Centrifugal Force and the Mouth of a Shark: Toward a Movement-Oriented Poetics

Abstract

“No one leaves home unless/Home is the mouth of a shark,” read the opening lines of Warsan Shire’s poem, “Home.” Connecting this powerful poem to the migrant/diasporic literary tradition, this article will introduce a new interpretive framework for the study of migrant literature – one which I call kinopoetics. I modify here Thomas Nail’s (2015) concept of ‘kinopolitics’, or a ‘politics of movement’, which suggests that ‘regimes of social motion’ have historically created the material conditions for social and political formation. Kinopolitics, in turn, recognizes the migrant as the primary constitutive figure of social history and transformation. Extending from a politics to a poetics, kinopoetics takes a non-representational approach (derived from Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Nigel Thrift) that treats literary texts as aggregates of sensible experience and affective maps of migrant mobility. I will explore, then, how these texts depict the migrant experience of disenfranchisement and expulsion, and how they reflect the ‘pedetic social force’, or active political power, that migrants are able to enact. Therefore, I emphasize how migrant literature reconfigures the static, place-based poetics built into a regime of borders and nation. I will conclude with a kinopoetic reading of Warsan Shire’s poem, showing not only how it foregrounds the centrifugal forces that coerce refugees into exile, but also how the migrant’s poetic voice confronts and undermines nationalistic hostilities.