by Kate Clanchy
By May, Miss P’s room was filled with babble. Sometimes it was frustrated: Shakila on her furious quest for words; the low moans of Neelam suddenly giving up mid-poem, and insisting that each line she had written, each word, was in some indescribable way wrong. Mostly, though, it was cheerful. Tiny Fatima of the sad bear proved not to be melancholy at all, but impish – given to delivering runaway rants on the merits of Twilight. She wrote a long poem in an invented language – half English, half Urdu – and giggled at it until she fell off the seat and kicked up, under her long robe, outlandish high heels.
Disha and Neelam formed an alliance of satire, writing deliberate, dark counterpoints to Priya’s exquisite sun-filled laments. Both of them had had the experience of leaving Bangladesh as young children, and then returning as teenagers, only to be as alienated and terrified by their country’s poverty as they felt welcomed by its warmth. They could not say enough dark things about it, and at the same time, they could not love it enough, or leave the subject alone. One day, Disha wrote an utterly triumphant poem, a piece about Bangladesh that ran through a series of grand metaphors in grand language, discarding them all, and ended: “And so, my poem is my country / my home country / and my country is poor.” And she read it out, and looked over to her gifted, lyrical sister, and gave a tiny nod.
We didn’t win.
We sent all the Foreign Girl poems into the Foyle competition, including ‘My Mother Country’, the obsolete tiger, and the cloud-horse, but got not so much as a mention. I was merely sad about this – it’s a huge competition – until the winning poems were published alongside portraits and bios of the lucky poets. Then, I found myself studying them obsessively. They were all white! How could this have happened? And a large number of them seemed to go to boarding school. (Not that their schools were published; I discovered this by noting the winners’ home counties, and then typing in their names next to the name of their nearest prestigious private school on Google – as in, Camilla Poshperson, Cranborne Chase – and up they popped, one after the other, on the hockey or debate team.) I was shocked.
Because my assumption, when I sent out the Foreign Girl poems, was that they would be especially welcome because of their foreignness. When I’d judged the competition myself, I’d been on the lookout for the migrant experience, and there hadn’t been much in evidence. I thought that was because not enough migrant kids knew about the competition, and that my poets would be, if anything, at an advantage in such a field. In short, I thought there might be some of that much-vaunted thing, political correctness, around to help my students out. Clearly, though, not.
What had happened? I studied and studied the winning poems. They were good, of course they were good, but they were not longer or more complex or more literary than Priya’s poem. What they did share, and what I saw suddenly for the first time with a shock, as if coming back to my home city by water after a lifetime of approaching it by road, was a white landscape, one with lakes and low hills and houses filled with grandmothers in aprons who baked sponge cakes; houses with deckchairs, and copies of National Geographic, all foggy with restrained regret. This was the landscape that was recognized as poetic; Priya’s bright and humid Bangladesh was not.
In the end, I was so cross I wrote a letter, which was listened to courteously, and in subsequent years, things have changed radically; though it remains true that my only young poets of colour who have won any poetry competition have been selected by judges of colour. I repeated the process many times; I sent out ‘My Mother Country’ and the others to five more poetry competitions for young people, and, when more poems set in that white landscape were preferred, sent more rude letters. The one to the fifth competition was very rude; I got into a row. Was I accusing them of prejudice? Well, yes, I suppose I was. And I still suppose they were; that most people are prejudiced; that I am, that prejudice happens in the reading of poetry as well as everything else. I also think that if you acknowledge it, and try and set aside, you can see more: that is a gift that Priya’s poem has given me.
Another gift is that I now read more widely. The other day, while trekking across the vast landscape that is Tagore, the national poet of Bangladesh, Priya’s favourite reading matter, I finally came upon what is probably the source poem for ‘My Mother Country’: ‘I Cannot Remember My Mother’, the simple lament that Tagore wrote when he was fifty for the mother he lost when he was three.
I cannot remember my mother
but when in the early autumn morning
the smell of the shiuli flowers floats in the air
the scent of the morning service in the temple
comes to me as the scent of my mother.
