![]() ![]() ![]() This essay has three sections, the first describing the contexts that Shire is writing against: paranoiac political rhetoric and media stereotypes. Through writing, art, and performance, these works reveal how the state prevents communities from caring for one another through state apparatuses and articulate instead a right to mutuality and caretaking. The border control and deportation centers that appear in poems like Shire's "Home" indicate larger structures of nation-building and surveillance. 4 The work of Warsan Shire, Diriye Osman, Ladan Osman, and Ifrah Mansour embody place-based transnationalism that resists stereotypical media and political representations of Somali refugees as invasive and dangerous, especially gendered clichés of Somali, Muslim men as inherently violent and Somali, Muslim women as universally oppressed. The advent of the twenty-first century has seen an outpouring of Somali Anglophone cultural production, emerging from Somalia's rich oral poetic traditions in concert with genres like the novel, short story, and visual arts. In this essay, I examine the work of twenty-first century Somali Anglophone writers and artists, analyzing how they confront the connected experiences of displacement, migration, and surveillance. 3 These two examples of circulation-US protests against anti-Muslim racism and visual albums by a Black American artist celebrating Black families, women, and history-illustrate how Shire's poetry resonates transnationally in its resistance to anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black racism. 2 Shire also gained international attention when pop star Beyoncé used her poetry in her visual albums, Lemonade and Black is King. Shire writes about exile in her poem, "Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)," lines of which made their way into her poem, "Home." One image that repeats itself in both poems is the transformation of home into a perilous space: "No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark." 1 These words became popular for signs and readings at protests across the United States after Trump announced the Muslim Ban in 2017. ![]() That instead of safe harbor, Somali refugees are received with hostility and suspicion is the subject of London-based, Somali poet Warsan Shire's most well-known works. Decades of civil war, drought, famine, and international shadow wars have forced millions of Somalis from their homes. ![]()
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