I had judged the Foyle and run the course back in 2006, and seven years on, the Foyle young poets group I had taught were scything through Oxbridge, publishing poetry pamphlets with Faber, writing for the national press, and all the time networking frantically. The Poetry Society runs this competition each year, and the prize is a week’s writing course with all the other young winners. Specifically, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award. Now, I thought it was time we won something. By that point, I had been working at the school for three years, partly funded by the charity First Story, and had done a lot of voice-finding already. I decided to create a poetry group.Ī ctually, I didn’t do it to be nice, or to help the kids “find a voice”. Sana had written about her mother tongue: “How shameful, shameful, forgotten.” Ismail, who had never written a poem before, who rarely spoke, covered three pages with sensual remembrance, ending: “I don’t remember the fearless boy I used to be / no, I don’t remember my country, Bangladesh.” So many of them – and so good, so clear. I read it to my class, then asked the students for a list of things they definitely didn’t remember, not at all, from their childhoods. Priya’s poem, though, was like a magic key. “I came from my country when I was six but I don’t remember it. The more terrible the place they have fled, the more likely they are to have seen things that leave an awful, lingering sense of shame. This, mostly, is a good thing, but it does leave a layer of stories untold, and some festering, because very few people make it out of war zones by being exceptionally nice at all times. Students follow suit, speaking to each other in English, of English things, in mixed racial groups. Teachers, on principle, accept each new arrival as simply a student equal to all others, and try to meet their needs as they appear.
DONT QUIT POEM FRAMED CODE
In our school, there is a code of silence. We are always, in this country, obliging refugees to tell their arrival stories: border officials, social workers, charity workers, housing officers all want to know, and the consequences of telling the wrong tale are dire. Some were born in Britain to parents from Bangladesh and Pakistan, some were migrants from eastern Europe or Brazil, a few were refugees from war zones: Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan.īut none of them talked about it much. Miss T’s class, fairly typically, had students from 15 different mother countries. Our school, Oxford Spires Academy, despite its lofty, English name, meets every marker for deprivation and its students spoke more than 50 different languages. Then I took it into my next class, Miss T’s year sevens. She stuck it on her door, just above the handle, so that everyone entering or leaving her classroom had to read it.
I printed out a copy and taped it to the staffroom tea urn, then made another, and took it across to the head of English, Miss B.
I typed up a fresh copy of the poem in Times New Roman, removing a stray comma, marvelling at its shape.
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