Words from a Broken World

Abstract

Words from a Broken World is a collection of stories and poems grown from conversations with Somali women in diaspora who are in search of a sense of belonging and a desire to convey both transnational and cosmopolitan identities. The aim is to give these women a voice and a sense of liberty by helping to tell their stories. The work is a collection of poems and stories from women who have fled from death and violence; myself included. It puts forth words from a broken world that many of these women would not dare to share publicly, but were willing to trust me to tell on their behalf. The women in these stories and poems escaped acute hardship and faced the truth of lives that had been forcibly displaced by war and culture. The characters in these stories are refugees or asylum seekers; some still unable to return home. Many of these women have built new lives for themselves in parts of the countries where they had never been. Because of their communities and clan identity, they are now relatively safe. But all have endured agonies of separation and loss. These are stories that are painful to read, and some might find them shameful to norms of cultural sensitivity. But pain and suffering are something that Somali culture will never confront on its own. As a writer, I struggled with the ethics of talking about certain specific events, but decided that it was more important to share the truth than to protect cultural sensitivities. Most of the poems in this collection come from my own autobiography; most of the prose comes from other victims of injustice, from the narratives of characters who were never allowed to share their own stories.