Channelling East African Poetic Futures Through Diasporic Experiences

Warsan Shire, a British national born of Somali parents in Kenya, and Nayyirah Waheed an African poet in the United States, through their poetry collections, Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Salt (2013), respectively, address the issues of mobility, cultural appropriation and commodification, issues of gender, ethnic and racial conflicts, amongst others, by creating a hybrid space of poetry production and consumption. This paper aims to study how the poets address experiences through their created personas by incorporating forms of new media in their poetic style. It observes that both writers trace their origins to East Africa, an aspect of their heritage that presents itself in their work as they trace migrant experiences from the African region to Europe and North America. This will also form the ideas presented in the paper interrogating the East African intellectual and cultural histories which inform the current and future production of poetry.