The vast majority of young students at Oxford Spires Academy in England are refugees and economic migrants. According to teacher Kate Clanchy, this mixture of cultures and languages creates something magical, including some remarkable poetry in English. Clanchy has published some of them in an anthology, England: Poems from a School. They include the wistful, sensuous “My Mother Country” by Rukiya Khatun, a 17-year-old from Bangladesh. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Lovely Poetry from English Immigrant Schoolchildren”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Despite its aspirational name, Oxford Spires Academy is in the impoverished outskirts of the town that is home to the famous university in England. About 20% of the teens who attend this school are white. The vast majority are refugees and economic migrants from all over the world. They speak a mix of 30 languages.
And according to teacher Kate Clanchy, this creates something magical, a community without a majority culture or religion, and a mix so extreme that no one can disappear into their own cultural grouping. Everyone has to make friends, companions, and enemies across racial and language divides.
Grant, as a result, her students end up writing some remarkable poetry, and some of it’s collected in a book called England, Poems from a School. Kate Clanchy believes that one of the things that makes these young writers so good is actually the process of language loss and change.
All of these students came to English after the age of six, and whether through migration or deafness or dyslexia, all of them went through a period where they lost their native language, when, as one of them put it, silence itself was my friend. And Kate Clanchy writes in her gorgeous introduction to this book, that lockdown period may be painful, but it feeds the inner voice.
And I’ll give an example of what I’m talking about. Here’s a poem by one of her students, Rikia Katun. It’s called My Mother Country.
I don’t remember her in the summer, lagoon water sizzling, the kingfisher leaping, or even the sweet honey mangoes they tell me I used to love. I don’t remember her comforting garment, her saps of date trees providing the meager earnings for those farmers out there in the Gulf under the calidity of the sun or the mosquitoes droning in the monsoon or the tippa-tappa of the rain on the tin roofs dripping on the window, I think.
And there are just a lot of lovely poems in that book. Again, it’s called England Poems from a School, edited by Kate Clanchy.
Well, if they’re all as gorgeous as that, Martha, thank you so much for the recommendation. And, you know, Martha and I love to hear your recommendations for poetry and poets and authors and writing and books that have influenced you.
Send them to us at words@waywordradio.org or tell us on Twitter so we can share them with the world @wayword.
