I’m a 24 year old MA student of Somali heritage and I’m currently studying African Gender History. I love to eat, write, sing loudly, dance wildly, eat some more and then write again.

I believe there are so many stories that have yet to be told, sometimes because there are no ears to listen other times because the voices are weighed too heavily into silence with life and experience. I write because I have to, because the experiences of my mother (and her mother and her mother before her) need to be told to guide my future daughter. I can’t make sense of the world except to write. So in essence, life, love, womanhood, friendship, mothers, daughters, tears and strength are what inspire my poetry.

I celebrate women and all parts of womanhood and believe that we are all unique. I believe being a Complexd Woman is about creating and carving out your own path, dancing to the beat of your own drum while you continue the legacies of all the sisters before you. We are all collective individuals; separate shining lights joined, a group in the individual as well as individuals in a group. I hope that is what I am doing in my time.

Read a snippet of Nimo’s poetry below

THAT WOMAN, THIS WOMAN, THOSE HANDS

She’s been over so many things,

Not one you could be under.

So next time you think you know a thing about her

Or even begin to wonder,

Know that this is the true Amazonian woman!

How can I make you believe?

That these women move mountains on a daily basis,

Creating fountains of life so potent,

No warlord will ever be able to take or break it!

This is the woman of the Pharaohs,

Whose tapestry is so rich with so many stories untold?

She whispers her secrets only to herself.

The Somali woman.

Do you know of women who build homes with their hands?

Weaving the fabric of a country

With just their own two hands,

What can you know of infibulations?

When you spend your time contemplating,

Why it is that she wears that?

For that is your major most trepidation

And she!

Well She has to worry how to rear a child of no apprehension

And no hesitation

In a world full of cancellations.

You know of child birth and labour,

She knows of being sewn, torn, and sewn again

Ripped open for his pleasure

And for equal measure

She’s taken fists in the face and knees in the stomach

Yet she gets up the next day and fills his stomach.

For duty is the first rule of being this woman.

Have you heard of a woman whose tears are silent and dry

For she will never cry,

On the outside,

But on the inside,

She’s died a thousand times?

You’ve seen refugees on the TV

Swollen bellies and flies,

She’s seen sorrow as she flies

Thousands of miles

Leaving her babies behind

Just so she can go, search and find,

That better life!

Alone she stands as an alien in a foreign land

Away from the home she built with her very own hands

Away from the babies she nearly died to deliver

Away from dalka hoyoo who she hopes can forgive her

Away from the wallal she would die to protect

And all the other brothers she’d give her own soul to resurrect.

Nimo Hussein