A review of Warsan Shire’s TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH

Have you heard of Beyonce? Her megahit, Lemonade? If so, then you may have noticed credits to British-Somali poet Warsan Shire. Shire came to Beyonce’s attention partially through her 2011 chapbook, teaching my mother how to give birth. While some of the themes overlap with the Beyonce album, especially a focus on the Black female body, this book finds that body in war zones where women grapple with sexual violence and sexual control.

In the worlds Shire brings us, war is a given. It’s not the subject of the sentence; it’s the basic context for everything. In “Your Mother’s First Kiss,” we hear “The first boy to kiss your mother later raped women / when the war broke out” (8). We barely get to consider sexual innocence before war enters; sex transforms into sexual assault. In “My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want To Be Touched,” a husband tells us “My wife is a ship docking from war” (30). She has left the war zone, but the war has not left her body, creating a barrier to intimacy. That theme of war in your body gets a different perspective in “Ugly” where the mother of a girl from a war zone says:

What man wants to lie down

and watch the world burn

in his bedroom?

Your daughter’s face is a small riot

a refugee camp behind each ear,

a body littered with ugly things.

But God,

doesn’t she wear

the world well? (31-32)

Unlike the speaker who wants to be close to his wife and war blocks him, this speaker believes war will make her daughter too ugly to be wanted by any man. War has transformed her into “a body littered with ugly things.” I appreciate how the last stanza is a moment of resilience and pride. If she has to wear the world, she can wear it well.

In this world suffused with war, sexual violence appears again and again. In “Conversations about Home,” a powerful multi-sectioned poem set in a deportation center, a speaker says, “these countries are like uncles who touch you when you’re young and asleep” (25). The incredible betrayal and helplessness made even worse with the matter-of-fact delivery. Shire uses a cool tone for hot topics like an actor holding back the tears, letting the audience feel the anger and grief in their bodies.

The sexual violence was hard to read, but not a shock. What was a surprise was the sexual control these speakers have. In “Birds,” “Sofia used pigeon blood on her wedding night” (14) to fake virginity. She mocks her husband who has no idea she is the one who has flown away. We learn recipes for getting your husband back if he has strayed. In “Fire,” told from the perspective of an abusive husband, we hear of him being left despite her mother saying, “Your father hit me all the time / but I never left him” (17). The familial and societal pressure might be to give up your sexual control, but this woman does not. The speaker then goes on to relate a childhood memory of a man burned to death because he betrayed his wife:

The wife, waiting for her husband to come home,

doused herself in lighter fluid. On his arrival

she jumped on him, wrapping her legs around

his torso. The husband, surprised at her sudden urge,

carried his wife to the bedroom, where

she straddled him on their bed, held his face

against her chest and lit a match. (18)

The wife overpowers him because he reads her actions as sexual desire. By putting this story in a child’s memory, we don’t just learn that women can fight back and do, but that stories (like the ones in these poems) can change us. The speaker never directly says “I was wrong. I am guilty.” Shire is too subtle for that, but the speaker does meet a man in the elevator who says, “Last night in bed I swear I thought / my body was on fire” (19). In “Birds” a character secretly subverts her husband. In “Fire,” he burns, and he knows why.

Early in the book the speaker is born as the result of a rape, later as the result of a secret wedding. I’m embarrassed to admit that on a first reading I thought, how could they both be true? I kept trying to see this book as one narrative. It is not. It is many personas, many voices, finally getting a chance to be heard.

teaching my mother how to give birth is available from Flipped Eye Publishing. Shire’s most recent book, Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her Head, was released by Penguin Random House in 2022.