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

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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. Warshan Shire is a young Kenyan-born Somali poet and this book is her debut published in 2011. Her poetry is beautiful, full of sourness, hurt but also of love. Many of the poems gives voice to the plight of Muslim women of different generations and to refugees/migrants forced to flee for different reasons. How about love? As a woman entering a relationship set yourself on fire in the same sense, do not become meek and docile: do not allow him to take over. This reading feels like one of the strongest. If you compare this to the ideas that are manifested in the spoken word poem For Women Who are Difficult to Love it becomes more evident. The ideas empower women and suggest that if you are volatile, if your personality is like that of a fire, do not quench yourself: carry on. Be yourself, he is not worthy if he cannot love you for you: keep that fire burning. New ideas and activities to involve your students in presenting and debating mindfully in English Lessons

PDF / EPUB File Name: Teaching_My_Mother_How_to_Give_Birth_-_Warsan_Shire.pdf, Teaching_My_Mother_How_to_Give_Birth_-_Warsan_Shire.epub 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”. The last stanza made my heart hurt. I know war and I know violence, but rejection - that's something I can't pretend to understand. My favourite poems are Things We Lost in the Summer, Birds, Ugly and Old Spice, but the greatest impact have the short pieces of prose labelled Conversations about Home (at the Deportation Center). Each piece reads like a protest, an outcry, like a way to give the thousands of immigrants and refugees a voice to tell their story. In our current political climate many people see refugees as a (terrorism) threat and refuse to give them a chance, but Shire's words cut so deep that you can’t turn a deaf ear to them. It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.”

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beautiful poems about pain, war, the body, family, and love. i really enjoyed "grandfather's hands," though perhaps it's odd to like to think about grandparents touching. it's tender, this legacy of love and of loss. Poet, activist, editor and teacher, Warsan Shire is a spoken-word artist whose poetry, usually performed publicly, connects gender, war, sex and cultural assumptions, giving a voice to the displaced and acting as a healing agent for the trauma of exile and suffering. Her best known poem, Home, has touched a nerve among people and helped understanding of the refugee crisis.

Poetry is difficult, almost impossible to review. It's actually tempting to not review this collection of poems, to not rate it. This book is amazing. Warsan Shires work is amazing, and some of her poems in this book made me tear up and wonder at how we all have ths same words, but only a special group of people can craft and place them so beautifully that the truth and emotions of them make you ache. 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.

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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. Home itself becomes the speaking voice in st. 8, telling its people to “ leave, run away from me now” because it is no longer the place they grew up in, the land they belong to. The conclusion is a bitter one: “I dont know what I've become but i know that anywhere is safer than here”. Did you tell people that songs weren’t the same as a warm body or a soft mouth? Miriam, I’ve heard people using your songs as prayer, begging god in falsetto. You were a city exiled from skin, your mouth a burning church.”