Beyoncé

'Beyoncé is not a woman to be messed with' – Lemonade review

Beyoncé’s imperious sixth album sees her turn her attention to her marriage, with witheringly powerful results

Alexis Petridis

Mon 25 Apr 2016 14.46 BST

D

ishearteningly billed as “a conceptual project based on every woman’s journey of self knowledge and healing” – a description that makes it sound like something agonisingly earnest you’d go out of your way to avoid at the Edinburgh Fringe – Beyoncé’s sixth solo album touches on a lot of potent topics. Quite aside from the presence of her much-discussed single Formation, a meditation on race that originally appeared in the middle of Black History Month, there are lyrical references to slavery, rioting and Malcolm X and a ferocious guest appearance by Kendrick Lamar that jabs at Fox News and police brutality and ends with something approaching a call to arms.

In an era when pop doesn’t tend to say a great deal, there’s obviously something hugely cheering about an artist of Beyonce’s stature doing this: she increasingly seems to view her success and celebrity as a means to an end rather than something to be maintained at all costs. Nevertheless, Lemonade is an album less about politics than something more personal. It’s more preoccupied with the state of her marriage than it the state of the world, overshadowed by her husband Jay Z’s alleged infidelity. If you want to compare her to an old soul legend, it’s more Here, My Dear than What’s Going On: for all its brilliance, Formation feels oddly tacked-on at album’s end, arriving after All Night, a track that sounds remarkably like a grand finale.

Given the amount of lurid media speculation about the Knowles-Carter union, you could have reasonably expected Beyonce to step discreetly around the subject of what you might call Hova’s legova, for fear of giving the gossip mags further fuel: perhaps a knowing allusion here and there, the odd bitter reference to the press intruding on her personal life. But no: in the film that accompanies the album, premiered last night on HBO, she does everything to express her displeasure at her husband’s behaviour short of appearing holding aloft a pair of scissors in one hand and Jay Z’s severed testicles in the other.

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She’s seen tearfully committing suicide, smashing things up with a baseball bat, destroying cars by driving over them in a monster truck and throwing her wedding ring at the camera, as well as reciting the alarmingly visceral poetry of Warsan Shire – best known as the author of that oft-quoted line about how no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark – much of which sounds less like the words you usually hear issuing from an R&B divas mouth than something the late Richey Edwards would have come up with around the time the Manic Street Preachers made The Holy Bible: “till the blood spills in and out of uterus, wakes up smelling of zinc, grief sedated by orgasm”.

The album itself is no less bracing in its approach than the film. “Suck on my balls, I’ve had enough,” she sings on Sorry, shortly before threatening to leave and take their daughter with her. “Big homie better grow up”, she adds, a direct allusion to the title that Jay Z gave himself during his guest appearance on her 2003 single Crazy in Love. The music, too, slowly works itself up into a righteous frenzy of anger, shifting from the becalmed misery of opener Pray You Catch Me via via the sparse simmer of Hold Up – which rather wittily borrows its chorus from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s paean to undying devotion, Maps, and its hook from Andy Williams’ Can’t Get Used To Losing You – before finally boiling over on the fantastic Don’t Hurt Yourself: a ferocious, distorted vocal as commanding as anything she’s recorded, wrapped around samples from Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks and a guest appearance from Jack White. Indeed, without wishing to encourage someone towards the divorce courts, she’s so good at the hell-hath-no-fury stuff that it’s almost disappointing when the mood eventually lightens and she declares everything well in her marriage once more.

Not everything here works as well as that, or the weird, affecting mixture of defiance and vulnerability found on 6 Inch, a track on which she slurs and snarls about how rich, hard-working and desirable she is over ominous electronics, before her voice appears to crack as sings “come back, come back, come back”. Daddy Lessons’ curious blend of New Orleans jazz and country sounds uncomfortably like pastiche, while there’s something of a lull at the centre of the album, ironically the moment where the mood changes from bitterness and fury to something more forgiving and redemptive. The piano ballad Sandcastles isn’t a bad song as such, and it boasts a startlingly raw vocal that occasionally threatens to turn into a distraught howl, but it sounds a bit commonplace compared to what’s going on around it, not least the flatly astonishing Freedom, a dense swirl of sound containing everything from old Alan Lomax field recordings to 60s psychedelia from Mexico.

