Two poems about refugees

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We Refugees by Benjamin Zephaniah 

Benjamin Zephaniah (born 15 April 1958) is a British writer, dub poet and Rastafarian. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. His poems are often inspired by political causes. They often deal with global issues such as racism, animal cruelty and the need for greater social justice. (Dub poetry is a form of performance poetry of West Indian origin, which evolved out of dub music in Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1970s, as well as in London, England and Toronto, Canada, both, cities which have large populations of Caribbean immigrants. It consists of spoken word over reggae rhythms.)
This is a poem about the various reasons why people are compelled to become refugees.

I come from a musical place
Where they shoot me for my song
And my brother has been tortured
By my brother in my land.

I come from a beautiful place
Where they hate my shade of skin
They don't like the way I pray
And they ban free poetry.

I come from a beautiful place
Where girls cannot go to school
There you are told what to believe
And even young boys must grow beards.

I come from a great old forest
I think it is now a field
And the people I once knew
Are not there now.

We can all be refugees
Nobody is safe,
All it takes is a mad leader
Or no rain to bring forth food,
We can all be refugees
We can all be told to go,
We can be hated by someone
For being someone.

I come from a beautiful place
Where the valley floods each year
And each year the hurricane tells us
That we must keep moving on.

I come from an ancient place
All my family were born there
And I would like to go there
But I really want to live.

I come from a sunny, sandy place
Where tourists go to darken skin
And dealers like to sell guns there
I just can't tell you what's the price.

I am told I have no country now
I am told I am a lie
I am told that modern history books
May forget my name.

We can all be refugees
Sometimes it only takes a day,
Sometimes it only takes a handshake
Or a paper that is signed.
We all came from refugees
Nobody simply just appeared,
Nobody's here without a struggle,
And why should we live in fear
Of the weather or the troubles?
We all came here from somewhere. 

Questions

1. What adjectives are used to refer to the poet's country?
2. What's going on there?
3. Give some examples of discrimination endured by people living in the poet's country?
4. Who 's they in line 2 referred to?
5. What are the reasons that are listed as causes for becoming a refugee?
6. Why do tourists go to his country?
7. "We all came here from somewhere" What does it mean?

Refugee Blues by Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden(21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was an English-American poet. Auden's poems deal with politics, morals, love, and religion, and are characterized by a variety in tone, form and content. His main themes are the value of everyman, citizenship, national identity, materialism, communication-gap, alienation, death and especially the horrors in his time- bureaucracy, totalitarianism.

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.





refugee blues presentation

comment refugee blues

1. Match each word in A to its meaning in B.

A		B
1. refugee		a. stately homes
2. souls		b. town
3. fair		c. formally
4. village		d. board
5. mansions		e. hovels
6. officially		f. person in exile
7. committee		g. courteously
8. holes		h. people
9. politely		i. come again
10. return		j. good

2. Replace each underlined word or phrase with the correct form of the word from the word bank below. Make any necessary changes.

Passports	Floors	Feet	Great plain
Public	fastened	Wood	marched
Speaker	pin	Politicians
Daily bread	harbour	the Human Race

1. Someone who doesn’t have the relevant travel documents is unable to enter or leave a country.

2. Elected leaders make decisions on behalf of mankind.

3. The apartment building had many storeys.

4. The jacket was secured shut with a brooch.

5. The fish swimming in the bay were only a short distance away from the refugees.

6. There were many trees in the forest.

7. The meeting was open to the community.

8. The spokesman objected to the idea that taking in many refugees would cause a shortage of necessities.

9. The soldiers walked over the large prairie. 

3. Answer the following questions. 

1. Name two places where people are living. 

2. Where are the narrator and his companion unable to go? 

3. What does the old yew do every spring?  

4. According to the consul, when are you officially dead?

5. What was the refugee offered by the committee and what did they ask him? 

6. What is the speaker at the public meeting concerned that the refugees will do if allowed in?

7. What did the refugee mistake for the sound of thunder rumbling in the sky? 

8. Which animal is let in an opened door?

9. What did the narrator see at the harbour?

10. What did the refugee see in the woods?

11. What did the refugee see in his dream? 

12. Who is looking for the refugees? 

13.“Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors, A thousand windows and a thousand doors; Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.”  In your opinion, what does this imagery represent? 

THE JEWISH PERSECUTION

In the 1920’s many Jews felt safe in Germany and considered Germany their home, but there was definitely anti-Semitism in Germany as well as in other countries in Europe and even in the USA.
The Catholic Church continued to consider Jews as responsible for the death of Christ.However, the Nazis used Jews as a convenient scapegoat: they were blamed for all of Germany’s problems. According to the Nazis, there was a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany and its culture.In addition, the Nazis believed that the Germans were “racially superior” and they  identified Jews as as an “inferior” race.
Therefore, this enemy of the "German Race"’ needed to be eliminated. The first major action against Jewish-German citizens was the boycott of German shops.On the 1^st April 1933 shops owned by Jews were boycotted. Soon after the boycott, Jewish workers were dismissed and Jewish businesses were confiscated.Gradually all the rights that the Jews had were taken away from them. The measures affected all areas of life.

In 1935 the Nuremberg laws established that Jews could not be citizens. They were not allowed to vote or to marry a German.
 In 1938 Jews could not be doctors and Jewish children were forbidden to go to school.On the night of 9^th November 1938 Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, were attacked.
A lot of  Jewish people were arrested, beaten or killed. 20,000 Jews were rounded up and put into ghettos.That night was called Kristallnacht ( the Night of Broken Glass) and it was the start of more and more violence against Jews.Soon after almost 30,000 Jewish men were brought to concentration camps.Between 1933 and 1939, many  German-Jewish people emigrated mainly to the United States, Palestine,elsewhere in Europe.
Most foreign countries, including the United States,  Canada, Britain, and France, were unwilling to admit very large numbers of refugees.
The anti-Jewish measures continued and became worse. The start of the Second World War was the  darkest chapter in Jewish history.In 1941 all Jews were forced to wear a yellow star of David.The Nazis occupied 19 European countries during the Second World War. At the so-called Wannsee conference in January 1942, the Nazis decided that the only solution to the "problem with the Jews"’ was  the Final Solution. This meant the murder of every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe.The death camps were created, terrible places where Jews were killed with gassing or shooting.
The Nazis killed more than 6 million Jews between 1933 and 1945. This mass murder of the Jews is known as the Shoah or Holocaust. The main death camps were at Auschwitz and Treblinka.

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