‘Conversations about home (at a deportation centre)’
— Nix Thérèse
Warsan Shire is one of the best voices re: topics of immigration & diaspora, hands down. Her liquid, prose-like poems draw you into specific and timely realities, only to quickly turn a corner into gut-wrenching imagery that sticks with you long after you’ve finished. As the speaker here ruminates on the shame that always follows them, they highlight a pivotal moment in their immigration journey: “I tore up and ate my own passport in the airport hotel. I am bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.” This image is so striking, especially when you consider that having a Somali passport only grants you access to thirty countries/territories, so it was likely not stamp-filled. After the speaker devours many things that identify you as a person—name, gender, nationality, birth date, place of birth—I imagine them almost instantly becoming sick with the weight of it, their body unused to a swath of colored papers and ink. They later imply that they’ve become a living passport, by answering “can’t you see it on my body?” when officials ask how they arrived. They’ve now made themself harder to decipher or track, but the emotional cost of having to eviscerate yourself is steep. When they turn to others who have “the memory of ash on their faces,” I just hold my heart because the dirt has physically been scrubbed away but still lingers.
Ironically, the deportation centre is one of the clearer locales that the speaker gives us, given that they’ve spent a good portion of time un-situated: “I spent days and nights in the stomach of a truck… Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.” Constantly being caught in a liminal space for days, probably weeks on end, feels torturous. When the only consistency your body feels is motion, how can you react normally once there's finally a stop or a rest? Even a pause doesn't mean freedom; rather, you take in more detail of the space in which you’re enclosed until you know it intimately. Sometimes the rest is the more relentless of violence because you know the latch won’t open for you. The liminal space leaves so much room for dissociation that this speaker must have floated outside their body multiple times in response. The comedown for me usually feels like being dropped off the edge of a cliff, so imagine being skinned only to be put back in the same shell til you continually empty inside.
But we’re soon drawn back into the liminal space by watching the world play out across a screen: “I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink of blood.” I felt this so viscerally because I often unconsciously find myself biting my tongue til it bleeds if the news is too overwhelming. It’s so easy to unwittingly silence yourself until your body pushes back against the pressure of your dissociation and reminds you that it exists and can be hurt. While the mouth is currently a sink, I don’t feel the drain is open. Rather, I see the blood bubbling to the brim with nowhere left to go once it's birthed. In these relentlessly honest moments, we recognize just how much trauma an immigrant goes through just to exist, to have a name, to become the living passport that everyone keeps checking for stamps.