Thread by @massolit

Right, time for our next thread on the poetry in the Power and Conflict cluster. This time, we are thinking about Carol Rumens’ ‘The Emigrée’.

This time, I’m going to go through the poem sentence by sentence, and think about its ‘blurriness’.

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First up, some context.

‘The Émigrée’ first appeared in Rumens’ collection, Thinking of Skins, which was published in 1993.

This collection contained poems that had already been published elsewhere – in Unplayed Music (1981), Star Whisper (1983), Direct Dialling (1985) and From Berlin to Havana (1989) – as well as a selection of new poetry.

‘The Émigrée’ was one of the new ones.

As the title suggests, this is a poem about a woman – it’s an émigrée (female) not an émigré (male) – who has been forced to leave her country for political reasons.

The country she has left behind, which is unnamed in the poem, has apparently come under the control of a militaristic and authoritarian dictatorship.

It is “at war”, “sick with tyrants”, while certain things have been “banned by the state”.

For me, these images evoke countries such as East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, which were forced to be part of the Soviet bloc following the Second World War.

But neither the country nor the time period is not identified in the poem, so this could be *any* authoritarian dictatorship.

Indeed, one of the first points I want to make about this poem is that it is *in no way* autobiographical.

Rumens was born in South London and has lived in the UK her entire life.

She has never herself been an émigrée.

This isn’t itself a problem, of course.

Robert Browning wasn’t really a jealous duke who had his wife murdered, nor did Shelley really meet a traveller in an antique land.

The *speaker* in a poem isn’t necessarily the same as the poet.

However, the waters are muddied somewhat by the fact that so many of the Power and Conflict poems *are* genuinely autobiographical.

William Wordsworth *really did* go boating on the lake as a child, Wilfred Owen *really did* experience life in the trenches in WWI.

And indeed, I think the conflict between the experiences of the *poet* and that of the *speaker in the poem* is actually quite an interesting one.

To what extent does the power of a poem that is ostensibly based on a real experience (like this one) depend on that experience actually being real?

Anyway, let’s start thinking about this poem itself, shall we?

I actually think it is one of the most difficult poems in the collection.

There are a few strange images and metaphors, and the whole thing is quite impressionistic.

For that reason I thought I’d be useful to go through the whole thing sentence by sentence, and to try and identify what is actually happening and some other interesting things as we go.

I’ve decided to go through sentence by sentence as opposed to line by line as there’s quite a lot of enjambment in this poem (more on that in just a second) and I think it’s easier to see what’s happening on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

There are fifteen sentences in total in this poem. Here’s the first, which covers four lines:

There was once 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.

First question about these lines: how many of them are enjambed?

The OED defines enjambment as “the carrying over of a *sentence* from one line to the next.”

If that’s true, three of the four lines are enjambed – the first three – since this is a single sentence that spans four lines.

That said, it’s more accurate, I think, to define enjambment in terms of *clauses*, not sentences (which is what Don Patterson does in his book ‘The Poem’ for example).

For Patterson, end-stopped lines are those where the end of the line coincides with the end of a clause, while enjambed lines are those which do not.

According to *this* definition, *none* of the lines in this first sentence are enjambed, since each of the line-ends does in fact coincide with the end of a clause.

This is emphasised by the words that begin lines 2-4 – “but”, “for”, “which” – two conjunctions and a relative pronoun – which are words that begin new clauses.

It’s worth paying attention to those two conjunctions – “but” and “for” – because I think there’s something interesting going on here.

First, we have the “but”, which links the opening clause “There was once a country … I left it as a child” with the next clause “my memory of it is sunlight-clear”.

The word “but” emphasises a *contrast* between two clauses:

It is raining BUT I have an umbrella.

I am hungry BUT I have no food.

I am good at English BUT I am bad at Maths.

In this case, the first two lines can be summarised as follows.

I left a country as a child BUT my memory of it is “sunlight-clear”.

So far, so good, but then we get the next clause: “for it seems I never saw it in that November.”

The word “for” introduces an explanation for what has just been said. In this context, it is the equivalent of ‘because’.

