‘All That is Solid Melts into Air’: Abstraction as Empowerment for the Migrant Mind in the Poetry of Warsan Shire

• Main Author: Subhayu Bhattacharjee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hyperion University 2021-08-01
• Series: HyperCultura
• Subjects: abstraction; decontextualization; non-visible; home; host; time; past; future
• Online Access: http://litere.hyperion.ro/hypercultura/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Subhayu-Bhattacharjee.pdf

Abstraction as a critical faculty has often been in use in philosophical and critical discourses. The frequency of its usage has often left unconsidered the myriad dimensions of the term pointing to the various centers of contemplation of abstraction. These range from looking at abstraction from the perspective of the invisible and non-deictic to minimalism in art. This paper seeks to explore the question of abstraction in relation to the ‘home’ and its equivalent terms in the poetry of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire to see how abstraction is a tool of empowering the diasporic identity. In other words, taking recourse to various facets of the term, this essay tries to show that abstraction identified as the absence of the concrete is a form of individual resistance in itself instead of simply being a tool for philosophers to ‘interpret the world,’ as Marx suggests in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. In doing so, this paper will also attempt to show how an idea such as dissidence could become qualitatively different in a non-European setting and how collectivist resistance might occlude the unique modes of conception of individual resistance.