And the poem quenched my anger, as great poems will. Perhaps, I thought, the problem is simply that ‘My Mother Country’ sounds as if it were written by a fifty-year-old, and so doesn’t fit with the teenage poems in competitions. Perhaps the judges could not believe, as I didn’t believe at first, that seventeen-year-olds can write like that, or go through loss like that, or be as old as that in their minds, and so they put the poem aside. And if it is also the case that we have not tuned in to this voice yet, the voice of our new England, an English inflected with all the accents of the world, with the mass migration of the early years of the twenty-first century, the voices of the Very Quiet Foreign Girls, then perhaps I can understand why, and think how lucky I am to work in a place where I can hear it.
Priya herself has no regrets. She values her writing, and her journey, for itself. And in school we continue to value this poem especially. It has created, in poetry workshops, a thousand daughter poems. We have published it in anthologies, put it on the website, and blown it up to six foot high, framed it, and hung it in the English corridor: a permanent, life-size reminder of the Very Quiet Foreign Girls. When we showed the result to Priya she gazed at it for a long while, pleased, then said: ‘Look, all the “o”s.’ The poem is indeed studded with them: honey, love, mangoes, don’t, don’t, mosquitoes, monsoon. Blown up to the size of my hand, the ‘o’s look like portholes, or lifebelts, or pools, and now each year new generations of students gaze through them, or hang on to them, or dive into them, and start to write about what they can’t remember.
About the Hijab
Imani’s Argument
Perhaps half the girls I teach wear hijab to school; black stretchy cotton ones for the younger girls, elaborately pinned shawls for the sixth-formers. A hijab now, to me, signals a probably good student, a potentially excellent one. Shakila, Disha, Priya, and Imani were all hijabis and also some of my most talented poets. I knew them extremely well; I met their parents, I took them on residential trips, and I never saw their (Asian/silky/curly?) hair in eight years.
All four of these women, and I think all the hijabi girls I teach, cover up more than their mothers. Muslim women in the Indian subcontinent universally wore a loose, light scarf in the last years of the twentieth century and very often still do. Women in North African countries wore a head wrap. The burqa and the niqab came only from Arabia, and they came before Islam, from desert countries where it was practical to wear long, loose, enveloping garments and to cover the face; it is only in the last few decades that these garments have spread. In our city now, many young Pakistani women wear the niqab, and almost all Muslim women wear a scarf that pins tightly under the jawline and covers the whole plait behind.
Imani has a fierce argument as to why this should be so. (In fact many of the girls do, but Imani – tiny, Tanzanian, and terrifyingly articulate – puts it best, and has even made prize-winning speeches about it.) Imani says: Look around you. Look at Instagram or just down the street. Look at the young girls in their tight dresses, and miniskirts, their breasts out on show like buns! (I think she might mean Susie.) Look at them trying to run in their high heels! (She definitely means Kristell.) And then look at the modest young girl on the other side of the street, airy in her long dress, modest in her veil, comfortable in her soft, hidden shoes. Who is wearing the impris
oning garment? Who is the freer in her mind?
And, of course, she is right. If I could put a burqa on Susie and Kristell tomorrow, I would. A year or two of being invisible to the male gaze, of going home quietly to study, could only be liberating, and enabling too, of the rest of their lives. But I am suspicious of some of the rest of Imani’s argument. Imani is very sporty herself, and her long dress visibly restricts her. Not every gaze is sexualizing, and not all sexualizing is desperately offensive; because looking is a healthy thing that people do, and so is desiring, and women do both. There is a disturbing undercurrent of good girl/bad girl in Imani’s argument, and it’s important to say that nothing that Susie or Kristell ever wear, however brief, entitles them to any abuse, ever.
I would also like to observe that it is possible to wear a flirty hijab, like Samira’s leopard-patterned one. And that Farida’s dress may be loose and floor-length, but it still manages to show the beautiful lines of her figure when she hitches it tight around her as she sits by the basketball courts; and when she tucks her hijab that bit neater round her ear with one tiny, manicured, be-ringed hand, it drives Izzat visibly bonkers. Even Imani started wearing head wraps instead of shawls in university. She looked brilliant, because she has such a strong skull shape and elegant neck, and also more African, which she is, and it was not immodest in any way.
