the Émigrée
Carol Rumens
Published: 1993
Birth – Death: 1944 - ?
Monarch: Elizabeth II
Prime Minister: John Major (Conservative)
Nationality: British
The Émigrée is about a child being forced to leave her home and flee to another land. In this poem the child remembers her homeland and heritage. The meaning of Émigrée relates to someone who leaves one country to settle in another. Unlike many other emigrants’ poems, this poem describes the pitiable condition of a female child who is compelled to leave her childhood home and shift to another land, due to wars in the Middle East.
who is Carol Rumens?
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Carol Rumens is a poet, lecturer and translator.
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Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill, South London.
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She has lived in Belfast and Wales.
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She won a scholarship to a grammar school and studied Philosophy at London University but left before completing her degree.
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She gained Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for the Stage, with a distinction, from City College Manchester 2001.
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She taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury (1983-1985), Queen’s University Belfast (1991-1993 and 1995-1998), University College Cork (1994), University of Stockholm (1999) and University of Hull.
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She now teaches at the University of Wales, Bangor and the University of Hull.
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Rumens was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984.
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She has published several translations of Russian poems and created some Russian poems.
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Rumens had widely travelled Russia and Eastern Europe and even speaks fluent Russian.
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She is interested in eastern-European culture and Russia and speaks fluent Russian.
What is Carol Rumens Poetic Style?
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Her early poetry had domestic themes in it such as childhood and the role of a housewife.
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Rumens now focuses her poetry on language and culture.
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Phil Larkins inspired Rumens’ poetry as she liked his precise imagery and conversational tone of his poems.
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Thinking of Skins holds the poem The Émigrée. The collection of poems confronts political problems, they often have a background of Eastern Europe, Russia or her present home Northern Ireland. They follow themes of loss, exile, realities of suffering, separation, death, etc.
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She has a large portfolio of 15 poetry collections, some novels and some plays.
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She has arresting imagery and symbolism throughout all her poems.
What is an Émigrée ?
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Emigrants are people who have left the country of their birth to settle elsewhere in the world. This could be for various reasons.
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The spelling of the word Rumens chooses - émigrée - is a feminine form and suggests the speaker of the poem is a woman.
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Rumens suggests the city or country woman moved form may now be war-torn, or under the control of a dictatorial government that has banned the language the speaker once knew.
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In the 1990s there was an increase of immigrants entering various countries in the world. In the UK, immigration, mainly from those seeking asylum overtook the natural population increase for the first time. The 1990 Immigration Act in the USA made it easier for people to emigrate there.
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In 1956, the Soviets invaded Hungary with tanks, linking to Rumens description of tanks in the poem.
Society & Politics
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The British Nationality Act 1981, which was enacted in 1983, distinguishes between British citizens and British Overseas Territories citizens.
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During the 1980s and 1990s, the civil war in Somalia led to a large number of Somali immigrants, comprising the majority of the current Somali population in the UK.
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The Immigration Rules, under the Immigration Act 1971, were updated in 2012 to create a strict minimum income threshold for non-EU spouses and children to be given leave to remain in the UK.
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In the late 1990s both the Labour Party and the Conservatives have suggested policies perceived as being "tough on asylum". There is also the media frequently printing headlines about an "immigration crisis".