment of the constitutive features of transnational identity and the immigrant experience in the United Kingdom.