The Intertextual Relation Between Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli and “Home” by Warsan Shire. Claudia Excaret Santos Campusano College

Migration is not a contemporary phenomena; it has defined human nature since (or even before) crossing The Bering Strait. Humans migrate for two reasons: they are looking for better lives or they simply cannot stay—the latter being the most important and less comprehended. The idea of someone being unable to stay is easy to understand, but when migrants arrive to their destination, the fact that they could not stay home (and are not simply looking for improvement in their lives) is often inconceivable, and they are treated with mistrust. Migrants in both the poem “Home,” by Warsan Shire, and the essay Los niños perdidos, by Valeria Luiselli emigrate because they cannot stay, and are received with abuse. There is a intertextual relationship (as understood by Barthes) between these two texts; the intertextual relation makes visible the difficulty of migration, and recognizing and understanding this intertextual relationship helps to understand their situation.

Intertextuality, as explained by Barthes, is the relation between texts created by language (instead of by the author). The meaning of the words used by the author does not belong to him because he/she rearranges existing words, and this words already have meanings that are...