We Refugees - Benjamin Zephaniah

Personal pronoun - emotional connection or link with reader

Contrasts between positive place and negative people (forced to leave)

Violent imagery

Anaphora - Being driven out by your own community (how a situation can change the way people act)

.I come from a musical place/ Where they shoot me for my song/ And my brother has been tortured/ By my brother in my land.

Conflicts between memories and reality

Themes of indoctrination (generational affect) - lack of control (corrupt, totalitarian governments)

Children are forced to conform at an early age (lack of free will)

I come from a beautiful place/ Where they hate my shade of skin […] There you are told what to believe

THEMES of loss (both emotional and physical)

“think” - uncertainty - loss of connection to home country

Erosion of history and culture

I come from a great old forest/ I think it is now a field/ And the people I once knew/ Are not there now.

NARRATIVE SHIFT from singular to plural

Anaphora - emphasises how refugees had no power over their circumstances

Humanising refugees - defeats stigma

Longer stanza - brings focus

Criticises how arbitrary hatred and bigotry are

We can all be refugees/ We can all be told to go/ We can be hated by someone/ For being someone

Ancestral ties - entire lineages/heritages erased

All my family were born there

Tricolon + anapohora + passive voice - loss of power, erasure, robbed of autonomy

Shows defiance to regain identity

I am told I have no country now/ I am told I am a lie/ I am told that modern history books/ May forget my name

Vague “here” + inclusive, collective “we” - unifies all people, regardless of their circumstances/struggles

No end stop - cycle of arbitrary hate

we are all refugees and come from families and a heritage who had to fight to gain their identity and sense of belonging

We all came here from somewhere