Also: Amina comes from a strict Pakistani background and remains a devout Muslim. She has thought carefully about the whole issue and doesn’t wear the hijab. She has her hair cut to her jaw, and wears modest clothes as the Koran says, but they are pretty and no sort of uniform. She is tiny and beautiful, but this is not what you notice about her; you see her intelligence and her warmth. Amina walks effortlessly down the street, hampered by neither heels nor long skirts, and if men whistle, it hurts her, much more than it would hurt Susie, but she ignores them. She makes a straw man of Imani’s argument, because she is so supple, and decided, and so very much herself.
About Uniform
Elsa, Connor, and Saira
I’m in favour of uniform, and here are the children why.
Because of Elsa
Elsa is small and freckled and mostly silent. You could not say she was talented, exactly, but she is keen; she comes to Poetry Group very regularly, and writes small, sad poems, nearly square. She is particularly keen on having her work typed out; when she was absent once she brought me an extra square sad poem on a sheet of A4 for me to tackle. Miss B is very taken by this progress, and when we are offered a trip to London we agree: a place for Elsa. But we can’t get her mum to sign the form.
Forms are an endless nuisance; we expect delay. We anticipate it, in fact; we photocopy extra forms, we dole them out several times, we nag, we write notes in planners, we phone home. Two days before the trip, this has worked for everyone but Elsa, and Miss B is making arrangements for her to stay in school, when, on my way home at nearly six at night, I spot Elsa walking away from the Co-op, holding a loaf of bread. I catch her up, and she is so alarmed, she walks faster, pulling her hood up over her heavy wings of dark greasy hair.
‘Don’t you want to come on the trip?’ I ask her.
‘Yeah,’ she says, surprised, outraged.
‘What about the form then?’
‘I got it,’ she says.
‘Well then, could we have it?’
‘I lost it,’ she says, with equal conviction. We have stopped at the gated entrance to the flats behind the Co-op, where Elsa seems to live, and I have one of my brilliant ideas. I have a spare photocopied form right here in my bag. Why doesn’t Elsa just pop upstairs and get her mum to sign it?
‘You want to see my mum?’ says Elsa. And I say no, it isn’t necessary, I can wait right there.
There is a long pause. Elsa looks at her small, turned-in feet. ‘But,’ I say, ‘I could come in. If that would help. If it would help if I explained.’
And so I fall down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole and find myself in another land, in a small red room with a loud television and an acrid, woody smell, where a woman in a velour dressing gown is huddled in an armchair, and a yellow bird bashes my face like a slap.
‘They like to fly about,’ says the woman. And I see that there is a bird cage in front of her with an open door, and two canaries loose in the room, and seed and bird droppings everywhere underfoot. Elsa still has her coat on. She stands quietly by the door, feet pressed together.
‘I’m Elsa’s teacher,’ I say nervously. ‘I just bumped into her and I thought . . . There’s this trip to London. I expect she told you?’
‘Ain’t heard nothing about it,’ says the woman. ‘We can’t pay this month.’
‘It’s free,’ I say. ‘I wondered – could you just sign this form?’ And I hand her the form, and she takes it and studies it.
‘Uumph,’ she says. ‘Dunno.’
Suddenly, Elsa appears with a pen. ‘Mum,’ she says, ‘just there, sign there.’ And the woman puts down a scribble, and I realize she can’t read.
‘Miss has to go,’ says Elsa, and I can’t wait.
Afterwards I tell the story to Miss B, who nods.
‘You wouldn’t know,’ I say. ‘Elsa looks quite normal in school.’
‘No,’ says Miss B. ‘Lost property is a wonderful thing.’
And it turns out to be Miss B who greets Elsa every morning for breakfast club, and unlocks the shower in PE for her, and hands out clean uniform. It is Miss B who whizzes the clothes round the school washing machine, the one bought for PE kit, every week.
Miss B says Elsa only ever misses one day of school each year, and that is Red Nose Day, when no uniform is worn.
