Summary
In the first section, a speaker recalls her mother explaining to her that all women's bodies are houses—containing various locked rooms that hold a variety of emotions, such as lust, grief, and apathy—and that men sometimes come with hammers or keys and break into these rooms.
The second section begins with a Somali proverb that loosely translates to, "A missing man / lying down." It then uses dialogue to describe a sexual assault.
In the third section, the speaker ponders over a situation in which a woman—possibly the speaker herself—develops a plan to take a man back to her place only to have him rise back to consciousness in an ice-filled bathtub, the victim of an unidentified (but unmistakably gruesome) “procedure.”
In the fourth section, the speaker describes her body as people usually describe clothing, something to be slipped on and discarded.
The fifth section describes the speaker's father lying on a table with his mouth stuffed with a red apple.
In the sixth, the speaker muses over the fact that as she grows up, more men arrive with keys to unlock her body’s doors. She mentions some by name: Anwar, Basil, Johnny and Yusuf. She explains how some men begged and others promised to arrive, but never showed up.
The seventh section finds the speaker recalling someone, presumably a social worker, asking her to use a doll to show where she was touched. She replies by saying she doesn’t resemble a doll, but a house, and describes what happened to her using the house as a metaphor.
In the eighth section, the speaker talks about her first love and, in keeping with the metaphor of the body as a house, admits that he discovered a trapdoor when he touched her breast nine years previously. He fell through the trapdoor, but she hasn’t seen him since. He’s still trapped inside and makes his presence known by tracing a hand up her thigh. She then goes on to suggest that he is not the only prisoner inside of her, but that she treats these prisoners well.
The ninth section describes a knock-knock joke, it's "who's there" answered with "No one."
The poem ends with the speaker referring to the fact that sometimes at parties, she tells people that her body is a house where love comes to die, and everyone laughs, although this is not a joke; she has begun to really see herself as a kind of haunted house.
Analysis
"The House" is about a woman coming to terms with the way that past relationships and abuse have manifested themselves in her body and psyche, while also dealing with her own shattered sense of selfhood. It is mostly a collection of vignettes that explore various aspects of the speaker's memories.
The first section introduces the poem's motif of a woman's body as a house. This comparison is particularly potent given the ways in which domestic space is typically coded as feminine, a woman's domain. Shire expands this social construct and re-appropriates it with her metaphor, reclaiming ownership of it at the same time as she reflects upon how her body/home has been taken from her by outside forces and patriarchal or otherwise damaging systems. By telling us that this idea first came from her mother, Shire implies that trauma and abuse can thread their ways through generations, and patterns and habits in relationships can be inherited. This addresses both the proprietorship and agency that is often granted to men (as in, they possess the keys), while also referencing abuse and violence (the use of hammers).
The second section describes the trauma of a sexual assault, exploring the ways that memories of assault can be fragmented or lost. The first line, written in Somali, explores the idea of missing or lost parts of the self, and it is followed by a line that only uses dialogue to describe assault; by stripping the assault of all details except dialogue, this line perpetuates the feeling of bodily erasure that continues to haunt the speaker for the rest of the poem. In losing her identity and her voice, she also loses access to herself, instead finding herself defined by the sharp edges of difficult memories.
The third section finds the speaker getting revenge on a mysterious man, presumably a dreamlike stand-in for the abuser of the previous stanza. Previously the speaker's mother noted that one of the rooms in the house is a "bathroom of apathy"; by placing the man's body in this bathroom, and presumably castrating him, the speaker uses her sense of apathy and numbness to seek revenge on someone who wronged her. Castration implies a loss of masculinity, and so in the act of castrating this man, the speaker is destroying the thing that has harmed her so much. The fourth section is also defined by apathy; by describing the body as clothing, the speaker describes how she feels unattached to her body, or rather she feels dissociated from it, as if it does not belong to her; perhaps because people had previously treated her like her body was not her own. The fifth section returns to earlier themes of familial and inherited trauma; the speaker's own father was the object of her mother's hatred and likely a perpetrator of harm. In this way, the poem continues its inquiry into how trauma and patterns of relationships are inherited and passed down.
The sections that reference former lovers refer to aspects of the speaker's past that continue to influence and haunt her. She makes it clear that memories and past loves have visceral effects on her body, and describes the ways that different men failed or succeeded in unlocking her doors. The next section returns to athe forementioned trauma, with a social worker's visit; this line reveals that the speaker is still haunted by the aftermath of childhood abuse. Her recollections of her first love remind her that some love does exist in a pure form, and not all memories contain ghosts.
The end of the poem finds the speaker still struggling to come to terms with what has happened to her. She uses dark humor to cover up the extent to which she still aches from her past, telling knock knock jokes that reveal her sense of detachment and self-dissatisfaction. The poem is another attempt for the speaker to compartmentalize and understand what has happened to her. Its dreamlike, collage-like format make it disorienting. It does not operate in a linear fashion; instead it winds in and out of the tunnels of memory and emotions; it is as labyrinthine as a house itself, and in this way the poem, too, comes to serve as a house, containing different aspects of the speaker's past, and perhaps some keys to an eventual redemption.