On Freedom, and indeed for much of Lemonade, Beyonce sounds genuinely imperious. She’s obviously not the only major pop star willing to experiment and push at the boundaries of her sound: that’s clearly what Rihanna and Kanye West were attempting to do on Anti and The Life of Pablo respectively. The difference is that those albums were at best a bold and intriguing mess: the sense that the artists behind them were having trouble marshalling their ideas was hard to escape. Lemonade, however, feels like a success, made by someone very much in control. “This is your final warning,” she scowls on Don’t Hurt Yourself, “if you try this shit again, you lose your wife.” You rather get the feeling Jay Z should heed those words: on Lemonade, Beyonce sounds very much like a woman not to be messed with.

THE GUARDIAN

 

The poet Warsan Shire writes primarily about the immigrant experience,
but also tweets about reality television.Photograph by Amaal Said

The Writing Life of Warsan Shire, a Young, Prolific Poet

Alexis Okeowo

October 21, 2015

It’s a rare poet who can write movingly about African migration to Europe and also tweet humorously about the VH1 reality show “Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta.” Every generation of writers and readers has mourned the shrinking place of poetry in our lives, and they may not be wrong. They also may not be looking in the right places. Young poets are on Tumblr and Twitter, composing affecting and funny verse as short as a hundred and forty characters and also stretching much longer. Verse that is then reblogged and retweeted by thousands of followers who see themselves reflected in the posts. Of this new genre of poets, Warsan Shire, a twenty-six-year-old Somali-British woman, is a laureate.

Shire was the actual Young Poet Laureate of London in 2014, the city’s first. Born in Kenya to parents from Somalia, Shire grew up in London, where she has always felt like an outsider, and embodies the kind of shape-shifting, culture-juggling spirit lurking in most people who can’t trace their ancestors to their country’s founding fathers, or whose ancestors look nothing like those fathers. In that limbo, Shire conjures up a new language for belonging and displacement. What she has described, in an interview, as the “surrealism of everyday immigrant life—one day you are in your country, having fun, drinking mango juice, and the next day you are in the Underground in London and your children are speaking to you in a language you don’t understand.”

Her poetry evokes longing for home, a place to call home, and is often nostalgic for memories not her own, but for those of her parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, people who forged her idea of her ancestral homeland through their own stories. With fifty thousand Twitter followers and a similar number of Tumblr readers, Shire, more than most today, demonstrates the writing life of a young, prolific poet whose poetry or poem-like offhand thoughts will surface in one of your social media feeds and often be exactly what you needed to read, or what you didn’t know that you needed to read, at that moment.

In 2011, Shire published “Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth,” a spare collection of poems that was outsize in its sensuality, wit, and grief. She opens the book, her first, with “I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes / On my face they are still together.” In “Beauty,” she tells us of someone’s older sister: “Some nights I hear in her room screaming / We play Surah Al-Baqarah to drown her out / Anything that comes from her mouth sounds like sex / Our mother has banned her from saying God’s name.” In “Your Mother’s First Kiss,” she writes, “The first boy to kiss your mother later raped women / when the war broke out. She remembers hearing this / from your uncle, then going to your bedroom and lying down on the floor. You were at school.” At the end of the poem: “Last week, she saw him driving the number 18 bus / his week a swollen drumlin, a vine scar dragging itself / across his mouth. You were with her, holding a bag of dates to your chest, heard her let out a deep moan / when she saw how much you looked like him.”

How much of the book is autobiographical is never really made clear, but beside the point. (Though Shire has said, “I either know, or I am every person I have written about, for or as. But I do imagine them in their most intimate settings.”) It’s East African storytelling and coming-of-age memoir fused into one. It’s a first-generation woman always looking backward and forward at the same time, acknowledging that to move through life without being haunted by the past lives of your forebears is impossible.

Shire has said that she is most interested in writing about people whose stories are either not told or told inaccurately, especially immigrants and refugees, and so she brings out her Dictaphone when relatives come to her with tales from their experiences so that she can record them faithfully before turning them into poetry. Her tone lightens in “Maymuun’s Mouth” and “Birds.” In those poems, Shire writes tenderly and hilariously of a Somali woman removing her body hair and “dancing in front of strangers” as she adjusts to her new life abroad, and of a girl who, with pigeon’s blood, fooled her new husband and his mother into thinking she was a virgin. Later, evoking the memories of mothers caught in the worst turmoil of Somalia’s conflicts, “In Love and in War” reads, “To my daughter I will say / ‘when the men come, set yourself on fire.’ ” The collection feels confiding, occasionally brutal, but somehow still playful.

