The Émigrée Essay Questions

What is the poem's context and what is the impact of keeping it unspecific?

The context given in the poem is that the speaker was forced to leave her country of origin as a child due to political unrest. As an adult, she hears news of the war and tyranny afflicting her state, but her lack of a valid passport prevents her from returning. The current governing body of her country bans her native language and she faces discrimination in her new place of residence, but nothing breaks the speaker’s fond association with her country of origin. Keeping the details unspecific allows this poem to apply to anyone who has been forced to leave their home country due to political unrest. The unspecificity also makes the poem timeless: it applies to a wide variety of instances that have occurred throughout history and in the contemporary era.

In another vein, the poem’s vagueness contributes to its fantastical quality. Beginning with the first line “There was once a country…” the poem is presented in a fairytale-like manner.

How does this poem align with Rumens’ concern with the ‘importance of elsewhere’?

The "importance of elsewhere" was a phrase coined by the poet Philip Larkin, who was an important inspiration to Rumens. Foreign cultures, histories, and languages greatly inform Rumens’ work, and this can be seen not just in “The Émigrée” but in the entirety of her other collections.

In “The Émigrée,” Rumens presents a speaker who experiences something that Rumens herself has not gone through: emigration resulting from political turmoil. Though many of Rumens’s poems center on Europe, “The Émigrée” could apply to emigrants from around the world. In this way, Rumens touches upon an archetypal experience despite not having gone through it herself. The ‘elsewhere’ or otherness of this experience is felt through empathy with the speaker of “The Émigrée.”

What does sunlight represent in the poem?

The speaker’s relationship (her memories and imagined encounters) with her country of origin is defined by sunlight in the poem. In the first stanza, she states that she is “branded by an impression of sunlight” despite the news of war and tyranny afflicting her country. The act of branding carries a certain violence, but it ultimately displays how the speaker will permanently think of her country with fondness. Sunlight is warm, life-giving, and clear: it allows for the capacity of sight and understanding. In this case, the speaker’s heritage grants her an understanding of the world and her place in it. This is shown when the speaker’s native language tastes of sunlight. She means to grasp “every coloured molecule” of the language despite the fact that it has been banned by the state. No darkness (of war, oppressors, or the speaker’s own feelings of guilt and anger) can prevent her from associating her country of origin with sunlight.