All by Katherine Mackinnon
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.
In her book Refugees in Twentieth Century Britain, Becky Taylor carefully explores the reception, experiences and significance of refugees in Britain across the twentieth century. Time and time again, she demonstrates how closely bound up the refugees’ lives have been with the British public’s own experiences of changing political and social factors, whether these two groups come face to face or not, and however much of a gulf the media may lead people to believe exists between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Making sense of a huge range and diversity of sources, the book beautifully demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of British society, and the many ways refugees encountered these complexities.