Jennifer Leetsch

Oceanic Refugee Imaginaries in Warsan Shire's Poetry 

The Somali-British poet Warsan Shire writes from and through positions on the East African coast, from where she unsettles by-now traditional imaginaries of the Atlantic waters of the Middle Passage. While these still function as an important historical and cultural backdrop for contemporary Afro-diasporic writing, in Shire’s poems they are transposed by the aquatic universe of the Indian Ocean with its different regional shores and multi-directional waterways. Turning away from the overarching specter of the African-American, Caribbean and African-British Atlantic diaspora of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and moving to another watery space of contact, as the Shire does, means to explore the complexities of African migranthood even further than has hitherto been done. By mapping diasporic movements from the postcolony into the world from a different vantage point and with differently interwoven nodes of contact, Shire’s work pluralizes simple East-West or South-North relations. In her work, the ocean emerges as a troubled, but enabling site of multiple exchanges and becomes a deeply connective, effective space that in its watery fluidity diffracts simple categorization.

Without ever negating the sea as space of violent rupture, Shire’s poetry imbues it with alternative meanings – invested with possibilities and potential, if fraught, futures. As my analysis of especially female experiences of flight and refuge, of resistance to the trauma of seeking refuge, and of rewriting and re-signifying refugee trajectories will show, Shire’s poetry constitutes the ocean not only as a deathly space but as generative as it offers up the possibilities of passage and movement, however violent and dangerous they may be. In this talk, I will outline how Shire's poems, which trace the itineraries of their Somali characters across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, shed light on the reparative potential of water, and with their focus on relationality and affect privilege “a politics of coalition-building, solidarity and resistance among groups connected by historical and contemporary experiences of confinement and terror at sea” (Perera 2013, 55). Through intimate corporeal acts, through tentative connectivity and through affiliation networks, Shire’s female voices re-configure the ocean space through their oceanic imaginaries.