Migration & Displacement
Migration & Displacement — Overview
These three poems explore what it takes to hold on to yourself in a place that does not always welcome you. James Berry, Roger Robinson and Imtiaz Dharker each write about a crossing — a train carriage, an ocean, a walk to school — and present it as both a risk and a source of strength.
James Berry — “On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955”
Berry (1924–2017) arrived in England from Jamaica in 1948 as part of the Windrush generation. This poem captures a specific moment: a Black man on a suburban train in 1955, and a white woman who “startled me” by speaking to him first. The title’s precision — the exact route, the year — grounds the poem in documentary reality.
The woman is a Quaker who has been “moved in silence / to speak”, and she talks warmly of “racial brotherhood”. Berry uses the carriage as a microcosm of 1950s British race relations: real kindness, and an unmeant racism when she asks “Where are you from?” and assumes Jamaica is in Africa.
Berry’s poem is set in 1955, seven years after Windrush. The carriage holds connection and distance together: the speaker jokes that “Ireland is near Lapland”, and at the end “people sat down around us” — the word “us” links the two of them and separates them from everyone else.
Key techniques: Berry uses documentary precision, free verse and everyday, unmetaphorical language, and four stanzas that mark the stages of the conversation. The plain tone makes the casual racism more disturbing — it is ordinary, unremarkable, built into daily life.
Context: Berry was one of the first Caribbean-British poets to gain mainstream recognition. He documented the Windrush experience with clarity and dignity, insisting that these everyday encounters were worthy of poetry.
Roger Robinson — “A Portable Paradise”
Robinson, born in London to Trinidadian parents, explores how migrants carry their homeland within themselves. The poem’s central concept is that paradise is not a fixed geographical location but something internal — portable — that can be transported across oceans and sustained through memory, sight, smell and sound.
The title is both optimistic and poignant. “Portable paradise” suggests resilience: the speaker can recreate home anywhere. But it also implies loss — the need to carry paradise suggests that the original paradise has been left behind or is no longer accessible in its original form.
Robinson builds “paradise” from “white sands, green hills and fresh fish”, and from imperatives — “trace”, “smell”, “hum” — that ask you to use your senses. The poem celebrates the embodied nature of cultural memory: home lives in the body as much as in the mind.
Context: Robinson won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2019. His poetry draws on both London and Caribbean cultures, exploring what it means to be rooted in two places simultaneously. “A Portable Paradise” speaks to the universal migrant experience of constructing home from fragments of memory.
Imtiaz Dharker — “A Century Later”
Dharker was born in Pakistan, brought up in Scotland, and has lived in England, Wales and India. “A Century Later” was published in 2014, the centenary of the First World War. It opens with an allusion to Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, but moves the war to a school.
The girl in the poem can be Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head in 2012 at the age of fifteen, or any girl kept from school. “The school-bell is a call to battle”; she “takes the bullet in the head” and, across a stanza break, “walks on”.
Key techniques: Dharker uses war imagery in a peaceful setting, enjambment across a stanza break, and free verse with no fixed stanza pattern. The tone turns from threat to triumph: “You cannot kill a book / or the buzzing in it.”
Berry shows a stranger’s kindness crossing a racial line; Robinson shows home as something you carry within; Dharker shows a girl claiming a place she is told is not hers. Together, they present belonging as something that has to be won, not given.
Connections Between the Poems
All three poems ask what it costs to belong. Berry finds warmth and a careless question inside the same conversation. Robinson builds a home from memory and culture that nobody can take. Dharker shows a girl who must walk through gunfire to reach a classroom.
Berry records a real conversation: warmth and an unthinking question in the same four stanzas. His tone is plain and observational. Robinson responds with creativity — building paradise wherever you stand. His tone is warm and celebratory. Dharker answers violence with defiance — the schoolgirls stand up “one by one”. Her tone turns triumphant.
These responses span the experience of being made an outsider: the awkwardness of arrival (Berry), the resilience of adaptation (Robinson), and the courage of refusal (Dharker). Together, they argue that belonging is not given once but claimed again and again.