A Quote by Warsan Shire
I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel once. I'm bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.
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I went to Ethiopia, and it dawned on me that you can tell a starving, malnourished person because they've got a bloated belly and a bald head. And I realized that if you come through any American airport and see businessmen running through with bloated bellies and bald heads, that's malnutrition, too.
I’m saying language is a passport. A dubious, dangerous passport too.
With me, traveling for work is arriving at the airport, checking into the hotel, leaving the hotel the next morning at 4 or 5 to do something like 'The Jimmy and Jackie Captain Crazy Morning Zoo,' doing a bunch of those in a row, then going back to the hotel, and then finally going to the club.
I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.
When I was on the road full-time, there was about an eight, nine year stretch where I averaged, conservatively, 250 days a year out on the road. That's basically you fly into a town, you get a Rent-A-Car, find a hotel, go to the gym, you eat, you go to the arena, go back to the hotel, you wake up, go to the airport and go somewhere else.
Once I accidentally left my passport in Nice, France, when I was on my way to Prague. Upon arriving in Vienna, after taking an overnight, and being asked to present my travel documents and realizing I forgot them at the hotel, they kicked me off the train and sent me back!
I woke up one time coming out of a blackout, and I was on an airplane, descending to land in Charles de Gaulle Airport in France. And all I can think is I must have decided it was a good idea to go to France, and got my passport, and got on a plane.
My new favorite thing is to wake up in hotel rooms, and write on the hotel pads. Usually, it's nothing. I leave it in a hotel and get really embarrassed about the maid picking it up, wondering what in the hell I'm talking about.
If you stand with the Customs and Border Protection officers who staff the passport booths at Dulles airport near the nation's capital, their task seems daunting.
When you have these van tours, you drive six hours with the doors closed and windows rolled up. You pull into the venue, check into the cheap hotel you can afford, eat whatever is there, sleep, wake up, and repeat. You're not really participating in the community.
For instance, I'm in Beverly Hills right now at a hotel. I told myself, "Man, it's so beautiful out here. If I ever moved to L.A., I would probably want to buy a house in Beverly Hills." The thing is, once I leave Beverly Hills, [I realize] there's no bodegas in Beverly Hills. Once I leave L.A. and go back to Miami or if I go visit New York, it's like, "Oh man, there's the bodega." What I'm saying is that you can't forget the reality. Sometimes people take success and forget about reality.
I have a diplomatic passport for India, diplomatic passport for Albania. I have Vatican passport and to America, I can go any time.
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
Whenever I travel to the South, the first thing I do is visit the best barbecue place between the airport and my hotel. An hour or two later I visit the best barbecue place between my hotel and dinner.
It can be really tough to find decent veggies when you're racking up highway miles or bouncing from airport to airport.
If I were one of the three viable presidential candidates, I doubt I'd be too broken up about someone looking into my passport file. Go ahead look, I'd say. It's the passport photo I wouldn't want anyone getting his hands on.
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