In one poem, “My Loneliness Is Killing Me,” she describes meeting her uncle at the boarding house, as Somali pop plays in the background: “Steam rises from qaxwo bitter with tears, carefully / rolling tobacco the same color as his hands / He sings along. They don’t fit anywhere.” Shire’s first full collection, “Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head,” will come out in March. Something about that also reminded me of how futile their lives must have felt in this new world. “They would wear these suits, and the suits were a bit too big and would hang over the wrists, and they looked like little boys playing dress-up to go to a job interview that they’re never going to get accepted at. “There’s always been this thing I found particularly sad about some of the men I grew up around,” she told me. In the past several years, though, she had become more curious about the inner lives of the men in her family. Much of Shire’s poetry has focussed on the experiences of immigrant women. In the boarding house, sipping qaxwo-Somali coffee, spiced with cinnamon and cardamom-he told her he felt that he had “failed at life” and was “cursed by the war.” Shire’s parents had also gone to England as refugees from Somalia, and through the years she had often talked with her uncle about his past. He immigrated to England, but he never married or had children. But when a civil war broke out in Somalia, in the early nineties, he lost the scholarship. When her uncle was a teen-ager, he won a scholarship to study abroad family members spoke of him as the relative who had great promise. And you do that every single day and never get anywhere, because you’re constantly lying to yourself.” And then the sun comes up, and the towers have been toppled. “I asked him how it feels to do that.” He told her, “While you’re high, it’s like you build, with your words and with your dreams, these massive towers of what you’re going to do tomorrow, how you’re going to fix up your life. “When you chew khat, you don’t sleep, it keeps you up,” Shire told me recently. Her uncle had lost most of his teeth because of his khat addiction. Shire, who is thirty-three, with dark curls and a high forehead, sat with him in his room at a boarding house in Northwest London, where several immigrant men lived. On a wet day in London, around 2013, the poet Warsan Shire turned on a voice recorder as her uncle talked about his youth in Somalia, his life as a refugee, and his addiction to the bitter-leaf stimulant khat.
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