mouthmark series
Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth
by Warsan Shire
literary pointillism on a funked-out canvas
Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth
mouthmark series (No. 10)
Produced in the United Kingdom
Published by the mouthmark series, 2011
a pamphlet series of flipped eye publishing
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design by Effi Ibok
Series Design © flipped eye publishing, 2006
First Edition
Copyright © Warsan Shire 2011
Print ISBN: 978-1-905233-29-8
Mother, loosen my tongue or adorn me with a lighter burden.
— Audre Lorde
Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth
I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are still together.
What Your Mother Told You After Your Father Left
I did not beg him to stay
because I was begging God
that he would not leave.
Your Mother’s First Kiss
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.
Your mother was sixteen when he first kissed her.
She held her breath for so long that she blacked out.
On waking she found her dress was wet and sticking
to her stomach, half moons bitten into her thighs.
That same evening she visited a friend, a girl
who fermented wine illegally in her bedroom.
When your mother confessed I’ve never been touched
like that before, the friend laughed, mouth bloody with grapes,
then plunged a hand between your mother’s legs.
Last week, she saw him driving the number 18 bus,
his cheek 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.
Things We Had Lost in the Summer
The summer my cousins return from Nairobi,
we sit in a circle by the oak tree in my aunt’s garden.
They look older. Amel’s hardened nipples push through
the paisley of her blouse, minarets calling men to worship.
When they left, I was twelve years old and swollen
with the heat of waiting. We hugged at the departure gate,
waifs with bird chests clinking like wood, boyish,
long skirted figurines waiting to grow
into our hunger.
My mother uses her quiet voice on the phone:
Are they all okay? Are they healing well?
She doesn’t want my father to overhear.
Juwariyah, my age, leans in and whispers
I’ve started my period. Her hair is in my mouth when
I try to move in closer– how does it feel?
She turns to her sisters and a laugh that is not hers
stretches from her body like a moan.
She is more beautiful than I can remember.
One of them pushes my open knees closed.
Sit like a girl. I finger the hole in my shorts,
shame warming my skin.
In the car, my mother stares at me through the
rear view mirror, the leather sticks to the back of my
thighs. I open my legs like a well-oiled door,
daring her to look at me and give me
what I had not lost: a name.
Maymuun’s Mouth
Maymuun lost her accent with the help of her local Community College. Most evenings she calls me long distance to discuss the pros and cons of heating molasses in the microwave to remove body hair. Her new voice is sophisticated. She has taken to dancing in front of strangers. She lives next door to a Dominican who speaks to her in Spanish whenever they pass each other in hallways. I know she smiles at him, front teeth stained from the fluoride in the water back home. She’s experiencing new things. We understand. We’ve received the photos of her standing by a bridge, the baby hair she’d hated all her life slicked down like ravines. Last week her answering machine picked up. I imagined her hoisted by the waist, wearing stockings, learning to kiss with her new tongue.
Grandfather’s Hands
Your grandfather’s hands were brown.
Your grandmother kissed each knuckle,
circled an island into his palm
and told him which parts they would share,
which part they would leave alone.
She wet a finger to draw where the ocean would be
on his wrist, kissed him there,
named the ocean after herself.
Your grandfather’s hands were slow but urgent.
Your grandmother dreamt them,
a clockwork of fingers finding places to own–
under the tongue, collarbone, bottom lip,
arch of foot.
Your grandmother names his fingers after seasons–
index finger, a wave of heat,
middle finger, rainfall.
Some nights his thumb is the moon
nestled just under her rib.
Your grandparents often found themselves
in dark rooms, mapping out
each other’s bodies,
claiming whole countries
with their mouths.
Bone
I find a girl the height of a small wail
living in our spare room. She looks the way I did when I was fifteen
full of pulp and pepper.
She spends all day up in the room
measuring her thighs.
Her body is one long sigh.
You notice her in the hallway.
Later that night while we lay beside one another
listening to her throw up in our bathroom,
you tell me you want to save her.
Of course you do;
This is what she does best:
makes you sick with the need
to help.
We have the same lips,
she and I,
the kind men think about
when they are with their wives.
She is starving.
You look straight at me when she tells us
how her father likes to punch girls
in the face.
I can hear you in our spare room with her.
What is she hungry for?
What can you fill her up with?
What can you do, that you would not do for me?
I count my ribs before I go to sleep.
Snow
My father was a drunk. He married my mother
the month he came back from Russia
with whiskey in his blood.
On their wedding night, he whispered
into her ear about jet planes and snow.
He said the word in Russian;
my mother blinked back tears and spread her palms
across his shoulder blades like the wings
of a plane. Later, breathless, he laid his head
on her thigh and touched her,
brought back two fingers glistening,
showed her from her own body
what the colour of snow was closest to.
Birds
Sofia used pigeon blood on her wedding night.
Next day, over the phone, she told me
how her husband smiled when he saw the sheets,
that he gathered them under his nose,
closed his eyes and dragged his tongue over the stain.
She mimicked his baritone, how he whispered
her name– Sofia,
pure, chaste, untouched.
We giggled over the static.