I ate some chips FOR (i.e. BECAUSE) I was hungry.

I went to bed FOR (i.e. BECAUSE) I was tired.

So we can summarise the first sentence as follows:

I left a country as a child BUT my memory of it is “sunlight-clear” BECAUSE I never saw it in that November.

If you find that sentence a bit confusing – you’re not alone!

Even worse, it’s actually hard to work out *why* it’s confusing, but I think it comes down to that word “sunlight-clear”.

What does “sunlight-clear” actually mean here?

Looking at the first two clauses alone, the most natural reading of “sunlight-clear” is ‘clear’ or ‘accurate’.

I left a country as a child BUT my memory of it is accurate.

When you get the third clause, however – the one introduced by the word “for” – this reading of “sunlight-clear” doesn’t work.

I left a country as a child BUT my memory is accurate BECAUSE I never saw it in that November.

It makes no sense for the speaker to say that her memory the country she left as a child is accurate because she *didn’t* see it at some certain other point in time.

Our memories don’t become clearer, i.e. more accurate, based on something that *didn’t* happen.

Something *not* happening has no impact on the clarity of our memories at all.

What *not* experiencing something *can* do, however, is give us a *more positive* memory of something than would otherwise be the case.

When it comes to the second and third of the three clauses in the first sentence, then, we are required to understand “sunlight-clear” as meaning ‘positive’.

The memories I have of my country are positive BECAUSE I never saw it in that November.

But this creates another problem. If “sunlight-clear” means ‘positive’ (as the second and third clauses seem to require), the “but” that links the first and second clauses no longer makes sense.

I left a country as a child BUT my memory of it is positive.

We can understand why someone’s memory of a country they left as a child wouldn’t be clear/accurate – i.e. because it happened a long time ago – but not why it wouldn’t be positive.

In fact, memories formed in childhood seem much more likely to be positive than anything else.

Indeed, it seems the sentence would make much more sense if the conjunction used was not “but”, but “and”.

That is: I left a country as a child AND* my memory of it is positive BECAUSE I never saw it in that November.

There’s something quite subtle going on here, I think, which I want to just mention now, but will (hopefully) become a bit more solid once we reach the end of the poem.

Namely: this is a poem which indulges in the blending together positive and negative.

This blending of positive and negative manifests itself in the poem is interesting ways, including the blending of multiple meanings within the same word, and the interchangeability of certain conjunctions (e.g. “and” and “but”).

Right, next sentence:

The worst news I receive of it cannot break
my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.

I think this is actually fairly self-explanatory: the speaker hears more bad news about the (current) goings-on in her country, but it won’t affect her positive memories, which are described as “bright, filled paperweight”.

If you don’t know what a paperweight is, it’s a small, heavy object that is put on top of pieces of paper to keep them in position.

Paperweights comes in all shapes and sizes, but they are often made of glass with objects (e.g. flowers) suspended inside them.

Here’s a paperweight:

The speaker’s memories of her country are (so to speak) encased in glass, safe from external influences (like “the worst news”), like flowers suspended in the centre of a glass paperweight.

Next sentence:

It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,
but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.

This continues the idea from the previous sentence about how “the worst news” of this city cannot impact the speaker’s positive memory of it.

Here, the “worst news” is spelt out in more detail – the city is “at war” and “sick with tyrants” – and yet the speaker is “branded by an impression of sunlight.”

Given that sunlight in this poem stands for positivity, the phrase “branded by an impression of sunlight” means that the speaker has an indelibly positive memory of her country, despite everything that is now going on.

At the same time, the phrase “branded by an impression of sunlight” is a curious one.

Why “an impression of sunlight” as opposed to simply “sunlight”?

The answer, I think, is because it shows how strong the speaker’s positive impression of her old country actually is. Even just an “impression” of it is enough to “brand” her.

What the first three sentences of this poem – the first stanza – is saying then is (I think) as follows: the speaker has very positive memories of the country she left as a child, despite the many bad things that have happened in that country since she left.

The reason she has such positive memories is two-fold. First, because she “never saw it in that November”, which is presumably when something very bad happened, and because, since leaving, her memories have been (so to speak) encased in glass, immune to external pressures.

