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Journal of Language and Literature
Vol. 20 No. 1 – April 2020 ISSN: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online)
122
The Subjectivity of Forced-migrant in Poems of and by
Refugees
Nurhadianty Rahayu
nurhadianty.rahayu@gmail.com
English Department, STKIP La Tansa Mashiro, Banten, INDONESIA
Abstract
Refugees’ perilous experiences force them to flee home for safety. Their arrival from home country
to the host country is not only often reduced to be a statistical number in factual reports but also seen
as threats to national well-being. The study aims to provide the argument that poems provide a symbol
of resistance towards refugees’ given fate, and offer a platform for them to create their authentic
version of knowledge. Poems are chosen to be analyzed in this study as they can mediate the refugees’
unique experiences and their struggle to cope with the changing condition. The study argues that poems
of and by refugees can serve as strategic means of preserving memories that connect them with their
past, which shape their present and construct an alternative subjectivity against objectification and
stereotypes pinned to them. Poems analyzed in this research are ‘Home’ by Warsan Shire, ‘The
Icebreaker’ by Yovanka Paquete Perdigao, and ‘Empathy’ by A.E. Stallings. Those excerpts are
interpreted through Feminist Refugee Epistemology (FRE), which according to Espiritu (2018), “reveals
the hidden political forces within the site of intimate domestic interaction in each refugee’s unique
experiences and queer sociality.” The study concluded that poems of and by refugees could facilitate the
forced-migrants’ aspiration and create alternative knowledge as opposed to their common
objectification in mass-media reports.
Keywords: feminist refugee epistemology, refugee, subjectivity
Introduction
Refugees’ experiences, who flee home
because of state violence, civil war, or
colonization, are often mentioned in the brief
news reports as a percentage only, if not as a
threat to national wellbeing. Moore et al. in
Chouliaraki & Zaborowski (2017) stated that
the refugee was a victim of war and conflict in
need of protection but also a threat to ‘our’
community of belonging. The brief description
of their perilous journey to safer countries is
not portrayed thoroughly as their stories are
covered if accidents occur or if they are taken
as captives by the local authority in a detention
center, as exemplified by the letter from Manus
Island detention center written by Boochani
(2018). Unlike news coverage of the refugees
that depicts them as both passivized and
collectivized beings (Chouliaraki &
Zaborowski, 2017), poems are seen as the
artistic means that allow them to articulate
their narratives in the form of poetic
expression. Through this media, refugees can
revive their existence and subjectivity within
their hard circumstances against the portrayal
as victims to be pitied (Anna-Leena Toivanen,
2017). Poetic forms as an expression of in-
depth familiarity of bitter experiences which
reveal despair and agony of being rejected
while seeking for the safer condition can act as
both psychical remedy and political voice in a
state where the power holders fail to create an
inclusive environment in the host country.
The refugees’ state of homelessness
because of civil war, state terrors, and violence
help create the sense of ‘un-belonging’ that in
some societies include the lack of basic
material needs such as food and shelter, and in
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others, displacement is emotional and
intellectual (Shields, 2018). Home is, thus,
paramount to articulate the condition of the
refugees, which shapes their shifting
geopolitical identity. However, this notion of
home is ambivalent because it tends to be
closed tight with the idea of ‘returning.’ For
refugees, “Return is filled with genuine terror:
threats of persecution, imprisonment, or
unspeakable violence” (Castellani, 2019).
Immigrant literature, Castellani (2019) stated,
“mostly falls into one of two archetypes: a
character leaves behind a place to embark on a
personal quest; or a character enters an
unfamiliar country, where they are a stranger
to most, and finds they must navigate its codes
and culture to survive.” The refugees as forced-
migrants also experience similar journeys;
only it is more predicated and tragic, whose
end is uncertain.
Perspectives about the journey, home,
and troubled return help to drive the
conducting of this study. The focus of the
investigation is on how personhood and
subjectivity are reflected in the poems of and
by refugees. The poems scrutinized are
“Home” (Warsan Shire, n.d.), “The Icebreaker”
(Yovanka Paquete Perdigao, 2015), and
“Empathy” (Stallings, 2018). The lens through
which the interpretation of the investigation
takes shape is Feminist Refugee Epistemology
(FRE) within the context of refugees’
experiences in their poems highlighting the
forced-migration crisis.
Refugee crisis analyzed through literary
writings have been done to portray refugees,
and their relation with border policy, warfare,
conflicts, global inequalities and liminal spaces
(Boochani, 2018; Gallien, 2018a; Sakr, 2018;
Sellman, 2018; Surma, 2018); other studies
observe literary writings highlighted refugees’
journey on the sea (Anna-Leena Toivanen,
2017; Stan, 2018) and most of them are
scrutinized through the lens of postcolonial
theory.
