A poet sensitive to light...

The poet Carol Rumens tells a story as she writes in ‘The Emigree,’ of the complexities of migrant life that the ordinary person can probably never understand. From a collection by the poet entitled ‘Thinking of Skins,’ it offers a window to the confused thoughts of a migrant, on that journey that, but for the grace of Allah, we could all have taken, in another life, at another time, and in another place.

‘The Emigree’ speaks not of rights, but appears to have uniquely captured the uncertainties of migration, and I have integrated the poetry here to promote a colloquial understanding rather than a literary perspective. I have always been keen to present poetry in this way, and this work offers a rare opportunity to do so... ‘There once was a country...’ and the pause here speaks not only wistfully of home, but of reflection, but certainly tinged with regret. ‘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.’

We understand the female child she was at the time didn’t want to leave her happy place behind. However, ‘The worst news I receive of it cannot break my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.’ The news is clearly of war or conflict from the home which is never identified, though she could easily be speaking of somewhere like the Sudan, where corruption is rife. ‘It may be at war,’ she wrote, and ‘it may be sick with tyrants, but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.’ So she still holds on tightly to all that was good in her old home, still longs for its light, maybe a metaphor for its once bright future.

‘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,’ has nothing to do with tanks or frontiers, but the inexorability of time, and how ‘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,’ expresses clearly that every migrant has a need for the new language, and how proud she is to have mastered the new colourful vocabulary. However, she then finds that her former language, ‘It may by now be a lie, banned by the state but I can’t get it off my tongue.’ So she may have learned a new language, but her native language will live on, in her, and she so loves it, as ‘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.’ So her former safe haven was perfect, but now she finds herself in a new city, probably in reality a new country, seeking a home, but being unwelcome. ‘They accuse me of absence, they circle me. They accuse me of being dark in their free city.’

And so, as she thinks of home, ‘My city hides behind me,’ she feels threatened by this new freedom, and in hearing, ‘They mutter death, and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight,’ she feels unease in this new place, that she cannot yet call home, as there is no sunlight, no light. I don’t believe that the use of the word death means that she particularly feels threatened at this time, but maybe she feels the fate of every city, every country, is to be doomed to conflict and ruin.

I’m uncertain though whether Rumens is judgemental of societies, and their attitude to immigrants, but is trying to see displacement, and forced migration, through their eyes, rather than ours, which is most often the perspective. Interestingly, this poem was published in 1993, all of 31 years ago... As much as things change... they stay the same.