Momtaza Mehri

Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt. 'Exceptional... Mehri is a truly transnational poet of the twenty-first century' BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other 'A once in a generation poet' CALEB FEMI, author of Poor The definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry? Momtaza Mehri's debut collection poses this question, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. Mixing her own family's experience with the stories of many others across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Somalia, Bad Diaspora Poems confronts the ambivalent nature of speaking for those who have been left behind. We meet the poet, the translator, the refugee, the exile, and the diaspora kid attempting to transcend their clichéd angst. Told in lyric, prose and text messages, and taking place in living rooms and marketplaces, on buses and balconies, on transatlantic journeys and online, these are essential poems about our diasporic age.

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Bad Diaspora Poems

Marion

July marks the ooth anniversary. The poet is the antagonist of linearity.

You begin where you were told the story started.

The Year of Return. The child catches sight of the homeland.

The poet glorifies what the local dreams of escaping.

How many graves will you disturb with your longing?

This reminded me of Dionne Brandie’s note on the pronoun “We” from readings from the wreck:

This pronoun "we" that we invoke is, at base, a we of constant, detailed and expanding consumption, refracting in geopolitical and historical ways. All of us are recruited into this

"we," whether we have the means, or whether we are the means

"We" and "us" are always in flux. The meanings disaggregate with self-consciousness. "We" is an aggregate already disaggre-gated. And even in that partiality there is disaggregation

We are together for better & for worse. Fanon's cavernous We, the We of the Alge-rian, the Martinican, the exiled South African mother, the Sahrawi guerrilla, the Somali teenager in the Libyan prison camp. Fanon's We had the capacity to contain them. His colleagues believed in a We too shrunken for reciprocity.

Politics is a parsing of the We, the maintenance of its enclosure/s, the engulfment of all who attempt to defy its confines. Territory as terror. The plural personal is the evidence of murderous affinity. It is always an absence. Who is betrayed by every assumed We?

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