When ‘home is the mouth of a shark’ : understanding migration through the use of multicultural poetry

Abstract

Anders Lustgarten’s play Lampedusa opens with a grim monologue by Stefano, whose job is to fish for the bodies of migrants who drown on their way to Europe from North Africa: The bodies of the drowned are more varied than you’d think. Some are warped, rotted, bloated to three times their natural size, twisted into fantastical and disgusting shapes like the curse in that story my grandmother used to tell me. Dead of winter, chills down yer spine. Others are calm, no signs of struggle, as if they’re dozing in the sun on a lazy summer afternoon and a tap on the arm will bring them gently awake. Those are the hardest. Because they’re the most human. They’re overwhelmingly young, the dead. Twenties. Thirty at most. Kids, a lot of them. You have to be to make the journey, I suppose. By means of his play, Lustgarten hopes to initiate a conversation about a phenomenon that is not just affecting the Mediterranean region but is global in scope. Over the past few years, migration due to persecution, conflict and human rights violations has increased exponentially. In 2015, more than 65 million people were forcibly displaced by such factors. This record-high figure meant that 24 persons in every minute of 2015 were displaced from their homes. Young people constituted a large proportion of those who were displaced. In fact, more than half of the 21.3 million refugees in 2015 were people aged under 18, and around 98,000 asylum applications were lodged by unaccompanied or separated children. This global phenomenon led Ban Ki Moon to affirm that: “We are facing the biggest refugee and displacement crisis of our time. Above all, this is not just a crisis of numbers; it is also a crisis of solidarity”. His reference to solidarity is important given that its absence is likely to worsen the situation for all those people who are forcibly displaced from their homes, sometimes having to travel huge distances in search of security, safety, stability and better prospects in foreign countries. Ensuring that a sense of solidarity prevails among the citizens of these countries entails the harnessing of education for the nurturing of empathy and understanding in young people. According to Lustgarten, “At the heart of our self-delusion about migration is a wilful misunderstanding of why people come” (iii). The use of multicultural poetry in the English language classroom can serve to foster empathy in young people and correct misunderstandings. Multicultural poetry consists of poems from various cultural groups. Xerri describes such poetry as being “typically associated with ethnic minorities and other socio-economically marginalized and under-represented groups. Usually their literature is as sidelined in the curriculum as it is in society.” This chapter illustrates how critical engagement with multicultural poetry can help to develop young people’s attitudes and beliefs in relation to migration so that they are able to display empathy and understanding.