Sumaya Jirde Ali

- Norway -

Norwegian-Somalian poet Sumaya Jirde Ali was born in 1997 and has had an outstanding career, so far. When she published the first of her three poetry collections at age twenty, she was already an established contributor in the Norwegian public sphere. She received her first prize, The Bodø Citizen of the Year, in 2017, and The Zola Award for promoting civil courage and freedom of expression, as well as the Voice of the Year by the urban newspaper Natt & Dagthe year after. In 2021, she received the Amalie Skram Award for writing in the spirit of this Norwegian nineteenth-century feminist author. Ali has published two much-read and critically acclaimed memoirs, Don’t Be Afraid of People Like Me (2018) and Living in A Life-Jacket. Diary Notes on Norwegian Racism (2023), and in 2022, her first play, The Ocean Takes What It Doesn’t Give, was staged in Bergen. Apart from this, she has written a large number of newspaper articles and, among many things, edited the feminist journal Fett.


A sensitive political poet

 

The very first poem in Ali’s debut collection, Women Who Hate Men (2017), reads: “I am a black woman / picking up books / and putting them back / in the wrong places” (s. 7). Throughout her work, Ali picks up and places books into her own shelves, in the sense that her work frequently refers to canonical writers, especially to a line of black, political thinkers. By using epigraphs, the poet positions her work in dialogue with the American civil rights movement and pan-africanism (W.E.B. Du Bois (2018b) as well as with the cultural and political francophone decolonisation movement (Frantz Fanon, 2018, Aimé Césaire, 2021), contemporary Scandinavian antiracist and feminist literary activism (Athena Farrokhzad, 2021) and the tradition of testimonial poetry (Louise Glück, 2023).

 

Her poetry puts these ideas in the right place, a new place: the work which is hers. Ali’s work acknowledges poetry as part of, and a sensitive yet out-spoken aesthetical response to, a world historically and contemporarily characterized by unevenness.

 

  1. “Packing myself in Western culture”

 In both her memoirs, Ali delivers poignant analyses of what racism is in the context of contemporary Norway and what the costs may be of writing and speaking out if you are a young, black, and visibly Muslim woman.

 

The liminal space offered a Norwegian-Somalian subject, or a black citizen in a white-oriented context, is explored in many poems. In the poem “I”, in the debut collection, Ali presents an ironic take on the theme. The lyrical speaker dresses “in Western culture,” which comprises the Norwegian national anthem, costumes, and holiday, along with local brands (Bik Bok, Cubus, Kim’s, Tine Dairy) and customs (Taco-Friday). These are all preferred to “African time” and the Somalian national anthem. The poem mixes commercial ads and social media with the values of wasting money and nature (in the symbolic “fur coat”). Being “superficial” is the preferred mode of the Zeitgeist; it is “as it is supposed to be.” That this attitude, identity as clothing, brands, and posture, hides more than it reveals is implied in the act of “wrapping myself in” in the first stanza.

 

  1. “The Burka Woman”

Ali’s debut book contains poems written in English and Norwegian, perhaps showing a poet searching for her language and style. In Melanin Whiter Than Bleach (2018), her writing is focused and self-assured, and her poetry displays a humor that is dark, feminist, and anti-capitalist. In particular, the returning figure of “the Burka Woman” allows for absurdities, oxymorons, and paradoxes. She is the “daughter of two languages,” “bathing in contradictions,” and “always black, always immigrant” from the outside, but inside her, her “body houses oppressors and / the oppressed.” The collection contains her “to-do list,” which keeps her silent and pure, and her “teach me this list,” which assimilates her into Norwegianness. A liberating moment is portrayed on holiday, where “we have neither immigrated nor migrated / here we are without skin.” In the last poem, with a nick to Ali’s first book, “The Burka Woman Who Hates Men / Has Got a Man.”

 

The recurrent imagery in Ali’s oeuvre of living a “life in a life jacket” is introduced on the first page of Melanin. It can be a metaphor for vulnerability, the need for help in a troubled situation, but it also signals survival and will to live despite all calamities. It may refer to the necessary precautions taken in any boat. Yet, in the larger context of Ali’s work, it also adds to the imagery of migration and boat refugees in the following collection.

 

  1. “One of Sixty-Five Million”

When I See the Ocean, The Light Disappears (2021) is divided into three sections, “The Ocean,” “The Refugee Camp,” and “Bodø,” establishing a journey and a chronology, and, conventionally at least, development. Counteracting directions and intentions, the collection starts by naming objects: “worn out sandals, pasta bags, drenched, folded clothes / deep conflicts, dreamlike scars / the light bathes what is no longer there in suspicion, everything the ocean / didn’t give” (p. 81).

 

The items indicate Samira’s visual memory from traversing the ocean and more abstract feelings of tensions and old, perhaps forgotten, wounds. Later, we encounter a similar list, called «fragments of human existence,” where “jogging shoes eaten up by sea salt/marriage ring / […] a baby’s pacifier” hint, in particular, at a life cycle that is interrupted. Samira wonders why she survived.

 

The lyrical speaker Samira is presented as “one of sixty-five million.” The number equals the UN’s estimation of the unprecedented number of refugees displaced in 2015, the year of Europe’s so-called refugee crisis. Highlighted as Ali does, “the sixty-five million” echoes Toni Morrison's iconic “sixty million or more” in Beloved, referring to enslaved Africans in the US. Samira’s ocean is hostile and mean; the waves “laugh at” her prayer “for mercy” and steal “her vocabulary.” Ali’s poems on water, boats, and oceans, and the enormous amounts of lives lost at sea, echo other writers, connecting her work to a larger transtemporal and transcontinental tradition of writing on human suffering, trauma, and displacement in the context of slavery and colonialism, which seriously questions what historical development and humanity means. The book displays a play between dream and harsh reality, traumatic remembering, and oblivion and captures the ambiguous experiences of arrival and survival.

Essay written by Tonje Vold.

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. Part I: The Sea / Del 1: Havet

  2. Part 2: The Refugee Camp / Del 2: Flyktningleiren

  3. Part 3: Bodø / Del 3: Bodø