Since “Teaching My Mother,” Warshan’s profile has only grown. In addition to the Young Poet Laureate position, she received Brunel University’s inaugural African Poetry Prize, in 2013, was chosen as Queensland, Australia’s poet in residence in 2014, and has had her work published in various literary journals and anthologies. In June, the New York Times editorial board quoted from her poem “Home” in a piece urging Western countries to give more aid and safe passage to refugees: “You have to understand / that no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than land.” The editorial ran the same month that Shire tweeted about her adoration of a “Love & Hip-Hop” star known for her wild antics (“a bit in love with joseline”), which was a month before she tweeted “fat and perfect, perfect and black, black and fat and perfect” (retweeted three hundred and eighty-two times; she has struggled with bulimia), and a few months after she cryptically tweeted “mama i made it (out of your home alive),” retweeted two hundred and seventy-four times. Periodically, I will see tweets discovering a video of her reciting her most famous and viral poem, “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love,” which has become a self-affirmation mantra for lovelorn women online.

Shire’s work, she has said, is a project of “documentation, genealogy, preserving the names of the women came before me. To connect, honor, to confront.” But it’s her documenting of the present, always coming back to the subject of love and its many tender and punishing forms, that is enthralling. The simultaneous specificity and breadth of her appeal, across gender, race, and nationality based on her self-professed fans, is remarkable, and it took me by surprise the first time I started following her online. She tweeted “my dj name is dj eldest immigrant daughter” not long ago. I favorited it immediately.

Alexis Okeowo, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of “A Moonless, Starless Sky.” In 2020, Okeowo was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York.

THE NEW YORKER

Warsan Shire / The sun is perfect and you woke this morning

The sun is perfect and you woke this morning

by Warsan Shire

The sun is perfect and you woke this morning.
You have enough language in your mouth to be understood.
You have a name, and someone wants to call it.
Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it.
If we just start there,
every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible.
If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.

Home by Warsan Shire

 

HOME

by Warsan Shire

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-

leave,

run away from me now

i dont know what i’ve become

but i know that anywhere

is safer than here

Souvenir by Warsan Shire

 

SOUVENIR

by Warsan Shire

You brought the war with you
unknowingly, perhaps, on your skin
in hurried suitcases
in photographs
plumes of it in your hair
under your nails
maybe it was
in your blood.

You came sometimes with whole families,
sometimes with nothing, not even your shadow
landed on new soil as a thick accented apparition
stiff denim and desperate smile,
ready to fit in, work hard
forget the war
forget the blood.

The war sits in the corners of your living room
laughs with you at your tv shows
fills the gaps in all your conversations
sighs in the pauses of telephone calls
gives you excuses to leave situations,
meetings, people, countries, love;
the war lies between you and your partner in the bed
stands behind you at the bathroom sink
even the dentist jumped back from the wormhole
of your mouth. You suspect
it was probably the war he saw,
so much blood.

You know peace like someone who has survived
a long war,
take it one day at a time because everything
has the scent of a possible war;
you know how easily a war can start
one moment quiet, next blood.

War colors your voice, warms it even.
No inclination as to whether you were
the killer or the mourner.
No one asks. Perhaps you were both.
You haven’t kissed anyone for a while now.
To you, everything tastes like blood.

Warsan Shire / The Somali-British poet quoted by Beyoncé in Lemonade

The migrant talking back … Warsan Shire. Photograph: Amaal Said

Warsan Shire: the Somali-British poet quoted by Beyoncé in Lemonade

She was London’s Young Poet Laureate, becoming a voice for its marginalised people – now her work has been recited by the queen of pop

Rafia Zakaria
Wed 27 Apr 2016 15.00 BST

S

he writes of places where many Beyoncé fans rarely go, the portions of London where the faces are black and brown, where men huddle outside shop-front mosques and veiled women are trailed by long chains of children. Warsan Shire, the Somali-British poet whose words are featured in Beyoncé’s new globe-shaking Lemonade album, is a bard of these marginalised areas – she was even named the first Young Poet Laureate for London at 25.

Beyoncé reads parts of Shire’s poems, including For Women Who Are Difficult To Love, The Unbearable Weight of Staying (the End of the Relationship) and Nail Technician as Palm Reader in interludes between songs in her 12-track, hour-long video album that premiered this week. Truly, Shire was a brilliant choice for Beyoncé’s unapologetically black and female album: like the people and places from which they are woven, Shire’s poems – published in a volume titled Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth – are laden with longing for other lands and complicated by the contradictions of belonging in new ones. In Conversations about Home, she writes: “I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget”, and: “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.”

