Displacement
Displacement, migration, and diaspora are all words that define Warsan Shire's poem "Home," as well as much of her work.
"Home" is a poem about migration, about what happens to people when, uprooted from their homes, they find themselves unable to find acceptance in the places they fled to looking for safety. It is comprised of various scenes of discomfort and displacement, violence and movement leading to a loss of physical as well as spiritual home.
Violence
Violence pervades "Home," from beginning to end. It is what drives the poem's subjects from their homes, it is what defines their journeys, and it is also what greets them when they arrive at the places that promised them refuge.
"Home" describes violence unflinchingly and viscerally, beginning with the phrase "mouth of a shark" being used to describe the war-torn environments that often cause migrants to leave their homes. Everything, even things that are not traditionally violent, are made so in the realm of the poem: breath is "bloody" and passports are never merely thrown away; they are torn apart and sobbed over. This presence of violence in every aspect of the poem reveals the pervasive harm that war and displacement and hatred cause, leaching into every facet of people's life and completely altering the way they perceive the world.
Bigotry
The poem's sixth stanza is a collage of commonly repeated phrases used to express bigotry, xenophobia, and fear of foreigners and immigrants. It is incoherent, not coming from only one person but rather expressing the general sentiments and the hatred that many migrants face.
Bigotry, or prejudice, is essentially what the poem is addressing. It is begging those who hate migrants to consider the violence that they were forced to flee from.
Homesickness
Shire's "Home" is, in a sense, a twisted love letter to a home that does not exist anymore. The speaker is clearly sick with longing for the way life used to be; she sobs when she tears apart her passport, and she misses the boy she kissed once in a tin factory. The dream of what home once was only exists in her imagination now, and she wants to make it clear to the reader that she—like all migrants—would go home if she could. For no one would voluntarily leave their homes, and face bigotry, hatred, and danger in a new, foreign country, if home were not so much worse.
The narrator clearly misses home and longs to return home, but her home country has been so torn apart by violence—and continues to be—that she knows she can never go back. But this does not change the fact that she misses it. Even when she is being threatened, she "carrie[s] the anthem under [her] breath." This expresses a true sense of pride in her home and culture and a desire to preserve it even as it is being ripped apart by violence and hate. Although many migrants want to assimilate quickly to their new countries, many also feel a deep connection to their home countries—a sense of belonging that is vital to their identity construction upon their arrival, which is why many migrants form ethnic enclaves to preserve a sense of their lost homes.
