The Emigree Flashcards
‘Branded by an impression of sunlight.’
-‘Branded’ (verb) connotes that the speaker is being ‘marked’ by her memories and that her memories are preventing her from forgetting her past - further, her memories are biased (unreliable narrator), MOREOVER, it is also symbolic of cattle, meaning she’s one of many.
-‘Impression’ depicts the speaker is biased - it isn’t the truth, it’s only what the speaker necessarily WANTS to remember (the city left an impression on her). The ‘impression’ is preserving her memory - she’s latching onto this.
-‘Sunlight’; constant theme of sunlight (MOTIF) - connotes positivity, which further reinforces the child-like idea of the poem; it’s only what the speaker remembers as a child (naivety and innocence)
‘My city hides behind me.’
-‘My’ (possessive pronoun) - latching onto her city, latching onto her identity; it’ll always belong to her and won’t leave her.
-In the last stanza - last stanza has a volta alongside breaking the regular form - extra line is added, reinforcing her lack of identity.
-‘Hides behind me’ - personifies the city; everything the speaker once remembered of her country is no longer there; it’s now war-torn and ‘sick with tyrants’. The personification reinforces that the city can no longer be what it was, her memories are hidden.
–> The speaker is symbolic of the city, she further represents what the city was before it became war-torn (reinforced by personal pronoun ‘me’)
FORM
No set form; written in free verse and without a rhyme scheme, which explores the idea of freedom.
STRUCTURE
Poet uses enjambment to reflect the fluid nature of her memories and the freedom of her memory over the real experiences
CONTEXT
Main context is around the idea of DISPLACEMENT.
Rumens wrote the poem in 1993; a great upheaval for thousands of people - there is a lack of detail in the poem (unnamed city) as Rumens wants her poem to be as relevant to as many people as possible.