Finally, here is the migrant talking back, trolling the absurdities of documentation that have such unquestioned legitimacy in the Western architecture of border and boundary, admission and exclusion. Nationality rests in the passport: the Somali government, long embattled, no longer issues them. Via Shire’s poetic rendition, the two are paired and a question posed: Is reducing a person’s right to refuge to a piece of paper more or less bizarre than the act of eating one? Isn’t the body a better bearer of the story of a journey than a pamphlet made of paper? In verse, Shire recalibrates the distance between the documentary details of belonging and the human experience of it, revealing them to be two vastly different things, fragile and futile foundations for justice.

In Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre), Shire’s retort to being told “go home” and “fucking immigrants” is similarly prescient if ominous: “All I can say is: I was once like you, the apathy, the pity...” She ends on her now much-quoted line: “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.”

Girls: Warsan Shire performs the poem she wrote for the Guardian’s FGM campaign. 

If the otherness of migrant communities is one iteration of a no-go area, the sexuality of Muslim women is another. Shire’s verse explores this realm with equal ardour and originality, taking on faith, men and culture in a wild war of verse. Sometimes the dominance of men is countered via treachery. Birds is the story of Sofia, who “used pigeon blood on her wedding night” to fool her virginity-obsessed husband, who, easily fooled, “smiled when he saw the sheets”. At other times, the erotic and the transgressive intersect, as in Beauty, in which her older sister, returning from a tryst with her lover, “smiles, pops her gum before saying boys are haram (forbidden) don’t ever forget that.” Together the poems reveal the distance between rules and reality, what is believed and what is lived. In The Kitchen, food and sex become weapons, as a woman narrates the sensuous seduction of a cheating husband: “sweet mangoes and sugared lemon, he had forgotten the way you taste / Sour dough and cumin: but she cannot make him eat like you.” In Grandfather’s Hands, Shire imagines the lovemaking of her grandparents, their passion “claiming whole countries with their mouths”, a genealogy of passion, a foretelling of the literal journeys of the future. Sexual pleasure, like sexual violence, Shire seems to be saying, belongs to everyone; it is not learned or located in the west.

The migrant and the Muslim woman may be the most marginal figures of our divided and suspicious present, their realities dulled into the monochrome of submission and desperation, to elicit pity or polemic. In Warsan Shire’s poetry they speak for themselves, its vivid literary exploration of their inner lives adding the depth and complexity that grants them a full and realised humanity. Here is rebellion in verse, an act of literary guerrilla warfare against “the lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officer”, against a stodgy western literary sphere that too often relegates poetry like hers to the peripheries of acclaim. It is also a revolt against the constrictions of faith and femininity, a refusal to “sit like a girl”, to permit her own mutilation at the behest of tradition, to pretend at being “pure chaste and untouched”.

The last poem in Shire’s collection, titled In Love and War, is a bare two lines: “To my daughter I will say: when the men come set yourself on fire.” It is an apt conclusion; the poetic equivalent of self-immolation is self-exposition. Shire has done it, giving all of herself to us, so that we may read, feel and rebel. She’s one to watch, even after the social media frenzy around Beyoncé’s latest dies down.

THE GUARDIAN 

 

Interview: Warsan Shire's Raw & Vulnerable Poetry

An interview with Warsan Shire. Born in 1988 to Somali parents in Kenya, Warsan was raised in London where she began writing. Her raw & vulnerable poetry has gained an international following

ANYA WASSENBERG

Apr. 23, 2013 10:00AM EST

London-based poet Warsan Shire was born into a Somali family in Kenya. She started writing poetry as a child and at 16 gave her first public reading at a poetry slam. She won. Warsan's poetry is stark, acutely-observed and emotionally honest — it tends to connect immediately with a global readership who follows the poet on her two blogs and twitter account. The poetry is also shadowed by war, displacement, and abuse, traumatic experiences which Warsan helps other writers work through in the workshops that she conducts. She is the editor at SPOOK magazine, the author of a book of poetry called teaching my mother how to give birth (2012) and last year produced an album warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being lonely).

