The Emigree by Carol Rumens

“There once was a country… I left it as a child/ but my memory of it is sunlight-clear”

• “Was” suggests that country no longer exist and the whole opening reads like a fairy tale

  • This could imply the country was taken over by a neighbour and lost it’s identity and name or that the country is the same but it is not the same as the speaker remembers

• Implies that because the speaker was a child when she was still in the country, all her memories were happy and appear like “sunlight”

• “Sunlight” can also be blinding which implies that the speaker is blinded to the truth of what her city was actually like

“It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,/ but I am branded with an impression of sunlight”

• The speaker has moved to a country, presumably Britain, this is not sick with tyrants and at war

• The speaker may have lost her country but she has not lost her memories of it

• “branded” is a mark of ownership

  • The speaker is owned by her childhood memories and she cannot escape the past

  • Perhaps the poet is posing the question of if we are all branded by our childhoods which could be negative if the country you come from was horrible

  • “sunlight” however implies the speaker holds hope even though the country is at war and sick

• Caesura could symbolise the writer’s hope that the country might turn around, though perhaps this is an unhealthy obsession

• “impression” indicates that the poet realises that maybe the memories she had weren’t real and were a child’s impression on the world rather than the full perspective

“That child’s vocabulary I carried here/like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar”

• “Childs vocabulary” is the language she spoke in her foreign country but is also a child’s way of looking at the world because she was innocent

  • The poet is now looking back and realises that her view on the world was not a full perspective but that of a child and just a “hollow one”

• Perhaps the speaker assumed that her country was as happy as she was when she was a child but maybe that was a hollow and simplistic representation just as a “doll” is a hollow and simplistic representation of a human

• Although the speaker has doubts about her memory but she gets over this as she “spills a grammar”

  • Grammar is the structure of language implying that there is now a structure to her memories as holding onto her “vocabulary” or memory helps her get to grips with her memories, culture, past and she clings onto this

“It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;/I comb its hair and love it’s shining eyes.”

• The reason why the speaker hold onto her memories is because she has “no passport” and so, she can’t return there

• The speaker is building up an image of the city on paper for us, the readers and this is done to re-establish her memories of her city

• The speaker is aware however that she is controlling her memories of her past which is shown in the second line where the city becomes like a doll or a pet

  • The writer gives a lot of attention to her city, but her memories are false

• This also shows the poet’s loneliness as she has no friends or parents that have been mentioned, so she tries to recreate versions of her past but they are not real

• This is ironic because the “shining eyes” have no love for her whereas she adores it

“My city hides behind me. They mutter death,/and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight”

• Volta at the end of the poem

• The speaker seems to be under threat from the people who still rule that city or perhaps people who criticise it

• “They” could be the tyrants who see her as a threat as she has left the country and she has a voice against the regime- she could be attacked and these attack are commonplace in history

• “They” could also be the people in the country that she has come to live in- they could reject her out of racism/prejudice

• Facing whichever danger it is, by carrying her memory of sunlight she is saving her city. This could be by speaking out against the tyrants who made it sick or protecting the city from slander by the people who live in her country

• Contrast between “shadow” and “sunlight” implies because her body is still here, her upbringing in the city was a positive thing

• “Death” also implies the speaker could be killed but it doesn’t matter because her life is evidence of the positive memory she carried with her of her city- if we interpret the whole poem like this then it is a last testament to her city before she may be killed

• “Hides behind me” also implies when we get to know a person from a culture, we then can learn about their whole country through them

Form and structure of the poem

• There’s not really a form icl

• First two stanzas are 8 lines long but the last one is 9

  • If the last stanza was eight lines, it would end on death, but it carries on showing there is a positive ending, just as the positive memories of her country will keep on going after her death

  • Interprets this poem as a celebration of culture as other cultures enrich the already established culture of a society and we should embrace other’s cultures