Beyoncé's Lemonade: 10 things you need to know about British-Somali poet Warsan Shire

Tuesday April 26, 2016
Warsan Shire's poetry features at the start of Beyoncé's surprise sixth album. Meet the woman behind the words...

Warsan Shire Said

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The first voice you hear on Beyoncé’s mega HBO “visual album” Lemonade is obviously Queen Bey herself. But the words are not hers. “I tried to make a home outta you, but doors lead to trapdoors. A stairway leads to nothing. Unknown women wander the halls at night.

Where do you go when you go quiet?” are the words of 27-year-old British-Somali poet Warsan Shire. If you haven’t spent much time on Tumblr she might not be familiar but anointment by Beyoncé means world domination is almost inevitable.

1. Born in Kenya to Somalian parents, Shire immigrated to London aged one and grew up in Brent. She was appointed the first Young Poet Laureate for London in 2014 and won the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2013.

2. Her debut full-length collection is due out at the end of the year. Up until now she has published two shorter pamphlets called Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body. In 2012 she released a spoken-word album called warsan versus melancholy (the seven stages of being lonely).

3. On Lemonade, quotes from her poems are featured as interludes between tracks on Lemonade: For Women Who Are Difficult to Love; Nail Technician As Palm Reader; How to Wear Your Mother’s Lipstick; and The Unbearable Weight of Staying (the End of the Relationship). Shire is credited as a collaborator in “film adaptation and poetry”.

4. Shire writes primarily about identity, migration, womanhood and nationality, drawing on the experiences of her family and friends as first- and second-generation immigrants — although she doesn’t use their real names. Her words about love and loss, black identity and displacement chime perfectly with Beyoncé’s political focus in her most recent output.

5. Shire always writes to music, is a self-proclaimed hip hop fan and the “Music I write to” section of her website includes Kano, Laura Marling, Jay Electronica, Toro y Moi and Kwabs.
6. She calls Grace Jones her “patron saint” on her Instagram account.

7. While she might be an unknown to many, Beyoncé is actually a little late to the Warsan Shire party. Shire is a poet for the Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr generations with legions of fans online and in October 2015 she was profiled in the New Yorker.

8. She tweets economically; either lines of her own work or quotes from a diverse selection of voices: Margaret Atwood, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez, Pusha T, Anaïs Nin, Satre and FKA twigs.

9. Film inspires her and she often writes while watching her favourites. She’s a bit of a film buff; her speciality is horror, and intelligent, preferably female-created genre movies like The Babadook, It Follows and The Witch.

10. dream hampton is a friend. The writer, activist and film-maker has collaborated with Jay Z: and she ghostwrote Jay Z’s best-selling book Decoded.

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