Précis: This poem describes the pitiable condition of a female child who is compelled to leave her childhood home and shift to another land. The exact location of the city is unclear and precise details of it are sparse. Perhaps it only ever really existed in the Émigrée's imagination.
Context: Carol Rumens was born in South London and grew up there. In addition to her own verse, she has published a number of translations of Russian poems and has, according to the critic Ben Wilkinson, a "fascination with elsewhere". This fascination is clear in The Émigrée, which deals with a land and a city which for the spear is permanently "elsewhere".
The poem explores the memory of the poet and their experiences in a far-off city they spent time in as a child. The poet is looking at this city through the eyes of a child and the happy memories she had, she compares these to the truths she knows as an adult which is much harsher.
Émigrée relates to the word emigrate, the idea that a person goes and settles in another country, sometimes not feeling welcome to return.
The poet bases many of the ideas on modern examples of emigration from countries like Russia or the Middle East where people are fleeing corruption and tyranny, or those countries change in their absence to some form of dictatorship.
Themes: The poem has a deep sense of conflict in terms of emotions and memory, the poet is torn between her childhood memory and her adult understanding. This also reflects in the form of the city itself today which has become a hostile totalitarian place. The concept of a city can be a metaphor for memories and growth in general, progression from childhood to maturity.
Exile: The speaker seems to be an exile from an unknown city. Perhaps this mysterious and now unreachable city the speaker recollects is meant to represent the past, to which they can't return to. A repeated comparison like this, which runs through the poem, is known as an extended metaphor:"émigrée", "I left it as a child", "the frontiers rise between us", "there's no way back", "I have no passport".
News reports: Words and phrases associated with TV news bulletins used throughout. The vocabulary used throughout the poem depicts a war-torn country under the control of a brutal government. If the speaker's memories are of childhood, perhaps these terms are meant to represent the harsh realities of the adult world. The vocabulary of the newsroom in the poem: "worst news", "at war", "tyrants", "rolls its tanks", "banned by the state".
Light and shade: References to sunlight is repeated all the way through. The repeated references to sunlight suggest the speaker has an idealised, almost dream-like picture of the past, where it is always sunny. However, the place is not as perfect as she remembers it and mentions of "dark" and "death" imply that things are not as ideal as her memories suggest. There is a sense that her relationship with the place may be threatening to her in some way:"sunlight-clear", "branded by ... sunlight", "bright, filled paperweight", "the white streets", "tastes of sunlight", "being dark", "my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight".
Structure: The poem presents itself as a first-person account of an émigrée's relationship with her homeland. However, given the place is not named, the poem offers a more general consideration of the relationship between people, the places they left behind in childhood and to which they are unable to return. The lack of specific details about the émigrée's homeland implies that the poem may not be in any sense directly autobiographical. The speaker of the poem may be fictional and the city itself imaginary.
The poem is composed of three stanzas. The first two stanzas are eight lines each and the last stanza has nine lines. Why there's an extra line is unclear. Perhaps it suggests the speaker just can't let go of the memories and just doesn't want the poem to end?
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English GCSE AQA: Comprehensive Analysis of the Power and Conflict Poems
Non-FictionI decided to make a book on all the Power and Conflict poems for the English GCSE exams. NOTE: This book's analyses are very long and wordy due to much information from different sources. Although they are segmented, some may not find too much comfo...