We now move on to the second stanza:

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.

Before, the memory had simply been “sunlight-clear”, i.e. very positive.

Now, however, it is revealed that the speaker’s impression of the city is actually getting “even clearer” (i.e. more positive) as time passes.

That’s an interesting idea, and we might ask *why* this is the case – why would someone’s memories of the past become more positive with the passing of time?

The poem doesn’t tell us explicitly why this is the case, but it *does* suggest an implicit one, I think, which I’ll come back to later.

At this point, the poem takes a bit of a shift. Here are the next four sentences:

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.

What makes these lines difficult, I think, is the fact that (1) the language is very metaphorical; and (2) it’s not clear what the various “its” are referring to.

When the speaker says “Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it” – what does “it” refer to?

Similarly, when she says “it may be a lie, banned by the state / but I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight”, what do *these* “its” refer to?

One way through these lines, I think, is to understand the “grammar”, and the subsequent “its”, as the speaker’s native language.

This is a native language that the speaker has continued to learn since leaving her country, and is eager to master – to “have every coloured molecule of it”, as she put it.

Next sentence:

It may by now be a lie, banned by the state
but I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight.

If “it” is the speaker’s native language, I think we have to imagine a situation where the speaker’s country has been annexed by a larger power, which has then begun to suppress the native language.

If that sounds far-fetched … it shouldn’t!

The suppression of native or regional languages has formed part of colonial policy in many different contexts for centuries.

When England and Wales were formally combined in the 1536 Act of Union, for example, the use of Welsh was prohibited in public administration and the legal system.

This was extended with the 1549 Act of Uniformity, which demanded all acts of public worship to be conducted in English.

In the 19th century, Welsh school-children who were caught speaking Welsh (as opposed to English) were forced to wear a wooden board round their neck known as the ‘Welsh Not’.

A similar story can be told about the suppression of the Irish language by the English.

In 1537, the Statute of Ireland – passed by the English parliament – banned the use of the Irish language in the Irish parliament, while in 1541, further legislation was passed which banned the use of Irish in the areas of Ireland then under Irish rule.

So when the speaker says “It may now be a lie, banned by the state”, I think the speaker is talking about her native language, which is now “a lie”, i.e. banned by whichever state is now in charge of her old country.

This reading is reinforced by the use of the word “tongue” in the next line: “but I can’t get it off my tongue.”

To have something on your tongue is an idiom meaning you keep talking about it, but “tongue” also means language.

This double-meaning of tongue also explains the next sentence: “It tastes of sunlight”.

What the speaker means, I think, is that using her native tongue brings her pleasure, since “sunlight” always connotes pleasure in this poem.

But because tongue (language) can so easily evoke an actual tongue, the poet can describe this pleasure in terms of taste, which is what (actual) tongues do!

Before we move on, I want to focus on a small detail in the penultimate sentence of this stanza – “It may by now be a lie, banned by the state / but I can’t get it off my tongue” – which I think is actually quite puzzling.

Why does it matter, we might ask, that this language has been banned in one country given that the speaker now lives in an entirely different one?

Her old country has no power over her now, right?

At this point, we might note that “the state” in question isn’t actually specified, and while the most natural reading is that it refers to the government of speaker's old country, it could equally refer to the government of the country the speaker is *currently living in*.

Indeed, throughout the whole poem it’s actually unclear which city is being referred to whenever the speaker mentions the word “city”.

A little earlier, we understood the words “the white streets of that city” as referring to the city the speaker left behind, but “that city” could also be the city she lives in now, in which case the description of the streets as “white” potentially gains racial undertones.

If we continue down this path, we might wonder whether “the state” that has banned the speaker’s native language is not the country she has left behind, but the one she is currently living in.

Indeed, the word “now” in the phrase “It may now be a lie” is flexible enough to cover both interpretations.

In the first case: my language is “now” a lie (because the colonial power has banned it, whereas before it was legal).

In the second: my language is “now” a lie (because I have moved to a country where my language is banned).

I think the ambiguity over which city is actually being spoken about is deliberate, the purpose being to blur the distinction between them.