Okayafrica: The success of your poetry seems to lie in your willingness to be vulnerable to your readers; the point of view is very intimate and while not necessarily autobiographical, the emotion in the poems has an immediacy that connects with readers. As a writer, how do you deal with that aspect of writing? Do you actually feel that vulnerability? That kind of emotional honesty might be hard for non-writers to understand.

Warsan Shire: I don't care about stigma, shame, or bravado. Writing is cathartic for me, a lifeline. It's about survival and mental health as much as it is about creativity and expression. Vulnerability and transparency is my default setting. I don't try to intellectualise it.

OKA: How did you develop such an acute sense of observation (about human nature in particular)? Is it something that came naturally to you or was it something that developed over time? Is that sense of observation perhaps what drew you to write in the first place?

WS: I've always been very observant; I'd rather listen than speak. It's overwhelming, the amount of detail I see in really mundane scenarios: strangers touching one another; someone arguing on the phone; a man falling asleep on the train. I'll fill in the gaps of the story myself. In my mind I'll follow them home, I'll imagine their childhood, what their bedroom looks like, if they are in love with someone who does not love them. The downfall is that I give everything (and everyone) too much meaning. Sometimes a thing is vacant and I'll create depth for it; that's not always fair.

I don't know when I first realised that I could eat whatever I want and then vomit it out, the knowledge was stunning and soon everyone loved me more; my mother, my friends, the men in the streets. Beauty is a strange place, a road sign in the distance that you never actually reach.- Written for No Shame Day | an effort to eliminate the stigma around eating disorders.

OKA: You've said that you wrote your first poem when you were 11 and that it's about Africa. Can you share it with us?

WS: I don't have it anymore but I remember feeling very close to my father when he read it; he was so proud. He was fully present in that moment, perhaps I have been trying to recreate that by writing more poems, but it didn't happen again.

OKA: How would you describe the evolution of your style - the intimate voice, the evocative imagery & language that characterizes your current work? Is that something you aimed for or did it come about naturally?

WS: It's just how I write.

*'Excuses for why we failed at love', Director: Zayna Daze. Words: Warsan Shire

OKA: Poetry is very important in Somali culture, was that an influence on you becoming a poet? Do you still draw inspiration from your Somali background or Kenyan birthplace, and in what ways?

WS: Poetry is very integral to the Somali culture, it's part of everyday speech, but I have never been to Somalia and cannot say that my heritage directly influenced my becoming career. Obviously my culture, language and faith will affect the way I approach everything, especially writing. I wanted to be a writer, an author, before I was even aware of my otherness. Now being the daughter of immigrants, being the daughter of a country that has been at war for my entire existence absolutely informs my work, but so does a myriad of other things.

OKA: You have a huge online presence. How much time does that take up - are you a bit of an addict? How do you juggle that with leaving time for writing? And, how do you see social media — as an integral part of what you do or more as something that's separate from writing poetry?

WS: No, I'm not an addict. I sometimes think that technology and social networking sites will be the downfall of us. I'm really interested in dystopia and futurism; I see how the internet has created a society of spectators who are in many ways disconnected from real life/real intimacy and struggle to live in the moment without documenting it digitally for an audience of people they don't actually like. Anyway, I have a couple of blogs - one that mainly recommends film, music and art, and another where I post freewrites, dreams and self portraits. My Twitter is just a stream of free thought and links to music I'm listening to. I don't spend a lot of time on it and I don't see it as a task. Like all the things though, when abused it can be terrible. Without the internet I would not have connected with some of the most beautiful people in my life and I would not have been able to stumble across brilliance in the form of music, film and art. A wonderful poet by the name of Jacob Sam La-Rose (my editor and mentor) told me a few years ago 'Use the internet, don't let the internet use you'. That echoes in my head most days; I navigate through the space very aware of how important protecting myself is.

Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate. I'm the colour of hot sun on my 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.- Conversations about home (at a deportation centre), Warsan Shire, 26 November 2012 Part of a series of poems by African feminist writers for 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence

OKA: What is your favorite memory from childhood?

WS: The garden of our first home in North London, my parents are still together, I'm 5, it's summer, we have an apple tree and the apples are small. My mother is sitting with me and my brother, he is 3. My legs are bare and there is an ant crawling up my knee. My mother slices the sour apples into four pieces and lets us rub salt into it. I eat it, squinting from the sun, jaw tingling from the sweet and from the bitter.

OKA: What African musicians are you following right now?

WS: Just A Band, Laura Mvula, Tumi and the Volume.

OKAYAFRICA