وطن - ورسان شاير (شاعرة صومالية)

08:47 AM July, 19 2017

سودانيز اون لاين
بله محمد الفاضل-جدة
مكتبتى
رابط مختصر

قصيدة شابة صومالية الاصل اصبحت رمزا لللاجئين
"لاأحد يترك وطنه اذا لم يكن قد أصبح فك سمكة قرش. يجب أن تفهم أن لا أحد يضع الأطفال على متن قارب الا اذا كان الماء أكثر اماناً من اليابسة"
تلك كلمات يتلوها كل ليلة، الممثل المعروف "بيندكت كامبرباتش" المشهور بتمثيل دور "شيرلوك هولمز"، خلال عرض مسرحية "هاملت" في لندن، التي تلقى رواجاً.
وهي مقاطع من قصيدة اصبحت منذ بضعة شهور رمزاً لللاجئين في كل مكان. الا أن قليلين يعرفون ان كاتب القصيدة شاعرة شابة بريطانية من اصول صومالية ولدت في كينيا، هي "ورسان شاير" التي حصلت على عدة جوائز منها جائزة جامعة برونل للشعر الافريقي، وتـٌتلى قصائدها في عدة مدن اوربية. وانتشرت بقوة في اليونان في مواقع الوسائط الاجتماعية. فيما يلي نص القصيدة، بترجمة حرة؛

لا أحد يترك وطنه،
إلا إذا كان الوطن فك سمكة قرش
تركض الى الحدود، فقط
عندما ترى المدينة كلها تركض هي كذلك
عندما يركض جيرانك أسرع منك
ونفَسَهم الدامي في حلوقهم
والصبي الذي كان زميلك في المدرسة
الذي قبـّلك بشغف خلف مصنع الصفيح القديم
يحمل بندقية أكبر من جسده
تغادر وطنك فقط
عندما لا بسمح لك بالبقاء.
لا أحد يترك الوطن الا عندما يطاردك الوطن
نار تحت قدميك
دم ساخن في حشاك
انه أمر لم تكن قد تخيـّلت قط أنك ستقوم به
الى أن تحرق تهديدات النصل رقبتك
وحتى حينذاك كنت تحمل النشيد الوطني
تحت نفـَسِك
وأنت تمزق جواز سفرك في دورات المياه في المطار
تنتحب مع كل لقمة من الورق
معلنا بوضوح أنك لن تعود إلى الوراء.
عليك ان تفهم،
أن لا أحد يضع أطفاله في قارب
إلا إذا كان الماء أكثر أماناً من اليابسة
لا أحد يحرق أكفـّه
تحت القطارات
بين العربات
لا أحد يمضي أياماً وليالي في بطن شاحنة
تتغذى على الصحف
ما لم تعني الأميال التي تسافرها
شيئا أكثر من رحلة.
لا أحد يزحف تحت الأسوار
لا أحد يريد أن يـُضرب
أو أن يشفق عليه أحد
لا أحد يختار مخيمات اللاجئين
أو التفتيش الجسدي الكامل
في اماكن حيث جسدك يتألم
أو السجن،
لأن السجن أكثر أمنا
من مدينة تحترق
أو لأن حارساً في الليل
أفضل من شاحنة
مليئة برجال يشبهون أبيك
لا أحد يتحمل ذلك
لا أحد يمكن ان يهضم ذلك
لا يوجد جـِلد خشن بما فيه الكفاية كي يسمع:
عودوا الى بلادكم ايها السود
اللاجئون
المهاجرون القذرون
شحّاذوا اللجوء
الذين تمصون بلادنا
ايها العبيد بأياديكم المفتوحة
تفوح منكم رائحة غريبة
ايها المتوحشون
افسدتم بلادكم والآن تريدون
أن تفسدوا بلادنا
اما كيف لا نعطي اهتماماً للكلمات
للنظرات المتوحشة
ربما لأن الضربات أكثر ليونة
من تمزيق يد أو قدم
أو أن الكلمات أكثر نعومة
من أربعة عشر رجلاً بين
ساقيك
أو أن إبتلاع الشتائم أسهل
من حصى الرصيف
من عظام جسد طفلك
الممزق.
اريد العودة الى وطني،
ولكن الوطن فك سمكة قرش
الوطن فوهة بندقية
لا أحد يترك الوطن
ما لم يطاردك الوطن حتى الشواطىء
إلا إذا قال لك الوطن
أركض سريعاً
أترك ملابسك خلفك
أزحف في الصحراء
وأسبح عبر المحيطات
وأغرق
وأنجو
وجوع
وتضرع
وأنسَ الكرامة
بقاؤك في الحياة هو الأهم
لا أحد يترك الوطن الا اذا كان الوطن
صوتاً معروقاً يقول لك في أذنك
إذهب،
أهرب مني الآن
لا أعرف ما الذي أصابني
ولكني أعرف أن أي مكان آخر
أكثر أمانا من هنا