The three poems are scrutinized and
interpreted by the help of Feminist Refugee
Epistemology (henceforth FRE) that is
introduced by Espiritu & Duong. To resist the
portrayal of refugees as the utmost sufferers
and naturalized victims of military brutality,
Le Espiritu & Duong (2018) propose FRE to
reconceptualize war-based displacement as
social reproduction and innovation.
Borrowing the viewpoint of feminist
epistemology, FRE places the refugees’
position as the marginal, the oppressed, and
the excluded whose personal experiences are
the site of power contestation and
reproduction (Shalhoub-Kevorkian in Le
Espiritu & Duong, 2018).
The urge to investigate poems of and by
refugees emerge due to most research articles
analyzed fiction, personal narratives,
passbook, and letters (Boochani, 2018;
Hopkins, 2009; Lewis, Rodgers, & Woolcock,
2008; Saint, 2012; Sakr, 2018; Surma, 2018),
while the comprehending of this phenomena
through poems is still minimal. In addition to
the postcolonial theory used to observe the
refugee literary works (Anna-Leena Toivanen,
2017; Cahill-Booth, 2013; Gallien, 2018b,
2018c; Stan, 2018), FRE enriches refugees’
poems elucidation, particularly regarding its
role to provide valid subjectivity enacted by
the poet-refugee and activist-poet.
Methodology
The three poems under scrutiny in this
study are about refugees’ experience by ex-
refugees, i.e., Warsan Shire and Yovanka
Paquete Pedrigao, and the involvement of non-
refugee who is also a poet/refugee activist A. E.
Stallings. All of them are women, which help
the study to interpret refugee’s experiences in
their viewpoints whose political forces
operate within the site of intimate domestic
interaction and queer sociality (Le Espiritu &
Duong, 2018). The selection of the poems is to
highlight the personal history and recollection
of memory as a reconstructed knowledge. The
poetic expression of Shire, Pedrigao, and
Stallings is a hopeful battleground that
deconstructs the gap of global injustice in the
context of the refugee crisis from which the
poets form a new meaning-making.
The study decides to analyze the three
poems by women because of the particularity
of women’s experience that has a strong
correlation with their biological and social
roles as women and mothers. The poems
display the collision of the individual plight
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and how the voice in articulated activates new
meaning-making.
Feminist Refugee Epistemology in
Scrutiny of “The Icebreaker”, “Home”,
and “Empathy”
Le Espiritu & Duong (2018) criticize
public hyperfocus on refugees’ suffering
instead of doing a more in-depth analysis of
the geopolitical cause of their displacement.
This becomes the point of departure to see the
out-of-sight struggles the refugees took to
overcome the effect of war Hyndman (2010)
and Lubkemann (2008) in Le Espiritu & Duong
(2018). In line with the reconceptualization of
war-based displacement, the FRE-shaped
interpretation on the three poems: “The
Icebreaker”; “Home”; and “Empathy”, tries to
investigate the portrayal of refugees as a
subject who can construct their meaning-
making and tell their authentic experience as
an act of struggle as well as survival decision-
making.
“The Icebreaker” is a perfect specimen
that reflects poetical voice as an active subject
who fosters uneasiness as the trigger of
conversation in public socialization. “Home”
represents the shared experience of refugees
making a quick, dangerous decision to flee
home because home is no longer a place to
return to. This poem helps readers to fathom
the unattainable horror of refugees’ forced
migrant phenomena. “Empathy” lets the
readers question their position as the
privileged that should not take their ordinary
life for granted in the face of the refugee’s
crisis.
The three poems contribute to FRE in
terms of their trigger to form a new meaning-
making of peace, home, and social encounters
after experiencing the tragic migratory
journey as known facts and personal suffering
that intersect within the context of poetic
expression. The mirror of social interaction
that involves refugee’s experience as the topic
of public small talk in “The Icebreaker” reflects
the realm of “feelings and emotion, in order to
search for the quiet ways to subjugated
refugees stories to get (re)told” (Le Espiritu &
Duong, 2018).
