Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (mouthmark series) Read online

  *

  They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the city of Rome with no jacket. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I thought the sea was safer than the land. I want to make love, but my hair smells of war and running and running. I want to lay down, but these countries are like uncles who touch you when you’re young and asleep. Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour of hot sun on the face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck; I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.

  *

  I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and 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, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officer, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.

  *

  I hear them say go home, I hear them say fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second; the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I’ll see you on the other side.

  Old Spice

  Every Sunday afternoon he dresses in his old army uniform,

  tells you the name of every man he killed.

  His knuckles are unmarked graves.

  Visit him on a Tuesday and he will describe

  the body of every woman he could not save.

  He’ll say she looked like your mother

  and you will feel a storm in your stomach.

  Your grandfather is from another generation–

  Russian degrees and a school yard Cuban national anthem,

  communism and religion. Only music makes him cry now.

  He married his first love, her with the long curls down

  to the small of her back. Sometimes he would

  pull her to him, those curls wrapped around his hand

  like rope.

  He lives alone now. Frail, a living memory

  reclining in a seat, the room orbiting around him.

  You visit him but never have anything to say.

  When he was your age he was a man.

  You retreat into yourself whenever he says your name.

  Your mother’s father,

  the almost martyr,

  can load a gun under water

  in under four seconds.

  Even his wedding night was a battlefield.

  A Swiss knife, his young bride,

  his sobs as he held Italian linen between her legs.

  His face is a photograph left out in the sun,

  the henna of his beard, the silver of his eyebrows

  the wilted handkerchief, the kufi and the cane.

  Your grandfather is dying.

  He begs you Take me home yaqay,

  I just want to see it one last time;

  you don’t know how to tell him that it won’t be

  anything like the way he left it.

  My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want To Be Touched

  My wife is a ship docking from war.

  The doctor maps out her body in ink,

  holding up her breast with two fingers, explains

  what needs to be removed, that maybe we can keep

  the nipple. Her body is a flooding home.

  We are afraid. We want to know

  what the water will take away from us,

  what the earth will claim as its own.

  I lick my lips and she looks at the floor.

  Later, at home, she calls her sister.

  They talk about curses, the evil eye, their aunt

  who drowned, all the money they need

  to send back. It is morning when she comes to bed

  and lets me touch her. I am like a thirsty child

  against her chest, her skin

  is parchment, dry and cracking.

  My wife sits on the hospital bed.

  Gown and body together: 41 kilos.

  She is a boat docking in from war,

  her body, a burning village, a prison

  with open gates. She won’t let me hold her

  now, when she needs it most.

  We stare at the small television in the corner of the room.

  I think of all the images she must carry in her body,

  how the memory hardens into a tumour.

  Apathy is the same as war,

  it all kills you, she says.

  Slow like cancer in the breast

  or fast like a machete in the neck.

  Ugly

  Your daughter is ugly.

  She knows loss intimately,

  carries whole cities in her belly.

  As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.

  She was splintered wood and sea water.

  She reminded them of the war.

  On her fifteenth birthday you taught her

  how to tie her hair like rope

  and smoke it over burning frankincense.

  You made her gargle rosewater

  and while she coughed, said

  macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell

  of lonely or empty.

  You are her mother.

  Why did you not warn her,

  hold her like a rotting boat

  and tell her that men will not love her

  if she is covered in continents,

  if her teeth are small colonies,

  if her stomach is an island

  if her thighs are borders?

  What man wants to lie down

  and watch the world burn

  in his bedroom?

  Your daughter’s face is a small riot,

  her hands are a civil war,

  a refugee camp behind each ear,

  a body littered with ugly things.

  But God,

  doesn’t she wear

  the world well?

  Tea With Our Grandmothers

  The morning your habooba died

  I thought of my ayeeyo, the woman

  I was named after, Warsan Baraka,

  skin dark like tamarind flesh,

  who died grinding cardamom

  waiting for her sons to come home and

  raise the loneliness they’d left behind;

  or my mother’s mother, Noura

  with the honeyed laugh, who

  broke cinnamon barks between

  her palms, nursing her husband’s

  stroke, her sister’s cancer and

  her own bad back with broken

  Swahili and stubborn Italian;

  and Doris, the mother of your

  English rose, named after

  the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys

  the Welsh in your blood, from the land

  of Cymry, your grandmother who

  dreams of clotted cream in her tea

  through the swell of diabetes;

  then your habooba Al-Sura,

  God keep her, with three lines on

  each cheek, a tally of surviving,

  the woman who cooled your tea

  pouring it like the weight of deeds

  between bowl and
cup, until the steam

  would rise like a ghost.

  In Love and In War

  To my daughter I will say,

  ‘when the men come, set yourself on fire’.

  Notes

  Surah Al Baqarah— A chapter in the Qu’ran, used to ward off evil.

  Habooba— Arabic word meaning beloved woman, used as the word for grandmother in Sudan.

  Ayeeyo— Somali word for Grandmother.

  Macaanto— Somali term of endearment, meaning sweetness.

  Inna lillahi Wa inna ilaihi Rajioon— Arabic; To Allah we belong and truly, to Him we shall return.

  Baati— Long cotton Somali nightdress.

  Ounsi— The somali tradition to burn frankincense and myrrh over hot coal, releasing aroma through smoke.

  Istaqfurulah— Arabic, Allah forgive my sins.

  Yaqay— Somali word used to emphasise emotion/urgency in speech.

  Haram— Legally forbidden by Islamic law.

  Kufi— A brimless short rounded cap worn mainly by African men.

  Baraka— Blessings

  Alhamdulilah— Praise be to Allah.

  Table of Contents

  What Your Mother Told You After Your Father Left

  Your Mother’s First Kiss

  Things We Had Lost in the Summer

  Maymuun’s Mouth

  Grandfather’s Hands

  Bone

  Snow

  Birds

  Beauty

  The Kitchen

  Fire

  When We Last Saw Your Father

  You Were Conceived

  Trying to Swim With God

  Questions for Miriam

  Conversations About Home

  Old Spice

  My Foreign Wife is Dying and Does Not Want To Be Touched

  Ugly

  Tea With Our Grandmothers

  In Love and In War

  Notes