In the first part of the poem the unknown narrator is ‘spat out’ of their home, but notes the ‘longing, the missing, the memory of ash’ on the faces of fellow asylum-seekers, indicating the contradiction and inevitability of the desperation for escape and longing for the familiar.

The poem articulates how the vulnerability and precarity of a refugee’s situation is not resolved when they reach a place of supposed refuge due to the emotional toll and long-term effects of their displacement. The representation of individuals’ experiences of migration is typical of her verse which actively humanises victims of displacement by tracing moments in narratives of flight from conflict and the experience of resettlement, as well as asylum-seekers’ subsequent attempts to live with the accumulated trauma. As a result of its structure as a prose-poem it reads like excerpts from the transcription of an interview or a series of interviews, undergirded by poetic language and imagery. The poem is structured in four parts, each representing either a different character, or a different conversation, though this remains ambiguous. In this poem, Shire articulates the former home as both ‘the mouth of a shark’ and ‘the barrel of a gun’, two terms that have caught the imagination of human rights activists working on issues of migrant fatality, political instability in regions of conflict, and violence against and between asylum-seekers. This essay will consider Shire’s much-quoted long prose-poem ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ in the context of displacement. Shire’s work often represents these experiences as gendered, through character-driven verse, capturing a woman in niqab on the bus, or experiencing her first kiss. The wide dissemination of her poetry on refugees’ experiences has raised awareness in popular culture of the violence of the ongoing crisis. Shire’s poetry makes an intervention into the broad field of refugee studies and literature by offering an important meditation on refugees’ experiences of gendered violence and the trauma of flight and resettlement. Warsan Shire’s ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ may be found in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011), p. Close reading of Warsan Shire’s ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’

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