The voice in Shire’s “Home” speaks for the
shared experience of refugees, because
displaced people know, remember, and
transmit the feeling and emotion they feel
when making their refuge voyage to the
unknown. The private grief in the past is no
longer a historical artefact, but “constitutes a
feminist refugee practice of ‘critical
juxtaposing’- the deliberate bringing together
of seemingly different memories to make
visible the subversion” (Le Espiritu in Le
Espiritu & Duong, 2018). The different
memories circulated are those that relates to
the effect of migratory journey, such as the act
of walking through the desert and crossing the
oceans, tearing one’s passport to be able to
leave ‘home’ behind forever, the experiences of
being beaten by the border guards, the
imprisonment, and the refusal by the local
people upon their arrival. Those experiences
are several representations of refugee’s shared
memories as well as personal loss and despair
that intertwine with the public acceptance of
what they had gone through the poem. In this
light, FRE sees the intersection of refugee’s
personal and emotional circumstances with
public experiences as not only historical
artifact but an authorized meaning, if not,
knowledge-making. They own their shared
personal trauma, and they hold the right to
authorize their authentic knowledge and
distribute this in public spaces.
In comparison with “Home” and “The
Icebreaker”, the poetic voice in “Empathy”
confirms refugees’ inhumane sea crossing and
how impossible it is for the outsiders not to
feel moved by the humanity solidarity to help
them get proper aids. Refugee’s predicament is
too tragic, as seen in the comparison used by
the voice to state her gratefulness as opposed
to refugees’ dark journey. Therefore, the
critical voice in the poem questions the moral
consequences of most people’s spectatorship
within the rise of the crisis. FRE helps the voice
in the poem to intermingle the personal view
of a mother within a family with the public
display of asylum seekers, i. e. her reflection of
safety against refugee’s unsafe condition as
seen in public space. The meditating function
of activists/mother enables the readers to
listen, observe, and analyze their privilege to
empathize. This act of comparison portrays the
inevitable criticism of public empathy that
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dominates public spectatorship, instead of
solidarity, towards refugee’s occurrence in the
media. As a consequence, the poem formulates
a dominant transnational feminist praxis
(Swarr; Lock; Nagar in Le Espiritu & Duong,
2018) and fights for the distribution of
refugees’ stories, which focuses on the readers’
uncomfortable spatial and temporal
circumstances within the refugee’s context.
The poetic expression in the three poems
reveals the powerful poetic voice that engages
in refugees’ powerful knowledge-making and
social discussion trigger while at the same
time, construct the question of privilege in
refugee discourse. By considering the dual
viewpoints of refugees, forced-migratory
experience, the three poems reconstruct the
meaning-making process that triggers the
readers in the spirit of solidarity for humanity
and a more inclusive community and social
interaction.
The Intersection of Public and Private
in Refugee’s Poetic Expression
The collision of the public and the private
in the three poems reflect the actual
experiences of the refugees who must leave
home behind and survive by navigating the
host country’s codes and cultures (Castellani,
2019). The social interaction is inevitable once
they arrive on the new land. Therefore, the
speaker in “The Icebreaker” teases how
awkward the society was once she revealed
she was once a refugee. The introvert being,
though, the speaker declared at the beginning
of “The Icebreaker”, she tried to get involved in
social interaction with the society of the host.
Instead of despairing in sudden grief, she felt
You’ve always loved to throw off people
with the refugee line, it’s sometimes
The best icebreakers for an introvert
like you. You chuckle. If pressed, you
Tell them that you spent the summer of
1998 underneath a bed with your sister
Afraid a bomb might rip the ceiling.
The bold sentence reflects how the
juxtaposition of a refugee’s grim private
experience with her humorous sociable
attitude creates a new sense of owning the
conversation, where the speaker can direct
where the talk flows. Her act of laughing at
specific mirthless warfare memories in the
past depicts the personhood of an ex-refugee
who claims her historical yet personal
narrative in public.
Shire’s “Home” has inspired many
protests regarding global inequalities,
especially in the context of refugees. The first
two lines, which stated, “No one leaves home
unless//home is the mouth of a shark//”
signifies the real situations of global forced
migration. The title indicates that the poet
presents the ugly reality about what happened
back at home and the newly claimed home of
the present, which forces them to flee and seek
shelter in a foreign land. Home is indeed a
dynamic concept which carries with it the
historical and cultural stance to receive the
concept of permanent departure.
“Home” is intense in constructing the
terror—starting from the shift of socio-
political condition at home to the ambivalence
of still “carried the anthem under your
breath// only tearing up your passport in an
airport toilet// sobbing as each mouthful of
paper// made it clear that you wouldn’t be
going back.” The private and familiar turns
into the strange and foreign. This intersection
between the private lives of the refugee
bridges them to make a new home more
bearable a predicament in seeking shelter. She
reflects,
The
Go home blacks
Refugees
Dirty immigrants
Asylum seekers
Sucking our country dry
Niggers with their hands out
They smell strange…
How do the words
The dirty looks
Roll off your backs
Maybe because the blow is softer
Than a limb torn off
The host country’s mocks, their
resistance to refugees’ sufferings, the harsh
verbal and physical response upon seeing the
asylum seekers’ arrival provide a better
situation than the more absurd threats back
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Vol. 20 No. 1 – April 2020 ISSN: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online)
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home. This shift marks a meaning changing of
home, instead of being a place to return, to be
a constant journey to adapt to new
circumstances and a rigid concept of survival.
