The dream of what home once was only exists in her imagination now, and she wants to make it clear to the reader that she-like all migrants-would go home if she could.
The speaker is clearly sick with longing for the way life used to be she sobs when she tears apart her passport, and she misses the boy she kissed once in a tin factory. Shire's "Home" is, in a sense, a twisted love letter to a home that does not exist anymore. It is begging those who hate migrants to consider the violence that they were forced to flee from. It is incoherent, not coming from only one person but rather expressing the general sentiments and the hatred that many migrants face.īigotry, or prejudice, is essentially what the poem is addressing. The poem's sixth stanza is a collage of commonly repeated phrases used to express bigotry, xenophobia, and fear of foreigners and immigrants. This presence of violence in every aspect of the poem reveals the pervasive harm that war and displacement and hatred cause, leaching into every facet of people's life and completely altering the way they perceive the world. Everything, even things that are not traditionally violent, are made so in the realm of the poem: breath is "bloody" and passports are never merely thrown away they are torn apart and sobbed over. "Home" describes violence unflinchingly and viscerally, beginning with the phrase "mouth of a shark" being used to describe the war-torn environments that often cause migrants to leave their homes.
It is what drives the poem's subjects from their homes, it is what defines their journeys, and it is also what greets them when they arrive at the places that promised them refuge. Violence pervades "Home," from beginning to end. It is comprised of various scenes of discomfort and displacement, violence and movement leading to a loss of physical as well as spiritual home. "Home" is a poem about migration, about what happens to people when, uprooted from their homes, they find themselves unable to find acceptance in the places they fled to looking for safety. Displacement, migration, and diaspora are all words that define Warsan Shire's poem "Home," as well as much of her work.
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