Poets speak out for refugees: 'No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark'

“No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border / when you see the whole city / running as well.” This evocative stanza from poet Warsan Shire’s Home hit a nerve online recently as the European public finally woke up to the reality of the refugee crisis. Explaining, in short verses, the unthinkable choices refugees must take, Shire writes: “no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.”

The young Nairobi-born, London-raised writer first drafted another poem about the refugee experience, Conversations about home (at a deportation centre), in 2009 after spending time with a group of young refugees who had fled troubled homelands including Somalia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan. The group gave a “warm” welcome to Shire in their makeshift home at the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome, she explains, describing the conditions as cold and cramped. The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof. The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: “I wrote the poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way.”

There are a few versions of Home “floating around the strange streets of the internet,” says Shire. The Green Party’s Caroline Lucas was among the political figures who tweeted it, and the poem has been included in the video of a charity single fronted by Benedict Cumberbatch. Shire’s repugnance at the “disgusting, ugly, horrific inhumane atrocities [that] happen when we allow people to be dehumanised” is strongly reflected in Home:

And you are greeted on the other side with go home blacks, refugees dirty immigrants, asylum seekers sucking our country dry of milk, dark, with their hands out smell strange, savage – look what they’ve done to their own countries,

Shire was named the first young poet laureate for London, aged 24, and has won numerous awards; she also teaches workshops on exploring memory and healing trauma through the power of the spoken word.

JJ Bola: ‘we hid ourselves in language’

Being a refugee has touched many aspects of poet JJ Bola’s life. He fled Congo for London with his parents at the age of six. A promising basketball player as a teenager, his dreams of making it professionally were squashed because, without British nationality, he wasn’t allowed to travel, which meant he was unable to respond to interest from universities in America. Besides his writing, he works for several projects to raise awareness about the human rights situation in his native country, where six million people were killed betwee 1998 and 2003, and 1,000 women are still estimated to be raped every day.

No one leaves home if the hurt that will come is greater than the hurt that they will leave behind JJ Bola

“Europe is slowly (re-)discovering its humanity,” he reflects via email. “This is a bottom-up process, which must first come from the people and increasingly, the people are showing compassion for the refugees. We have seen this in Iceland where citizens have opened up their homes, in the football stands in Germany with banners that state “refugees are welcome”, the solidarity shown with Calais through marches or collections. However, this compassion has not reflected in government.”

He adds: “No one leaves home if the hurt that will come is greater than the hurt that they will leave behind. No one leaves if the ocean will swallow them up. No one leaves home, if there is peace. As a refugee there is only ever half of you in one place; because you have left of you where you have come from, and half of you is rejected where you arrive.”



The refugee experience is encapsulated in his poem Refuge:

We came here to find refuge / They called us refugees / So we hid ourselves in their language / until we sounded just like them. / Changed the way we dressed / to look just like them / Made this our home / until we lived just like them.

JJ Bola is the author of the poetry collection Word.



Yovanka Perdigao: ‘I used to love using the refugee line to throw people off’

“You’ve always loved to throw off people with the refugee line, it’s sometimes the best icebreaker for an introvert like you. You chuckle. If pressed, you tell them that you spent the summer of 1998 underneath a bed with your sister afraid a bomb might rip the ceiling.” Thus writes Yovanka Perdigao in The Icebreaker, about her experience experience in the UK, after fleeing Guinea-Bissau as a kid.

Perdigao is a writer and activist living in London. She was born in Lisbon, and when she was three months old went back to Guinea-Bissau with her mother. She hasn’t been back to the country since the family fled. As part of the Ain’t I A Woman Collective (AIAWC), she works to “promote the versatility of black women –their spirit and their experiences – particularly in the UK and, hopefully, Europe as a whole.”



“I used to love using the refugee line to throw people off”, she explains via email. “I guess people didn’t expect that I had once been some kid crouching underneath a bed in case a bomb dropped on our family’s home. Even though I was not shy to disclose my experience, I never really fully acknowledged the full extent of what happened those days. The Civil war in Guinea Bissau, 1998, changed my life completely. From the moment the war started everything became fragments. All I can remember vaguely is the adults whispering, I knew something was going to change. I had a small backpack, and layers of clothes and a little white flag. Just in case.”



I kept thinking that only my sister could swim if we all fell

She added that the her family was lucky as her father managed to secure space aboard a boat intended for French nationals. “There was a mass of people and when it was our turn to board the ship the bombing started again. They had to load us in rubber boats to get to the ship. I remember that my grandma never held me and my sister so tightly like that day, when the rubber boat kept zig-zagging as bombs were falling. I kept thinking that only my sister could swim if we all fell.”



She knows that “I was one of the lucky ones that summer, and even as I watch the news today I’m still lucky. Once there was an Aylan Kurdi whose death shocked the world, but there are still many Aylan Kurdis.”



Perdigao recently wrote a piece titled Do a Little More: A Black Woman Reflects on Global Crisis for the site For Harriet. Her poem The Icebreaker discusses/expresses this.



Yomi Sode: ‘Where is the safest place for a child in a war-torn country?’

Nigeria-born Yomi Sode moved to London aged nine with his mother, in search of a better life. His work has explored issues of identity and culture: “When I went back to Nigeria, I was judged for being a Londoner, like I’m judged for being black in London,” he reflected on his recent spoken word performance at the Southbank Centre, as part of the Africa Utopia series.

His poem Warchild, written earlier this year, deals with the fictional scenario of a woman who dreams of fleeing a war-torn country, and revolves around the idea of safety: “As much as you dream of place like London or Paris, when you actually have to venture it on your own, you’re still afraid,” he explains.

We clasp onto wishes for hope.

Wishes, that wet the dryness of our tongues while our parents pile bricks and ruin against the door from inside.

Sweat drops from my father’s face, He smells as though time has run out. We hear the music in their feet the percussion in shell cases ringing concrete, greeting our door like neighbours for Sisi, who talks about London and France. And, me.

Sode recently performed at the Southbank Centre as part of the Africa Utopia festival and he is an active member of the spoken word scene, where he performs as GREEdS (Generating Rhymes To Engage The EnlighteneD Soul). He can be followed here.



Deanna Rodger: ‘On paper, no one knows I’m a different colour’

Deanna Rodger is from London. Both her parents are also British. “I was born in Britain, my name doesn’t sound particularly foreign, so in an application no one would know I am a different colour – until they met me.” When they see she isn’t white, she has to face the assumption that she isn’t from London. “This makes me laugh, it’s a bit ridiculous,” she reflects. This is what prompted her to write her poem Being British, which breaks apart the three questions she gets asked all the time: “Where are you from?” (To which she replies London, or Fulham). Followed by: “What country?” (To which she replies England). And this is always followed by: “Where are your parents from?” Racism is “the most terrifying and amusing thing at the same time,” she says.

Watch her read Being British, here:



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deanna Rodger

A group of other authors, including Monica Ali, William Boyd and Marina Lewycka, are lining up to write a new crowdfunded anthology with the objective to counter the anti-refugee rhetoric in the media. Readers can contribute through their crowdfunding page at Unbound.