Borrowing the term of ‘the aesthetic of
nightmare realism’ (Sakr, 2018), Shire
culminates her absurd reality shared with
most war-torn refugees. However, even if it is
full of shame, painful, and ugly, she enacts
those experiences boldly in the form of a
poetic monologue.
Stallings, in “Empathy”, transfers her
helplessness to take a stance before the
issues of the refugee crisis and the rise of a
far-right movement contributing to the
making of global forced-migration
phenomenon. She is grateful she did not
become one of the refugees, yet her position
is helplessly ambivalent when she stated,
Empathy isn’t generous,
It’s selfish. It’s not being nice
To say I would pay any price
Not to be those who’d die to be us
She criticizes public response toward this
extraordinary humanity crisis by attacking
their hypocrisy of gratefulness in between
the tragic refugees’ cataclysm. The private
gratefulness within the public catastrophe is
juxtaposed in the way that public morality is
no longer taken for granted.
Dark Humour and Comparison as
Resistance
Unlike “Home”, which is very consistent in
increasing the tension of fearful war, “The
Icebreaker” gives space for a humorous
intervention. The social conduct which often
fosters people to become amiable is not the
motive; she is frank in her introvert
personality but finds an awkward pause in
social responses to her narrative farcical.
They become awkward, and you
laugh even more. You remember
that strangely
Enough you spent that whole
summer too laughing away. Like
when your aunty
Crossed your city waving around
white flag. Just in case.
The poet’s paradox is visible in public
spaces, which turns to be constant guilt when
she is in an individual circumstance. It shows
that dark humor is a social tool by which the
personhood stays in two realms: public and
private. The urge to adapt to a new land and
foreign customs cultivates the poet’s social
interaction, which veils the lingering
vulnerable effect of war.
Consequently, the recognition of the past
is a brave act of enacting one’s personhood in
society so that the focus is not on how pity
from the outside takes everyone’s painful past.
“The Icebreaker” hence is a compelling
trajectory that explores this social conduct of
making ways for social blending a robust
control over society’s reaction to an unusual
throbbing experience.
Similar to what Said (2013) admitted that
exile, which in this case refers to refugees,
compensates the disorienting loss by creating
a new world to rule. “The Icebreaker”
performs such a tiny niche for the poet, at least
in her social role.
Shire’s “Home”, on the other hand, traces
the past aching memories by staying true to
the intense emotion the forced-migration
carries. The robust honesty to admit the grim
past haunting the poet to flee home provides a
merciless description of its changing role from
protecting to threatening. The portrayal of
hardship over hardship before the journey was
taken, when it was done, and after it was
executed was vividly told all through the poem.
Shire’s method of juxtaposing the
hardships at home and those in foreign land
reveals her act of resisting injustice befell her
and her people. Similar to Said (2013), who
concluded upon his conversation with
Noubar—an Armenian friend—that exile is
sometimes better than staying behind or not
getting out. The table maps the poem’s
juxtaposition of the poet’s ambivalence in
narrating forced migration.
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Table 1 The Comparison which Shows Ambivalence in Refugees’ Poetical Narratives
Category Comparison
The shift from familiar
to foreign
the boy you went to school with//
who kissed you dizzy behind the old
tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his
body
the ambivalence of
nationality
then you carried the anthem
under// your breath
Tearing up your passport in an
airport toilet
The dangerous
journey
… no one puts their children in a
boat
no one spends days and nights in the
stomach of a truck
Unless the water is safer than the
land
unless the miles traveled //
means something more than a
journey.
Choicelessness no one chooses refugee camps//
or strip searches where your//
the body is left aching// or prison
because prison is safer//
than a city of fire//
and one prison guard
in the night//
is better than a truckload//
of men who look like your father
The unwelcoming host go home blacks//
refugees//
dirty immigrants//
asylum seekers//
sucking our country dry//
niggers with their hands out//
they smell strange//
savage
maybe because the blow is
softer//
than a limb torn off//
or the words are more tender//
than fourteen men// between
your legs
A sense of place to
return
I want to go home but home is the mouth of a
shark//
home is the barrel of the gun
The comparison acts as a robust
contestation between the past and the present,
even when both are utterly distressing. The
choicelessness triggers refugee-voice in the
poem to decide, and this is how subjectivity
performs in refugee discourse. The irony of
hardships shapes a decision mechanism,
which enables them to transform fears into
action.