More particularly, I think we are encouraged to ask the question: would life for the speaker be better if she hadn’t left her country at all? Is the city she currently lives in better than the one she left behind?

This question comes to the fore in the third stanza, which begins as follows:

​​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.

The first line of this stanza introduces the idea that the speaker might want to return to the city she came from.

But she can’t return even if she wanted to, because she has no passport, and “there’s no way back at all”.

At this point, we get what I think is the most memorable image in the whole poem: the presentation of the city itself as a person (or perhaps an animal).

The affection shown by the speaker to her city (now personified) emphasises her continued closeness to her city, and the importance of her personal cultural heritage, including her language.

And then we get the final four sentences of the poem, which highlight some of the *negatives* of the city the speaker is currently living in, compared to the one she has left behind.

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.

The first contrast is between “my city” and “the city of walls”.

That’s a bit of a surprise, isn’t it?

Up until now, the city that the speaker left behind has been the negative one, including being “at war” and “sick with tyrants”.

Now, however, it is contrasted with a “city of walls”, which suggests that the city she used to live in *isn’t* (or perhaps *wasn’t*) a city of walls.

And then things become even more menacing with a series of contrasts between “they” and “me”: “They accuse me of absence, they circle me. / They accuse me of being dark in their free city.”

“They” presumably refers to the native inhabitants of the “free city” the speaker lives in, but look how threatening they are!

They “accuse”, “circle”, and (in the final sentence of the poem) even “mutter death”.

Again, there are potential racial undertones: “They accuse me of being dark in their free city.”

Finally, the final sentence of the poem:

They mutter death,
and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.

The “they mutter death” bit is simple enough, I think – the people who live in this city are threatening the speaker in some way, presumably because of who she is (i.e. an émigrée from a war-torn country).

But what about that next bit – “... and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight”?

Well, for a start, it’s worth noting that all three stanzas have now ended with the word “sunlight”.

In the first two stanzas, however, something negative in the preceding line has been mitigated or counteracted by something positive, which has resulted in a kind of sunlight.

In the first stanza, the negative is that the speaker’s native country is “at war” and “sick with tyrants”, whereas the positive is that her memory of it remains “sunlight-clear”.

In the second stanza, the negative is that the speaker’s native language is “now … a lie”, having been “banned by the state”, whereas the positive is that she continues to speak it, which brings her joy (“It tastes of sunlight”).

In both cases, the two clauses are separated by the word “but”.

There’s some negative, “but” then there’s some positive.

When we return to the end of the third stanza, we see that, the conjunction used is not “but”, but “and”.

This “and” implies that the line “my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight” must be read negatively.

But throughout this poem “sunlight” has been an overwhelmingly positive force, so it would surely make more sense to have a “but” there rather than an “and”?

Thus: They mutter death (negative), / but* my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight (positive).

This takes us back to the discussion we were having about the very *first* sentence in the poem, where we suggested that “and” would make more sense than “but”.

We said back then that this was a poem that blurred boundaries between positive and negative, which manifested in various other blurrings throughout the poem.

Now that we’re at the end of the poem, we can appreciate just how ‘blurry’ this poem is.

Meanings of words are blurred: “sunlight-clear” means both accurate and positive, “tongue” refers to both language and the organ of taste.

Conjunctions are blurred: “and” is used when “but” would be better, and vice versa.

The two cities are blurred: “the city / of walls” turns out to be the “free city”, while “the mildest city” is the one “at war” and “sick with tyrants”.

The point of all this blurriness, I think, is to challenge the simplistic oppositions that we might be tempted to apply to the situation being described, particularly the opposition between the ‘bad’ city the émigrée has come from, and the ‘good’ one she has arrived at.

Going a bit further, we might say that this is a poem that denies the whole concept of conflict.

Conflict requires two opposing forces, in black and white.

What ‘The Émigrée’ is saying, I think, is that nothing is really black and white. Everything blurs together. The shadow is itself evidence of sunlight.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for ‘The Émigrée’.

Apologies for such a long thread that potentially doesn't say much at all!

Next up, we’ve got ‘Kamikaze’.