We Refugees — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
We Refugees
The poems
What you need to know
We Refugees by Benjamin Zephaniah (2000): refugees describe the beautiful places they come from and the war, persecution and disasters that drove them out, and insist that anyone can become a refugee.
Zephaniah's life and work and what makes someone a refugee, the repeated 'I come from' and refrain, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I come from a musical place / Where they shoot me for my song', 'Where they hate my shade of skin', 'Where girls cannot go to school', 'I come from a great old forest / I think it is now a field', 'We can all be refugees', 'All it takes is a mad leader', 'We can be hated by someone / For being someone', 'I am told I have no country now', 'Nobody simply just appeared', 'We all came here from somewhere'.
Form: fifty lines of simple, unrhymed statements, mostly in quatrains that begin 'I come from a ... place', broken by longer stanzas built on the refrain 'We can all be refugees'.
Structure: a list of beautiful places and the war, persecution, poverty and disasters that empty them, moving from 'I' to 'we' to the closing claim that everyone came from somewhere.
Context: Zephaniah (1958 to 2023), born in Handsworth, Birmingham, to parents who came from the Caribbean, a performance poet who also wrote for young readers; his novel Refugee Boy (2001) follows a refugee from Ethiopia and Eritrea; the 1951 Refugee Convention's definition of a refugee.
Compares well with The Émigrée (exile and a homeland that cannot be returned to), My Mother's Kitchen (a family that has fled again and again) and Us (who is included in 'we').
