These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination... Rabindranath Tagore

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
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On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--from Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Showing posts with label Refugee Boy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Refugee Boy. Show all posts

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Refugee Boy


Refugee Boy - Benjamin Zephaniah
Bloomsbury Publishing 2001


I'm Ethiopian
  I'm Eritrean
  I am cursed
  I walk the line
like a lonely piece of flotsam
  in a sea of coloured skins
  I bob around east London


Sheila, Pamela and Mariam
  foreign faces 
  become my guides


I'm African
  I'm a refugee
  I'm uneducated
  I walk the line


a family moors my life
  my small room means a large view
  and Ruth becomes my sister

 
I'm African
  I'm just a teenage boy
  I want to learn
  I walk the line
I find friends I did not know were friends
  young friends
  school friends
  willing to march for freedom
  willing to walk my line


I am Alem
  I want to give
  I want to be 
  a light


without the line


Linking to:
Poets United ~ Poetry Pantry



MY GOODREADS REVIEWRefugee Boy
Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps this book disappoints- not outlining the tensions between Eritrea and Ethiopia, not fully exploring and explaining the work of young Alem's parents, but the book is about the boy; the boy finding his own journey and his own rite of passage. We feel the incredible confusions he must feel - an alien culture and climate, a Refugee Council, a foster family, a new school and the whole disturbing, temporary arrangement of it all. And in the midst of all this darkness, appear some rather special miracles. Young people dare to face and challenge legal strongholds. An apparently indifferent girl becomes his sister. This book bridges and casts a rainbow over the many tragic chasms in our world.

View all my reviews + My liberation haiku, inspired by this book, is posted on my Haiku Songlines blog.

NOTE
This story became a play - BBC Review 14th March 2013
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