AQA Power and Conflict: The Emigrée

This poem, by Carol Rumens, is taken from her 1993 collection 'Thinking of Skins'. It describes, in the first person, the situation of a person who has left their native land for reasons that are not made clear, and who romanticises the image of their native city.

The title indicates the focus on a single speaking voice. An emigrée would normally be someone who has left their own country unwillingly, perhaps because of political pressure, or economic reasons. It was first used popularly to refer to French people who left France as a result of the 1789 revolution; refugees from the French Revolution in eighteenth-century England were known as 'émigrés' rather than refugees.The rather old-fashioned and refined term both indicates that it is a female speaker (the male form is émigré), and suggests times past. Although it is often used as an equivalent for words such as 'migrant', the term implies perhaps more choice about the manner of leaving than the use of 'refugee' would suggest. In strictly etymological terms, the word suggests more agency--a refugee seeks refuge, an emigre leaves or migrates from their country.

The poem has three stanzas in a rough pentameter, imitative of the speaking voice, of eight, eight and nine lines each. There is not a clear rhyming-scheme, but there are occasional half-rhymes that rely on assonance for their effect, such as 'break / weight', and sometimes end-rhymes, as for instance in the final stanza (city/me/city), create a striking effect when they occur. The repetition of 'sunlight' in the final line of each stanza has a slightly deadening effect, and the repetition is a slightly heavy-handed way of reiterating the central theme of the poem. The patterns are more stressed than syllabic, with between ten and thirteen syllables, but five clear stresses in each line. Although many of the lines show enjambement, this is not immediately evident, with lines often appearing end-stopped at first reading (for example 'I left it as a child / but my memory of it..' or 'my city takes me dancing through the city / of walls'. This creates a curiously multi-layered effect, as though the speaker is constantly adding on ideas and explanations to her original statements. In the final stanza it gives the effect of a final word, as the concluding 'extra' line seems to answer and reject the negativity of the preceding lines.

The start of the poem creates a sense of childlike innocence with the narrative gambit ‘There once was a country’. The inverted syntax and ellipsis powerfully suggest the conventional ‘once upon a time’ formulaic opening to a fairytale. This opens out the key contrast between the poem, between the darkness and struggle suggested by the semantic field of war, with the implicit and symbolic winter suggested by ‘that November / which…comes to the mildest city’, and the enchanted world of the child’s memory, illustrated by images that suggest toys, such as ‘the bright, filled paperweight’ or  the ‘hollow doll’ or paper plane. This contrast is enacted by the opposition between the repeated, positive image of ‘sunshine’ (the repetition of ‘of sunlight’ at the end of each stanza is a use of the rhetorical figure known as epistrophe) and the negative semantic field that opposes it.

Words such as ‘war’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘tanks’ undermine the idealistic ‘sunlight-clear’ memory, and suggest that the child knows that their memory is fantastical and unreliable, even as she clings to it.  The repetition of the provisional ‘may’ in ‘it may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants’ foreshadows the inevitable ‘but’ that follows. Regardless of the reality of the city, its metaphorical illness, the memory of happiness is a ‘brand’ that cannot be forgotten. Ironically the negative word 'brand' is here used to imply a positive--perhaps suggesting the ways that even apparently negative experiences can be positive if they are linked strongly to something highly valued.

In the second stanza, the 'tanks' of war are seen as objects--perhaps even toys-- owned by a personified time, which roll through the city. Despite the 'tanks of time' flattening memory, and the barriers this creates, the memory of the city is seen as 'even clearer', idealised with a 'glow  in recollection. The speaker has been absent from her homeland for such a long time that she has only 'a child's vocabulary' which she worries may be inaccurate--'a lie, banned by the state'. Nonetheless it persists, in much the same way as language persists in Sujata Bhatt's 'Search For My Tongue'. The image of the hollow doll, like a Russian doll, containing within it many smaller dolls, suggests something smuggled out of the country, the image of 'every coloured molecule' making the memory of language seem like a drug or sweet that is attractive to the taste--something picked up in the final line of the stanza. The 'mother tongue' of the speaker cannot be removed, and in a synaesthetic reference 'tastes of sunlight'.

In the final stanza, it is made clear that the exile is unable to travel back to their homeland, perhaps because of political or practical reasons, 'I have no passport'. The city, though, is then personified as something that comes to the speaker 'in its own white plane...docile as paper'. In an effect known as zeugma, the author here has made both the city and the plane possible referents for the phrase 'docile as paper'--the image of the paper plane, or the paper city (with its 'white streets') perhaps includes the paper on which this poem is written. Paper becomes an agent of memory.

The personified city seems almost like a pet (or a doll?) that the speaker tends to: 'I comb its hair and love its shining eyes', and this peaceful domestic image of calmness contrasts with what is probably really happening to the childhood city. In the final lines of the poem we discover indeed that it has become a 'city / of walls', threatening. 'They' in l.6 of the final stanza may refer to the walls, but equally may refer to a mysterious 'they' who accuse the speaker of abandonment. As such, 'they' may represent all the children who did not escape the city before 'that November'. The dancing child consoled by her happy memories is nonetheless circled by walls, or other children, a threatening gang who repetitively 'accuse' her of 'being dark in their free city'. The darkness here is of course a strong contrast to the 'sunlight' with which the speaker surrounds herself, and may suggest an element of Orwell's 'doublethink', in that her accusers accuse her of being 'dark', say that the city is 'free' while acting as though they are oppressive and restrictive, and threatening death.

The personified city is sheltered by the speaker in the face of this threat against memory: 'my city hides behind me'. The implication here is surely that even if the memory that the child cherishes is false to the way that the city now is--even if the city is in fact full of people angrily proclaiming freedom, furious at emigrees who have 'abandoned it', over-run with tanks and 'sick with tyrants', that nonetheless, what the child cherishes is in fact more true to her homeland's spirit than its current condition. In the final, complex image, as 'they mutter death' it is as though the city behind her glows brightly again, casting a shadow onto 'them' and throwing back the accusation of 'being dark'. The shadow is 'evidence of sunlight', just as perhaps, the sadness and threat is also evidence of a brighter future embedded in the memory of a brighter past 'of sunlight'.

The poem was one of those chosen for the 'Poetry by Heart' project and you can see a copy of it, and some further information about it on the 'Poetry by Heart' website. This interview by Lidia Vianu gives some additional context for the poem that you may find helpful, and Carol Rumen's own website also gives some additional context to her work which you may find interesting.