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
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
منقول
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Warsan Shire
(Kenya, 1988)



Warsan Shire
Monday 18 March 2013
Warsan Shire showed her first poem to her father at the age of 11, won an international poetry slam at 16 (“I didn’t really understand what a poetry slam was”), writes intense, sensuous poems which she has toured and read in several countries, has a BA in creative writing, published her first pamphlet in 2011, is poetry editor of the new “literary arts mashup” magazine, Spook, and runs workshops on using poetry and narrative to heal trauma. And she’s not yet 25.

Born in Kenya in 1988 to Somali parents, Warsan Shire was raised and still lives in London. Her work draws from both English and African culture; it is distinguished by its warmth and generosity, by its attention to the youth and humanness of previous generations – a great sense of continuity runs through her world view – and, above all, by a detailed and instinctive attention to how we experience life through our bodies. She writes about sex, war, sex as war, cultural assumptions and conflict, desire, love, mutilation, birth, death, previous generations – an astonishing range of subjects, treated with great emotional depth.

Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines including Poetry Review, Wasafiri and Sable LitMag, and at the time of writing she is shortlisted for the first Brunel University African Poetry Prize. In 2011 her pamphlet, teaching my mother how to give birth, was published by flipped eye.

It seems fair to say that as a London poet, Warsan Shire represents a new kind of Englishness, which the current generation of 20-somethings can take almost for granted – certainly in the cities. It's an Englishness that admits all races and creeds, joined by shared culture (music, films, poetry) and tolerant of specific differences. It incorporates and accepts a different kind of experience from its grandparents – whether they were in the UK or in some other country. Thus, Shire's poems – with their strong sense of time and place and person, and without the ironic, distanced, traditionally English (and maybe more 'male') pose – speaks to a very real and urgent sensibility whose time is now. 'Grandfather's Hands' encompasses several of these themes:


Your grandmother kissed each knuckle,

circled an island into his palm,
and told him which part they would share,
which part they would leave alone . . .

Your grandfathers hands were slow but urgent.
Your grandmother dreamt them,

a clockwork of fingers finding places to own –
under the tongue, collarbone, bottom lip,
arch of foot.

She uses her work to both celebrate and document the lives of women: in relationships, in various kinds of trauma, in war, in daily life. Her poems are rooted in the life of the body, but it is a body strongly connected to the soul and to other people. Her poems are about how we live with and in ourselves – in the case of so many women, as objects. They're also about love: who, what, why, and above all how we love. Her list poems about relationships are sharp and funny, even while poignant.

In 'Tribe of Wood', a mother addresses her daughter, whom she took for 'circumcision', saying, "women like us can't afford to be weak", and "your mother meant well":

I held down my daughter last night
spread her limbs across the forest
laid her out to rest
crushed berries across her mouth and
gave her my knuckles to chew on

I gave my daughter to a man
an offering that made my stomach tight
with want, he spread her limbs across the town
I prayed she felt something,
wriggled underneath him like
the women across the border,
I listened out to hear her moan
but I heard nothing . . .

This ability to be in the mind of the mother committing what we in the West would consider an atrocity demonstrates Shire's ability to encompass what she documents. It is not surprising that her workshops deal with trauma and healing; this poetry is moving, and healing in its presentation of shared humanity and struggle.

Her pamphlet is titled after a Somali proverb. In it, life parades through sisters and mothers and grandmothers, aunts and cousins and brothers and uncles. As in Wordsworth, whose "child is father to the man", in Shire's work each of us creates the mother in the other. She told Indigo Williams:

I'm the eldest in my family, my mother literally learnt how to mother, how to sacrifice, how to grow up, how to be alone, through me. I began writing the book when I was 19 years old. She was also 19 when she gave birth to me . . .

She has also said, in the same interview: "I think in Somali, I cuss in Somali, when I'm afraid I reach for Somali and this language is very rich, very filling. It's an unflinching language; the crudest most terrible things sound perfectly normal in Somali." Her poems contain lines of Somali, but more than that they are infused with Somali poeticism, and this comes through in her clear, musical, image-driven English. But the poems in her pamphlet encompass things that do not "sound perfectly normal" in any language. 'Conversations About Home', for example, is subtitled '(at the Deportation Centre)':

God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags؟ When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there's no space for another song, another tongue or another language . . . I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I'm bloated with language I can't afford to forget.
© Katy Evans-Bush
http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/22832/29/Warsan-Shirehttp://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/22832/29/Warsan-Shire