It All Came From Priya

It all came from Priyas poem, and Priyas poem came from well, I had no idea.
It was an
unlikely thing to turn up in a pile of marking. Yet there it was, tucked between two ordinary
effusions, typed in a silly, curly, childish font, a sonorous description, framed with exquisite
irony, of everything she couldnt remember about her mother country. This was the opening:
I dont remember her
in the summer,
lagoon water sizzling,
the kingfisher leaping,
or even the sweet honey mangoes
they tell me I used to love.
I typed up a fresh copy of the poem in Times New Roman, removing a stray comma, marvelling
at its shape. I printed out a copy and taped it to the staffroom tea urn, then made another, and
took it across to the head of English, Miss B. She stuck it on her door, just above the handle, so
that everyone entering or leaving her classroom had to read it.
Then I took it into my next class, Miss Ts year sevens. Our school, Oxford Spires Academy,
despite its lofty, English name, meets every marker for deprivation and its students spoke more
than 50 different languages. Miss Ts class, fairly typically, had students from 15 different
mother countries. Some were born in Britain to parents from Bangladesh and Pakistan, some
were migrants from eastern Europe or Brazil, a few were refugees from war zones: Iraq,
Kurdistan, Afghanistan.
But none of them talked about it much. We are always, in this country, obliging refugees to tell
their arrival stories: border officials, social workers, charity workers, housing officers all want to
know, and the consequences of telling the wrong tale are dire. In our school, there is a code of
silence. Teachers, on principle, accept each new arrival as simply a student equal to all others,
and try to meet their needs as they appear. Students follow suit, speaking to each other in
English, of English things, in mixed racial groups. This, mostly, is a good thing, but it does leave
a layer of stories untold, and some festering, because very few people make it out of war zones
by being exceptionally nice at all times. The more terrible the place they have fled, the more
likely they are to have seen things that leave an awful, lingering sense of shame.
I dont remember, our students say. I came from my country when I was six but I dont
remember it. I dont remember my language. No.
Priyas poem, though, was like a magic key. I read it to my class, then asked the students for a
list of things they definitely didnt remember, not at all, from their childhoods. In half an hour,
we had 30 poems. Sana had written about her mother tongue: How shameful, shameful,
forgotten. Ismail, who had never written a poem before, who rarely spoke, covered three pages
with sensual remembrance, ending: I dont remember the fearless boy I used to be / no, I dont
remember my country, Bangladesh. So many of them and so good, so clear. I decided to
create a poetry group.
Actually, I didnt do it to be nice, or to help the kids find a voice. By that point, I had been
working at the school for three years, partly funded by the charity First Story, and had done a lot
of voice-finding already. Now, I thought it was time we won something. Specifically, the Foyle
Young Poets of the Year award. The Poetry Society runs this competition each year, and the prize
is a weeks writing course with all the other young winners.
I had judged the Foyle and run the course back in 2006, and seven years on, the Foyle young
poets group I had taught were scything through Oxbridge, publishing poetry pamphlets with
Faber, writing for the national press, and all the time networking frantically. By mixing together
this group of exceptionally talented youngsters many of them privileged but a few definitely
not that course had forcefully changed most of their lives. I wanted some of that for our
students: not just the poetry, but the sense of entitlement, and, yes, the networking too. Just one
child, I thought, could bring back a generous netful of cultural capital from a single trip.
And now I believed that I could find a prize-winner among our migrant students. When I had
started at the school, I had assumed, like some parts of the British press, that speaking English as
an additional language was, for writing purposes, a negative an area that would simply need
extra work. Students such as Priya had changed my mind. I remembered teaching her the
previous year, in a GCSE poetry anthology workshop, with Miss Bs lower English set. They
were a particularly wildly mixed bunch, as lower sets always are, and Priya, doe-eyed in hijab,
just arrived from a bankrupt religious school, was quiet as a shadow among them.
Miss B had sent me off with a small group to work on Carol Ann Duffys poem Originally (the
city, / the street, the house, the vacant rooms / where we didnt live any more), and we were
remaking and breaking the line-breaks on a computer screen, finding out how they worked. In
the cheerful noise, Priya was silent, and it was not till the end of the lesson that I leaned over and
saw what she was working on:
There is that strange smell again, the tang of
the cars on the road screeching, not like
the laborious rickshaw in Bangladesh
Look ahead, jump, skip and hop. Hide the fact
you are alienated. Chew on the candy floss.
It melts in your mouth. Such foreign stuff!
She typed it in front of me, exactly like that, audacious line breaks, eccentric vocabulary,
disturbing punctuation the lot. The echo of Duffy was precise, but the original force of the
poem even stronger. Priya was in the lower set because her critical skills were, at best, ragged,
yet when it came to poetry it was as if she were listening, with extra ears, as much to the sounds
of the words as their sense. I thought it might be to do with the loss of a language: Priya moved
from Bangladesh when she was six. If that was the case, there might be more students like her in
our school. In fact, we might have a wealth of them. Poets.
Now, I was going to make a group of them. Students tempered by loss but not just that. I
wanted those turned inward instead of outward, the quiet sort. Ones who read, of course, and
preferably in two languages. And then something harder to describe: the ones who, whether they
had arrived months or years previously, still seemed to live in two worlds and two languages. I
also decided, just for once, to limit my group to girls. Several of the students I had in mind came
from strict homes: it would help them speak freely if there were no boys around. And so it was
that I asked the English department for some Very Quiet Foreign Girls.

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It all came from Priyas poem, and Priyas poem came from well, I had no idea.

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