Warsan Shire's "Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth" — A Practical Breakdown
This poem is from Warsan Shire's second collection, Foreign Parts, published in 2014. It's one of her most widely discussed pieces and has been analyzed to death in university seminars, which means if you're looking at it for a class, expect your professor to have strong opinions about it. The poem appears in the section of the collection dealing with displacement, the Somali diaspora, and specifically the experiences of Black women navigating violence and motherhood across differentborders. Shire herself was born in Kenya to Somali parents and raised in London, and that biographical context matters here because the poem literally tasks the speaker with teaching her own mother the act of giving birth — something the mother already knows how to do. That circular, impossible instruction is the whole engine of the piece. The poem opens with the speaker describing labor and birth in graphic, unromanticized terms. Not the Hollywood version. The version where bodies fail, where there is blood and terror and the strange disorientation of being both the person doing the birthing and the person being born through. Shire writes about pain without decoration. She writes about the mother-daughter relationship as something that carries inherited trauma the way a body carries scar tissue. The mother in the poem is not just a parent figure — she is also a survivor, and the speaker is trying to transmit that survival knowledge in a language the mother may not have the words for. One thing most people miss on first read: the title is deliberately impossible. You cannot teach your mother how to give birth. She already did. That impossibility is the point. The speaker is trying to give her mother something she herself needs — witness, validation, a shared language for experiences that were never discussed. In my experience reading this with students or in discussion groups, people initially treat it as a straightforward mother-daughter poem about communication. It is not. It is about the failure of language to contain certain kinds of pain, and the desperate attempt to use whatever language you have anyway.
The poem is structured as a series of direct addresses and visceral images. Shire uses second-person imperatives — telling, instructing, demanding. This creates a tone that is simultaneously intimate and confrontational. The speaker is both pleading and commanding. There is no softening language. No hedging. This is deliberate. Shire has said in interviews that she writes to survive, and this poem reads like someone constructing a survival manual out of their own body. The instructions are not practical in a literal sense. They are survival instructions for carrying trauma across generations.
Key Techniques and What Makes It Work
Shire's use of enjambment is worth paying attention to. She routinely lets lines run into each other without terminal punctuation, which creates a breathless quality — like the speaker is running out of time to say what needs to be said. The poem doesn't pause for reflection. It moves forward with a kind of desperate urgency. Combined with the short, stark line breaks, this produces a rhythm that feels close to labored breathing. Not a metaphor for breathing. Actual proximity to the physical experience of labor. Another technique that gets overlooked: the shifting pronouns. The poem moves between "I," "you," and "she" in ways that deliberately blur the boundaries between speaker, mother, and the unborn child. This isn't confusion. It's structural. Shire is showing how trauma collapses temporal and personal boundaries. The mother's past suffering and the speaker's present suffering occupy the same grammatical space. When you're teaching your mother how to give birth, the you and the I and the she are all the same body across different moments. Most casual readers skip over this and just feel that something is "messy" with the perspective. It's not messy. It's precise. The imagery draws heavily from bodily experience — blood, milk, bone, water, hospital spaces, domestic spaces. Shire refuses to abstract pain into symbols. The body stays concrete. This is where the poem differs from a lot of contemporary poetry about trauma, which sometimes elevates suffering into something beautiful or transcendent. Shire keeps it in the flesh. The result is harder to read but more honest. I've found that readers who come to this poem expecting lyric beauty often recoil. Then they come back to it.
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Common Misreadings and Where People Go Wrong
The biggest mistake is treating this as a poem about a difficult mother-daughter relationship that resolves into understanding. It doesn't resolve. The title's impossibility remains impossible at the end of the poem. The speaker is still trying. That lack of resolution is the whole argument. Shire is saying: some things cannot be taught, some things cannot be passed on cleanly, and you do it anyway because not doing it is worse. A second misreading is interpreting the poem as purely autobiographical shorthand for Shire's own experience as a Somali woman in the diaspora. While that context is absolutely relevant, reducing the poem to autobiography flattens it. The poem works because it operates on multiple levels simultaneously — personal, political, historical, mythic. The mother in the poem is a specific person and also an archetype. The birthing is a specific event and also a metaphor for any act of creation under duress. Keeping both readings active at once is necessary. Dropping one makes the analysis shallow. I ran into a specific issue once when helping someone prepare this poem for an oral interpretation. They wanted to perform it slowly and solemnly, the way you might perform Derek Walcott or seamus Heaney. That approach destroyed it. The poem requires a different kind of vocal control — not slow reverence, but the tight, controlled urgency of someone who knows that if they lose momentum, they'll either break down or stop talking altogether. The workaround was to have the performer read it aloud while walking, which forced a natural forward drive into the voice. The poem literally cannot be performed standing still.
Where to Find the Full Text
The complete poem is available in Foreign Parts by Warsan Shire, published by Hogarth Press in the US and William Heinemann in the UK. It's also reproduced in various poetry anthologies and on the Poetry Foundation website, which hosts it with proper attribution. If you're using it for academic purposes, make sure you're citing the published collection rather than a blog or social media post, because those versions sometimes have formatting errors or truncated lines that change the meaning. The poem is also included in Shire's earlier collection Her Blue Body Everything We Know, which was originally self-published and later picked up by marginal press. The text is essentially the same across versions, but the pagination and surrounding poems differ, which matters if you're doing a close reading that depends on contextual placement. Foreign Parts gives you the poem in its more widely encountered arrangement.
Why This Poem Matters Right Now
Warsan Shire gained wider public attention after Beyoncé sampled her work in the Lemonade visual album, but "Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth" predates that exposure by several years and stands on its own. It has been referenced in discussions of reproductive rights, maternal mortality among Black women, and the specific violences faced by refugee and diaspora communities. The poem's relevance hasn't faded because the conditions it describes — the absence of safe childbirth, the inheritance of trauma, the failure of institutions to protect vulnerable bodies — have not been resolved. What the poem does that few others do as well is hold two truths at once: that birth can be an act of violence and an act of creation, and that both can be true simultaneously without canceling each other out. Shire refuses the easy framework of victimhood or triumph. The speaker is neither passive nor powerful. She is competent in her incompetence, which is perhaps the most accurate description of what surviving generational trauma actually feels like. If you're teaching this poem, the most productive question to start with isn't "what does it mean?" but "what is the speaker trying to accomplish and why is she failing?" The failure is the achievement. That's the counter-intuitive core of the piece, and it's where most analysis stalls out because it's looking for resolution that isn't there.