After he had praised her, she smiled, rubbed his head,
imagined his mother back home, parading
these siren sheets through the town,
waving at balconies, torso swollen with pride,
her arms fleshy wings bound to her body,
ignorant of flight.
My older sister soaps between her legs, her hair
a prayer of curls. When she was my age, she stole
the neighbour’s husband, burnt his name into her skin.
For weeks she smelt of cheap perfume and dying flesh.
It’s 4 a.m. and she winks at me, bending over the sink,
her small breasts bruised from sucking.
She smiles, pops her gum before saying
boys are haram, don’t ever forget that.
Some nights I hear her in her room screaming.
We play Surah Al-Baqarah to drown her out.
Anything that leaves her mouth sounds like sex.
Our mother has banned her from saying God’s name.
The Kitchen
Half a papaya and a palmful of sesame oil;
lately, your husband’s mind has been elsewhere.
Honeyed dates, goat’s milk;
you want to quiet the bloating of salt.
Coconut and ghee butter;
he kisses the back of your neck at the stove.
Cayenne and roasted pine nuts;
you offer him the hollow of your throat.
Saffron and rosemary;
you don’t ask him her name.
Vine leaves and olives;
you let him lift you by the waist.
Cinnamon and tamarind;
lay you down on the kitchen counter.
Almonds soaked in rose water;
your husband is hungry.
Sweet mangoes and sugared lemon;
he had forgotten the way you taste.
Sour dough and cumin;
but she cannot make him eat, like you.
Fire
i
The morning you were made to leave
she sat on the front steps,
dress tucked between her thighs,
a packet of Marlboro Lights
near her bare feet, painting her nails
until the polish curdled.
Her mother phoned–
What do you mean he hit you?
Your father hit me all the time
but I never left him.
He pays the bills
and he comes home at night,
what more do you want?
Later that night she picked the polish off
with her front teeth until the bed you shared
for seven years seemed speckled with glitter
and blood.
ii
On the drive to the hotel, you remember
the funeral you went to as a little boy,
double burial for a couple who
burned to death in their bedroom.
The wife had been visited
by her husband’s lover,
a young and beautiful woman who paraded
her naked body in the couple’s kitchen,
lifting her dress to expose breasts
mottled with small fleshy marks,
a back sucked and bruised, then dressed herself
and walked out of the front door.
The wife, waiting for her husband to come home,
doused herself in lighter fluid. On his arrival
she jumped on him, wrapping her legs around
his torso. The husband, surprised at her sudden urge,
carried his wife to the bedroom, where
she straddled him on their bed, held his face
against her chest and lit a match.
iii
A young man greets you in the elevator.
He smiles like he has pennies hidden in his cheeks.
You’re looking at his shoes when he says
Last night in bed I swear I thought
my body was on fire.
When We Last Saw Your Father
He was sitting in the hospital parking lot
in a borrowed car, counting the windows
of the building, guessing which one
was glowing with his mistake.
You Were Conceived
On the night of our secret wedding
when he held me in his mouth like a promise
until his tongue grew tired and fell asleep,
I lay awake to keep the memory alive.
In the morning I begged him back to bed.
Running late, he kissed my ankles and left.
I stayed like a secret in his bed for days
until his mother found me.
I showed her my gold ring,
I stood in front of her naked,
waved my hands in her face.
She sank to the floor and cried.
At his funeral, no one knew my name.
I sat behind his aunts,
they sucked on dates soaked in oil.
The last thing he tasted was me.
Trying to Swim With God
Istaqfurulah
My mother says this city is slowly killing all our women;
practising back strokes at the local swimming pool.
I think of Kadija, how her body had failed her
on the way down from the block of flats.
The instructor tells us that the longest
a human being has held their breath under water
is 19 minutes and 21 seconds. At home in the bath,
my hair swells to the surface like vines, I stay submerged
until I can no longer stand it, think of all the things
I have allowed to slip through my fingers.
Inna lillahi Wa inna ilaihi Rajioon.
My mother says no one can fight it –
the body returning to God,
but the way she fell, face first,
in the dirt,
mouth full of earth,
air, teeth, blood,
wearing a white cotton baati,
hair untied and smoked with ounsi,
I wonder if Kadija believed
she was going to float.
Questions for Miriam
Were you ever lonely?
Did you tell people that songs weren’t
the same as a warm body, a soft mouth?
Did you know how to say no to young men
who cried outside your hotel rooms?
Did you listen to the songs they wrote,
tongues wet with praise for you?
What sweaty bars did you begin in?
Did you see them holding bottles by the neck,
hair on their arms rising as your notes hovered
above their heads?
Did you know of the girls who sang into their fists
mimicking your brilliance?
Did they know that you were only human?
My parents played your music at their wedding.
Called you Makeba, never Miriam, never first name,
always singer. Never wife, daughter, mother,
never lover, aching.
Did you tell people that songs weren’t the same
as a warm body or a soft mouth? Miriam,
I’ve heard people using your songs as prayer,
begging god in falsetto. You were a city
exiled from skin, your mouth a burning church.
Conversations About Home
(at the Deportation Centre)
Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.