Because of Connor
Connor is never quite late, but always last-minute. He is also never quite without uniform, but always has something misplaced; he is wearing his sports trainers already, he has a baseball cap on, a jacket slung over his shoulder. So every morning, Miss P tells him off, makes him remove the offending garment, and sends him on his way with a flea in his ear. Miss P is our most imposing, old-fashioned, scary member of staff. ‘He never gets any better,’ she says, ‘so we have to conclude that he likes a telling-off.’
And probably he does. Miss P is scary, but she is also very fair, and very clear. Connor is small, undergrown, unable to progress. He has the small head and mask-like face that are the markers of foetal alcohol syndrome. He comes from a cruel, chaotic home where most attention comes as abuse. He has chosen this engagement with Miss P. Each morning, she and the uniform tell Connor that he is in a boundaried place now, where people care what he wears, and care if he keeps the rules.
Uniform is a very safe thing to kick against, just as Miss P is a safe person to kick.
Because of the Poor Table
Once, wearing my poet hat, I visit the poshest and most over-subscribed state primary in the city, and one of the few not to have a uniform. Year 5 look comfy and cheery in their non-uniform outfits, but when the teacher tells me that the less able children are gathered at one table and she will support me there, I am shocked to find that she does not need to tell me which table that is. It’s the one with the boy in the Manchester United shirt, the girl in the tracksuit, and her friend with the pierced ears, tiara, and leggings. The table with no one at all sporting outfits from the Boden catalogue, or shoes from Clarks. This school does very well generally in its SATs, but not by its few disadvantaged kids, who lag dreadfully. I don’t expect the Poor Table, and the ease with which it is identified, helps.
Because of Saira
Saira is the youngest of three devoted Pakistani sisters. They are orphans; their father died, and they are being raised by their constantly ill mother and two bullying, much older brothers. Recently, the brothers have taken to going to the strict Wahhabi mosque, and the older sisters, who are in the sixth form, where there is no uniform, are kitted out in floor-length dresses and tight hot hijabs. Saira is still in Year 9, so she can’t wear that kit to school, she’s not allowed. She wears the wid
ely despised, baggy, Terylene school trousers instead. The older sisters have grown heavy and womanish already and spend lunchtimes in the library. Saira, though, can be seen at lunchtime round the basketball hoops, jumping and running. Saira is very butch-looking altogether, with square shoulders and a distinct moustache. She adds a baseball cap, quite often, in school colours, and when she punts the ball into the hoop she looks utterly happy, joyous, even; healthy and moving and alive in those ugly uniform trousers.
On the Church in Schools
Tess, Jude, and Oldest One
Tyneham is a ‘ghost village’ in the Purbeck peninsula in Dorset. It’s a ‘ghost’ because it was requisitioned as an emergency measure in 1943 for the army to practise shooting at, in, and through. After the war, though the government promised otherwise, it was not given back to its ancestral tenants; instead, the army kept it and the surrounding, lovely, Lulworth Ranges. Tyneham sank under gunfire as if drowning in a reservoir, and lost its roofs, and its Great Hall, and became a picturesque ruin, golden stones in green hills.
These days, it’s open to visitors on weekends and Bank Holidays. Then, the army ceases its training exercises and making of loud pops, lowers the red flags over its gateways, and in come the general public; on foot, in Range Rovers, and by the coachload. One year, we bring our children, all under nine, to see this village, ‘frozen in time’.
Frozen it certainly is, but the year does not seem to be 1943. With its single narrow street pointing to a church full of tombs, Tyneham seems stuck at some much earlier point, some sepia era when all things were bright and beautiful, and the poor man at his gate, doffing his cap. This is Thomas Hardy country – it says so on lots of signs, as if it were a synonym for ‘rural and picturesque’ – but I can only see the dark, political side of Hardy, here. Here are the dank, dark corridors of the dairy just like the one where Tess worked; here is the servants’ path to the Great House, just like the one Tess took to be raped and abused – though if you look up, here is also the humbling beauty Hardy wrote about, the huge, overarching sky.