Collective poetry and refugee history
What can a poem, and the creative process of writing it, tell us about refugee history? Existing research on creative writing by refugees tends to focus either on the writing process or the writing itself. Research on the writing process is usually situated within the social sciences and examines the effect of this process on language acquisition, confidence building or wellbeing. Refugee literature is a field in itself, one that looks at the texts first and foremost, and even then mainly texts produced by published writers. Creative methods including collective poetry are a way of combining both of these approaches, allowing us to experience, document and analyse both the process and the output. These methods are widely used in disciplines like sociology, but far less in history. We should use them more: for researchers working on refugee history, creative methods open up a space for the previously unsaid to be recorded, which can then enrich, contextualise, or complicate testimonies gathered in formal interviews or drawn from archives. Both ethically and methodologically, these methods can contribute to refugee history as a field, by providing alternative ways of exploring, documenting and understanding experiences of migration.
In practice-based research I have been carrying out in Glasgow in collaboration with Maryhill Integration Network, Agha Shahid Ali’s poem At the Museum served as a starting point for a group of refugee, migrant and local women to explore history and memory. Together they used the poem as a way in to speaking about different aspects of their personal histories of migration, and their relationship to history as memorialised in art, museums and oral tradition. I worked with the women to intertwine these contributions together into a single poem (reproduced in full below), creating in that single artefact a commemoration of that afternoon, our conversations, and these women’s words and memories.
History
is in the recipes of our parents.
History is a woman standing in a museum
looking at "The Last of The Clan"
resonating with her own exodus,
leaving everything behind.
History is seeing your own history in the museum of another place
realising history's truths. Entering a room
seeing connections between life in her country
and life in this country:
tools, plates from one hundred years before
still in use. A memory of fresh sheets in childhood.
In the graveyards where people are sleeping
beneath the trees' wide branches,
her hand rests on the stones in silence.
History is leaves pressed in a book.
History is in the wrinkles of a face,
of the mountains. We have always been travellers,
wanderers, on pilgrimages.
History is grandmother's unspeakable stories,
jewels made of steel.
This poem titled ‘history’ situates itself in different histories – in the history of the asylum dispersal programme which brough thousands of asylum seekers to the vacant social housing stock of Glasgow in the early 2000s, but also sits within Scotland’s longer history of clearance and forced migration. The painting referenced in the third line of the poem is Thomas Faed’s 1895 work ‘The Last of the Clan’, an oil painting that depicts a scene from the Highland Clearances in which a family group wait on the quayside, heads bowed as they contemplate their exodus from the ancestral lands. By offering this memory for inclusion in the poem, the participant gives us an insight into present-day refugees’ knowledge of, and relationship to, Scottish historical narratives of exile, and the sense of connection produced by this knowledge.
Working with a group of people to produce a collective poem or piece of writing is a powerful way to elicit reflections on individual and community experiences of forced migration. Collaborative creative writing offers an alternative method of documenting personal and communal experience and memory, which compliments and enriches existing written and oral sources like interviews. The practice also produces an ethnographic record of the research process itself, alongside the final poetic output. Focussing as much on the process as the outcome is a way of drawing attention to the collaborative nature of the work.
Creative writing also allows for experimentation, playfulness and joy in writing. Participants have the power to steer the poem in the direction of their choosing – some are funny, some absurd, some hard-hitting and poignant. This freedom of expression is particularly important in research with refugees, given that so much work on or with refugees centres narrowly on traumatic experiences of migration or the asylum system.
In her work on East African women’s writing of the 1960s, Anna Adima uses creative writing as a way to ‘fill the large gaps that the colonial archive leaves’. While analysing the contents of the poem can be a way to understand different aspects of participants’ experiences of everyday life, and fill some of these archival gaps, a practice of creative writing with refugees that reflects on the process itself can also make visible the networks and relationships we build as researchers. This demonstrates how the ‘finished product’ of research, be that a poem or an interview or an article, is always a work of co-production between ourselves and the source, whether our source be interview participants or archival documents.
Using poetry in research gives participants agency over how much or how little of their own experience to disclose. Refugee Hosts has highlighted the relationship-building power of creative methods, arguing that they facilitate ‘a more conversational and encounter-based form of engagement that helps to build and sustain trust and connections in complex situations’. The potential for fictionalisation of experiences and the use of characters also allows people to talk about their own experiences in an indirect way, both building on and departing from the trauma-informed practice of using indirect questions in interviews.
The development of ethical relationships with research participants is crucial in researching refugee history. Collaborative creative writing can create space for these relationships to build, while also encouraging participants to narrate thoughts and experiences on their own terms. In this way, creative methods differ from what Caroline Lenette describes as ’impersonal research traditions’, which can be one-directional and extractive. The more emotionally engaged nature of creative methods is particularly significant in contemporary UK refugee history, when the experience of asylum interviews is for many both a traumatic and difficult experience as well as being one of the most urgent reference points for what an interview looks and feels like.
Creative methods, on the other hand, provide an alternative method of documenting peoples’ experiences. Using collaborative poetry workshops in my research, I signalled to participants that the focus was not on verifying the exact date they came to this country, or the precise narrative of their life story so far. Rather I sought to draw out, and converse about, messiness and ambiguity. These techniques and methods push us to think: what went unsaid in those interviews of the past? As well as asking what ought to be left unsaid when silence and fiction offer a cloak of protection? What can be recorded and understood of people’s lives and journeys through poetry (or drawing, or zinemaking, or clay models) that would not emerge from a formal interview situation?
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The research I draw on for this article was undertaken as part of my PhD at the University of Glasgow, funded by the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities. With particular thanks to everyone at Maryhill Integration Network, especially Bisilda, Mary, Minaxi, Remzije, Rosa, Sara, Syeda and all the other writers involved in this project.
I am very grateful to Juliette Frontier and Becky Taylor for their help with this piece .
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The header image shows a view across an empty car park to buildings rising beyond. The end of one of them is entirely occupied by a large billboard-style mural, in white text on black background with a white border, reading, ‘More poetry is needed’. Photo by Flickr user Dan Thompson (Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/danthompson/31960954076/
