TRANSCRIPT

Today’s episode is guest hosted by Samiya Bashir.

I’m Samiya Bashir, and this is The Slowdown. 

This Saturday rock and roll aficionados will celebrate the 13th annual International Clash Day, in honor of legendary punk band “The Clash.” The day was launched in 2013 by Seattle DJ John Richards of KEXP, and has since been picked up and spread worldwide. Today, their message feels even more evergreen. “We’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we’re anti-racist, and we’re pro-creative,” said the late great Joe Strummer, the band’s cofounder, lead vocalist, and key spokesman. “We’re against ignorance.” Same, sis. Same. 

“They say the immigrants steal the hubcaps / Of respected gentlemen,” he sung on 1980’s “Something About England.” “They say it would be wine and roses / If England were for Englishmen again.” 

Immigration, which built the United States–for better and for worse–is again on trial not just here but in much of the West. The crackdowns are beyond devastating, yet the potential for complete societal collapse seems unable to trigger our better natures to see each other’s humanity. The crackdowns seem, instead, to be quickly creating a whole new disaster.

It takes so much strength to leave everything you know behind to try and build a new life amongst strangers. To find that the place one has been sold as the new north star of safety, carries yet more danger directed specifically at those who’ve worked so hard to survive, who continue to work so hard to contribute, must then be a devastation beyond words. 

Today’s poem, written by a Somali immigrant who has made a home in England, breaks through the rhetoric to the heart of asylum seeking.

Home
by Warsan Shire

I

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. 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 would leave home unless home chased you. It’s not
something you ever thought about doing, so when you did, you
carried  the anthem under your breath, waiting until the airport toilet
to  tear up the passport and swallow, each mournful mouthful making
it clear you would not be going back.

No one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than
the land. No one would choose days and nights in the stomach of a 
truck, unless the miles travelled meant something more than journey.

No one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten until your
shadow leaves, raped, forced off the boat because you are darker,
drowned, sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied. 
No one would choose to make a refugee camp home for a year
or  two or ten, stripped and searched, finding prison everywhere. And
if you were to survive, greeted on the other side— Go home Blacks, 
dirty refugees, sucking our country dry of milk, dark with their hands
out, smell strange, savage, look what they’ve done to their own
countries, what  will they do to ours?

The insults are easier to swallow than finding your child’s body in 
the rubble.

I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the
barrel of a gun. No one would leave home unless home chased you
to the shore. No one would leave home until home is a voice in  your ear
saying— leave, run, now. I don’t know what I’ve become.

II

I don’t know where I’m going. Where I came from is disappearing. I  am 
unwelcome. My beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning  with the
shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin  of memory and
the absence of memory. I watch the news and my  mouth becomes a sink
full of blood. The lines, forms, people at the  desks, calling cards,
immigration officers, the looks on the street, the  cold settling deep into 
my bones, the English classes at night, the  distance I am from home.
Alhamdulillah, all of this is better than  the scent of a woman completely 
on fire, a truckload of men who  look like my father— pulling out my
teeth and nails. All these men  between my legs, a gun, a promise, a lie,
his name, his flag, his language, his manhood in my mouth. 

“Home” by Warsan Shire from BLESS THE DAUGHTER RAISED BY A VOICE IN HER HEAD © 2022 Warsan Shire. Used by permission of the poet.