Originally

Question 1

We came from our own country in a red room

Answer 1

Metaphor, alliteration

Vivid description of their car-
Suggests their unity/red connotes sense of danger/ fear?
Sound of rolling “r”s echoes movement of car

Question 2

Fell through the fields

Answer 2

Metaphor, Personification of ‘fell’
Highlights sense of speed/blurring scenery as they pass
Suggests downwards movement/unpleasant/sense of fear

Question 3

My brothers cried, one of them bawling home, home

Answer 3

Word choice/verbs, repetition
Emphasises emotional wrench of moving home
Highlights boy’s/ brother’s open grief/ distraught at move

Question 4

The street, the house, the vacant rooms

Answer 4

Economical word choice/ listing

Mental retracing of rout- list moves from the General to the specific

Question 5

I stared at the eyes of a blind toy

Answer 5

Metaphor
She looks to her toy for comfort but finds none
Realises toy can neither see nor feel

Question 6

All childhood is an emigration

Answer 6

Metaphor
Highlights changes in life from childhood to adulthood/ magnitude of change/ continuous departure from one moment/ one age/ one level of maturity to another

Question 7

Some are slow

Answer 7

Short sentence
Echoes present
Move/ uprooting to another place

Question 8

Others are sudden

Answer 8

Contrast
Slow and sudden reflect growth to adulthood
Traumatic interruption to the slow process of growing up

Question 9

Your accent wrong

Answer 9

Short sentence

Highlights new set of social and cultural circumstances

Question 10

Leading to unimagined pebble dashed estates, big boys

Eating worms and shouting words you don’t understand.

Answer 10

Listing
Emphasises new experiences from architecture to customs to language are not pleasurable
Alliteration
Hard plosive “b” creates sense of fear in speaker
Climax
Childs fear rises-effect of profound sense of change in her

Question 11

My parents’ anxiety stirred like a loose tooth

In my head.

Answer 11

Simile
Emphasises lack of roots/ pain and nagging causes by tooth like parents worries
Physiological and psychological implications

Question 12

I want our own country

Answer 12

Italics
Dramatises child’s sense of self and sense of place-
Wants deeply to return to original home

Question 13

But then you forget, or don’t recall, or change

Answer 13

Listing

Highlights progression of time/natural survival mechanisms

Question 14

Skelf of shame

Answer 14

Scots dialect
Hints at her nostalgia-her original language
Metaphor
Emphasises change/ tiny effect of seeing her brother swallow a slug

Question 15

My tongue/ shedding its skin like a snake

Answer 15

Simile

Highlights her social acceptance in new area/city/ new exterior with the self, remanding intact

Question 16

Do I only think
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
And the right place?

Answer 16

Use of question
She asks herself if she only lost things in terms of geography, language, culture- but in losing them lost part of herself/ self identity

Question 17

Originally?

Answer 17

Use of question and italics
Echoes title of poem/sense of roots
Where you belong
Has duffy really learned to forgo her origins or not?

Question 18

Hesitate

Answer 18

Use of verb/ word choice

Suggests it is difficult to identify precisely where she comes from