The case of Stallings’ comparison in
“Empathy” is even darker. She touches the
inevitability of socio-political dynamics, which
helps to cause the refugee crisis that helps
create the binary of the lucky/unlucky or
privileged/underprivileged or insider/
outsider. The global humanity catastrophe left
unaffected people with luxury to reflect their
luck by comparing it to others’ lack of luck. It
happens in the micro concept of humble
gratefulness, which encourages people to
reflect on how grateful they are compared to
the less grateful ones. Coming to Stalling’s
public activism in helping to cope with the
refugee crisis in Athens as the off-poetic
context, we may come to realize her powerful
expression in meditating moral emotions in
which the collocation between the privileged
and under-privileged articulate.
My love, I’m grateful tonight
Our listing bed isn’t a raft
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Precariously adrift
As we dodge the coast guard
light,
And clasp hold of a girl and a
boy.
Through the mass media publication of the
photograph of the three-year-old Syrian boy
Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach, the public
sees the minor representation of the refugee
crisis evocatively and coalesced more strongly
via social media (Dahlgren, 2016). Stallings is
one of the activists who roll up her sleeve in
helping to distribute aids for refugees in
Athens. Her direct contact with refugees left her
dejected, which often fostered her to make
short poems or epigrams in order to process
what she had just been through (Haven, 2017).
In Poet’s Note section in Women’s Voices
for Change’s article Poetry Sunday (Foust,
2018): “Empathy” by A. E. Stallings, she said
that,
“… this sense that children were drowning in
the same water we swam in haunted me all
summer, the sense of the Aegean as
dangerous and full of death as well as wine-
dark or Santorini blue, and that the same
element that caressed my children pulled
others under. I had dreams about making
that crossing. It was maybe that heightened
sense of vigilance and danger you just have
as a parent of young children, the way you
can’t avoid reading terrible news stories
about mishaps and accidents.”
Her direct encounters intensified by the
news circulation inspiring her “Empathy” as she
felt it unfair to tell the plight of refugees in their
viewpoints. Therefore, she wrote the poem of
refugees using her own critical observation to
move and to awaken those who do not need to
experience it themselves.
The subjectivity of refugees in “Empathy”
requires readers to digest their decision
making to flee in the acts of:
- Dodge the coast light – clasp hold of a
girl and a boy
- Wake - kids in the thin hours
- Hand over - cash to one of the smuggling
rackets
- buy cheap life jackets
- scan the sky for a mark (that demarcates
a shore)
- die to be ‘us’
The sight which observes refugee’s
phenomenon in the viewpoint of non-refugee
makes it more vibrant with nuances, in which
society sees the tragic phenomenon within
their safety. Nevertheless, the ending questions
on refugee’s right position showing any sign of
empathy, which is selfish rather than generous.
She provides an open-ended discourse about
empathy and its moral consequences. However,
empathy, which is critically portrayed in the
poem, tends to make the readers uneasy. The
voice encourages readers’ response to the crisis
by its revelation of the ugly truth about the
term empathy.
Conclusion
This study aims to comprehend how
refugees’ poems depict their subjectivity as
opposed to the media portrayal that mostly
portrays them as victims or objects of pity.
This study argues that the poetic platform
produces a powerful resistance to such a
display. “The Icebreaker” packs densely with
dark humor to adapt to and take control of
mingling in social conversation in the host
country. As opposed to the friendly voice in
“The Icebreaker”, “Home” incorporates
comparison in commemorating the speaker’s
meditation on her perilous journey to safety.
Both poems fuse the private and the public to
present a comprehensive experience from
which their subjectivity emerges.
The third poem, “Empathy”, by A. E.
Stallings takes readers to explore humanity
catastrophe and to question the equivocal
term of empathy. The recognition of the
subjectivity of the refugees articulates in the
poem by observing the on refugee’s viewpoint,
which enables readers to recognize the
ambiguous side of their empathy. The focus,
however, is not on the problematic impact of
empathy but on the portrayal of the refugees
whose courage cannot guarantee a safe life, but
they carry on instead.
The future study may take its stance from
the mix of poem’s linguistic exploration
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engaged with its contextual background or
philosophical theory about spectatorship
morality and relational empathy to help
shaping a more thorough analysis about the
global refugee crisis so that we can manifest a
more inclusive society and spread
humanitarian solidarity by the transcendence
of poetic vision and its post-reading
experience.
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