anthology: the emigree.

Question 1

what is the purpose and meaning of the text?

Answer 1

• speaker talks about a city in a country she left as a child.
• positive views on her home country.
• under attack and unreachable but comes to speaker in stanza 3.
• unknown ‘they’ accuse/ threaten speaker but still sees the city in a positive way.

Question 2

what is the context of the text?

Answer 2

• translator from south London.
• taken from 1993 poetry book.
• fascination with elsewhere.
• immigration rules encouraged free movement.
• more possible.
• experience of speaker- very relatable to people who have experienced these things or heard about it in the news.

Question 3

language and structure: explanation and quotes.

Answer 3

‘there once was a country….i left it as a child’- kind of like the start of a story, relaying her childhood memories.
- repition at the end of each stanza, emphasising the warm, clear, comforting memory.
- motif of sunlight.
- unrhymed stanzas.
- conversational- caesura, enjambement and end- stopped lines.
- and my shadow falls as evidence to my sunlight’- her pain and trauma had to exist to know something better.
- ‘glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks’ - personification, time as a soldier, attacking, worse as it goes on.

Question 4

key quotes.

Answer 4

• ‘but i can’t get it off my tongue. it tastes of sunlight.’
• ‘no passport, there’s no way back at all.’
• ‘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.’

Question 5

what does it pair well with?

Answer 5

• london.
• poppies.