Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Warsan Shire
Penguin Random House, 2022
Review by Stella Cali
Multiple voices ripple through this collection, music winding through words—the grainy sound of cassette tapes from home, whispers of lyrics and popular titles, a Tracy Chapman song sung in the living room. Warsan Shire’s debut full-length collection brims with loss, compassion, and sharp edges—brilliantly crafted and fiercely vital.
Dipping into constellations of individual lives—from family, to friends who’ve passed, to news reports—Bless the Daughter is a gathering of experiences, where moments glint like glitter in the dark. These poems pulsate with life, rich and painful, ghosts dancing off the pages. In moments spent with the speaker’s father, loss and longing are particularly bruising. “Rest your body, aabo,” Shire writes in “Lullaby for Father.” “Your children are distant galaxies emitting / light that keeps you up.” The intensity of attention, the care given to the individuals in this collection, is a kind of summoning—a space the writer holds for souls to breathe in. The poem continues: “you hang on the edge of the moon…teeth loosen and float / out of your mouth like small bodies.” The speaker’s father is often suspended, existing outside of gravity. In “My Father, the Astronaut,” he is suspended in time as well, “his tears pink, gelatinous clots, unable to fall.”
In “Home,” Shire writes to the experience of refugees, where home becomes a living creature in itself. “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark,” she writes. “You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well.” This prose poem is insistent, its use of repetition driving a feeling of endless motion. “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.”
Shire speaks to the experience of immigrants and refugees through phone calls to home—through the familiar voice of Hassan Aden Samatar wafting from a cassette player, singing “tonight no one knows you” (a moment attached to a pop culture reference—the title “My Loneliness is Killing Me”). “Bless Maymuun’s Mind” plucks jagged details—the way she “smells jasmine suddenly and then nothing,” her new prescription for sertraline, “50mg daily to be upped to 100mg if she still can’t live like this.” “The refugee’s heart often grows / an outer layer,” Shire writes in “Assimilation.” “It cocoons the organ. Those unable to grow the extra skin / die within the first six months in a host country.”
Shire frequently touches on mental health—in “Trichotillomania,” for example, a creature made of hair crouches behind the bed, “the height of a shrill scream.” Shire writes through bulimia, post-partum depression, and trauma. In “Bless This House,” she subverts the image of the body as a structure full of locked rooms, imagining the house as a place which, once broken into, becomes a cage for the intruder. “Maybe he’s met the others—” the speaker says of a man who broke in through her armpit, “males / missing…who tricked and forced their way in…At parties I point to my body and say / Oh, this old thing? This is where men come to die.”
Poems such as “Hooyo Isn’t Home” address sexual violence: “While in the shower, you break down,” the speaker says. “While you wash your body you realize it is not your body.” In “The Abubakr Girls Are Different,” shame is passed from father to daughter, girl to girl: “Daughter is synonymous with traitor, / their father mutters / in his sleep…One of them pushes my open knees closed. Sit like a girl.” “Bless the Qumayo” embodies the hissed hatred often directed at young women, as onlookers sit “tallying the sluts of the family,” culminating in an acidic double-edged line: “still, / we pray you find healing, bitch.” In “Filial Cannibalism,” Shire touches on the way that shame trickles down from mother to daughter: “Occasionally, / mothers…feed on the viscid / shame their daughters / are forced to secrete…”
The relationship between mother and daughter is contemplated at length, with the same piercing attention to detail gifted to the other lives held in this collection. Hooyo herself lives and breathes in this collection, through moments of portraiture in the text. In some instances her own voice comes through—as in “Hooyo Full of Grace,” where the speaker describes their mother as a “Goddess of absence, Holy Mother, / Our Lady of Leaving Children / With Strangers, patron saint of / the babies will raise themselves.” At times, the speaker remembers Hooyo in her youth, “turmeric / glow, soft as ripe mango…desert flowers tucked in her hair.” The relationship is complex, layered with understanding and anger. Perhaps this is most clearly exemplified in the collection’s opening poem:
Mama, I made it
out of your home
alive, raised by
the voices
in my head.
(“Extreme Girlhood”)
Throughout these poems, there is a gleaming thread of survival and resilience. Packed tightly with life and language, with jasmine and remembered music, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is a stunning debut—a resounding assertion of strength.
Stella Cali is a queer writer and artist completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sel̓íl̓witulh Nations.