The Emigrée Brief Response

I recently came across Carol Rumen’s The Emigrée and decided to share with you my initial response to the poem. If you have come across this blog post in the hope of finding a distinguished and essay-worthy critical response, I am afraid that I will have to disappoint; however, if you are simply interested in hearing an alternate perspective on the poem, you may find this interesting.

What better place to start with the poem itself:

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.

Beautiful, I agree, but also confusing — especially in the evident contrast between those clear yet politically fading memories. I’m sure many readers will associate it with the acclaimed The Kite Runner where Amir and Baba similarly leave Afganistan with halcyon days in mind, memories which are difficult to shift even in light of present media footage and, in light of the Refugee Crisis, the 1993 poem remains equally relevant today.

As I said, I perceive great confusion in Rumen’s words and perhaps most significantly in the title itself. The placement of two words – one English and one French – implies that the narrator does not have a clear idea of where she belongs: she is perched between two cultures. This idea is developed in the third stanza where Rumen says, “they circle me” and “they accuse me”. The use of the impersonal pronoun “they” gives no indication of personality and implies that the narrator is isolated and does not fit within this generalisation. Furthermore, the mirrored syntax in each phrase creates something of a repetitive feel, even more so in that “they accuse me” is stated twice in the space of two lines, suggesting that this hostility is a frequent occurrence that the narrator is constantly plagued by. The clipped //c// of “accuse” almost acts as onomatopoeia for the verb’s implied slander, and the fact that such a vile word is placed next to the gentle, sound of “absence” suggests that the narrator is unsure of why she is being treated in such a way.  This innocence is, for me, the most heartbreaking feature of the poem because, as anybody would in this situation, the speaker is feeling lost. In that first line, fractured with caesura in the form of a doubtful ellipsis, we can see stark and overwhelming confusion and ye nobody makes any attempt to comfort her and make her feel at home. On the converse, she is consciously separated and thence isolated in the public eye.

Rumen’s message is simple: all immigrants and refugees have lives, pasts, families and memories: we must treat refugees/immigrants with respect.