![]() ![]() She hasn’t been back to the country since the family fled. She was born in Lisbon, and when she was three months old went back to Guinea-Bissau with her mother. Perdigao is a writer and activist living in London. If pressed, you tell them that you spent the summer of 1998 underneath a bed with your sister afraid a bomb might rip the ceiling.” Thus writes Yovanka Perdigao in The Icebreaker, about her experience experience in the UK, after fleeing Guinea-Bissau as a kid. “You’ve always loved to throw off people with the refugee line, it’s sometimes the best icebreaker for an introvert like you. Yovanka Perdigao: ‘I used to love using the refugee line to throw people off’ JJ Bola is the author of the poetry collection Word.Changed the way we dressed / to look just like them / Made this our home / until we lived just like them. We came here to find refuge / They called us refugees / So we hid ourselves in their language / until we sounded just like them. The refugee experience is encapsulated in his poem Refuge: As a refugee there is only ever half of you in one place because you have left of you where you have come from, and half of you is rejected where you arrive.” No one leaves if the ocean will swallow them up. He adds: “No one leaves home if the hurt that will come is greater than the hurt that they will leave behind. However, this compassion has not reflected in government.” We have seen this in Iceland where citizens have opened up their homes, in the football stands in Germany with banners that state “refugees are welcome”, the solidarity shown with Calais through marches or collections. “This is a bottom-up process, which must first come from the people and increasingly, the people are showing compassion for the refugees. “Europe is slowly (re-)discovering its humanity,” he reflects via email. ![]() No one leaves home if the hurt that will come is greater than the hurt that they will leave behind JJ Bola Besides his writing, he works for several projects to raise awareness about the human rights situation in his native country, where six million people were killed betwee 19, and 1,000 women are still estimated to be raped every day. A promising basketball player as a teenager, his dreams of making it professionally were squashed because, without British nationality, he wasn’t allowed to travel, which meant he was unable to respond to interest from universities in America. He fled Congo for London with his parents at the age of six. Shire was named the first young poet laureate for London, aged 24, and has won numerous awards she also teaches workshops on exploring memory and healing trauma through the power of the spoken word.īeing a refugee has touched many aspects of poet JJ Bola’s life. Look what they’ve done to their own countries, Shire’s repugnance at the “disgusting, ugly, horrific inhumane atrocities happen when we allow people to be dehumanised” is strongly reflected in Home: The Green Party’s Caroline Lucas was among the political figures who tweeted it, and the poem has been included in the video of a charity single fronted by Benedict Cumberbatch. There are a few versions of Home “floating around the strange streets of the internet,” says Shire. The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: “I wrote the poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way.” The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof. The group gave a “warm” welcome to Shire in their makeshift home at the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome, she explains, describing the conditions as cold and cramped. ![]() The young Nairobi-born, London-raised writer first drafted another poem about the refugee experience, Conversations about home (at a deportation centre), in 2009 after spending time with a group of young refugees who had fled troubled homelands including Somalia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan. Explaining, in short verses, the unthinkable choices refugees must take, Shire writes: “no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.” You only run for the border / when you see the whole city / running as well.” This evocative stanza from poet Warsan Shire’s Home hit a nerve online recently as the European public finally woke up to the reality of the refugee crisis. “No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark.
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