‘I resist attaching labels to myself. Am I a
poet? I hope so but how can I be sure? I
would rather describe myself simply as
someone who loves language, and who
tries to make various things with it –
poems, chiefly, but also essays, plays,
translation, occasional fiction and
journalistic odds and ends. Poetry can
sometimes bring these different genres
interestingly together.’
Carol Rumens
Born in 1944 in Forest Hill, South London, Rumens lived for a number years in
Belfast before moving to Bangor, South Wales, and is currently Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Hull. She has also travelled widely in Russia and Eastern
Europe. As with Larkin reflecting on his time in Belfast as emphasising ‘the
importance of elsewhere’ – a place that served to reaffirm his Englishness –
Rumens has found foreign customs, cultures and languages the source of
much poetic inspiration, but one which has arguably provoked a more complex,
liberated response: ‘a new city street-plan’, as the narrator puts it in ‘A Hiccup in the
History of Belfast’ from Holding Pattern (1998), where ‘names / Try to slip through the
pages incognito, / Blending with the crowd’. This fascination with elsewhere has also
encouraged her to publish many Russian translations, including a version of Pencil
Letter by Irina Ratushinskaya (1988), The Poetry of Perestroika (1990), and Yevgenii
Rein: Selected Poems (2001).
Context of The Emigree
•Millions of people have been displaced, because their mother-land is a war zone.
•Families leave due to political corruption and oppressive dictatorship.
•People choose to immigrate to other countries, often in the West, in the hopes of a
better, safer life.
•Unfortunately, some feel that they are neither welcome in their new location nor the
country whence they came.
Let’s take a trip down …
Recall some of your childhood memories … what spring to mind?
Share with a partner…
Choose ONE word that you would use to describe your childhood
memories and write it down.
Childhood memories
Do we idealise it?
Or remember it realistically?
What emotion dominates your childhood
memories?
How many of you would love to go back to being a
child? Why? Why not?
Memories are evocative and our past can shape our
future.
What does the title ‘The Emigree’
mean?
Emigree (emigrant) - someone who leaves one
country to settle in another
Immigrant - someone who comes to a country
in order to settle there
https://www.bbc.com/bitesize/guides/zqchfrd/r
evision/1
The Emigrée (1993)
Carol Rumens
There once was a country… I left it as a child
but my memory of it is sunlight-clear
for it seems I never saw it in that November
which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.
The worst news I receive of it cannot break
my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.
It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,
but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.
The white streets of that city, the graceful slopes
glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks
and the frontiers rise between us, close like waves.
That child’s vocabulary I carried here
like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.
Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it.
It may by now be a lie, banned by the state
but I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of
sunlight.
I have no passport, there’s no way back at all
but my city comes to me in its own white plane.
It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;
I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.
My city takes me dancing through the city
of walls. They accuse me of absence, they circle me.
They accuse me of being dark in their free city.
My city hides behind me. They mutter death,
and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.
The Emigree – Carol Rumens
Stanza 1
Form and
structure
Language
Imagery
Rhythm/
Rhyme
Tone
and
Themes
Stanza 2
Stanza 3
Thought Tracking Exercise …
Imagine you are the speaker of the poem … summarise
in one word or sentence how you feel.
What can we notice about the words we shared? What
does this tell us about the Speaker?
Summarise for yourself in 25 words EXACTLY what this
poem means to you … What is it about? What message
does it carry?
Now annotate your
poems using the
prompts here:
Themes
•Power of humans
•Power of memory
•War
•Identity
•Childhood
•Racism
Tone
•Joy
•Fear
•Melancholia
•Disappointment
Language
•Personification
•Metaphor
•Synaesthesia
•Repetition
•Pathetic fallacy
Plot
Context
Form
•Enjambment
•Motif of sunlight
•Ellipsis and caesura