Imagine living in a strange, dark city for twenty years.
There are some dismal dwellings on the east side
and one of them is yours. On the landing, you hear
your foreign accent echo down the stairs. You think
in a language of your own and talk in theirs.
Then you are writing home. The voice in your head
recites the letter in a local dialect; behind that
is the sound of your mother singing to you,
all that time ago, and now you do not know
why your eyes are watering and what’s the word for this.
You use the public transport. Work. Sleep. Imagine one night
you saw a name for yourself sprayed in red
against a brick wall. A hate name. Red like blood.
It is snowing on the streets, under the neon lights,
as if this place were coming to bits before your eyes.
And in the delicatessen, from time to time, the coins
in your palm will not translate. Inarticulate,
because this is not home, you point at fruit. Imagine
that one of you says Me not know what these people mean.
It like they only go to bed and dream. Imagine that.
1) How far is the opening word ‘Imagine’ an imperative? Or does it suggest a significant and sympathetic starting point for a re-evaluation of the often perjorative connotations of ‘foreign’?
2) If the poem explores ‘otherness’ then whose otherness is under scrutiny? And is this sense of otherness in flux? Consider the power of the pronoun ‘you’ and why Duffy elected to use this second person pronoun throughout a poem called ‘Foreign’?
Who are YOU?!
3) Fiction is full of landings. Examine the role of the ‘landing’ in this poem and indeed in any other text where you have noticed this space before. Are these in-between places, spaces of community, isolation or transition? Or something else entirely? How far is the poem reliant upon the resonances of specific vocabulary and is this an irony in itself when we consider the meaning of the poem?
4) How is the experience of disassociation and estrangement communicated to the reader? Give evidence from specific moments in the text. What components make up this life and how does the ‘pulse’ of the poem reflect this?
5) What role has language in the construction and maintenance of a coherent and stable identity? Again support your views with specific examples from the poem.
6) Who is the speaker in the poem? How do you know this? How can ‘one’ be ‘one of you’ then?
7) Is all communication reliant upon some act of translation? What does this suggest about the ‘foreignness’ of language itself?
8) Is there any irony in a writer using language to suggest the shortcomings and inadequacies of language?