NIVEAU AVANCÉ DU SUPPLÉMENT SONORE

Helen Bowell, poète récompensée par le Foyle Award et membre du Young Poets Network nous parle de l’intérêt des jeunes générations pour la poésie, ainsi que de la diversité de leurs productions artistiques. CD audio ou téléchargement MP3 (sur abonnement)

ma, marvelling at its shape. I printed out a copy and taped it to the staffroom tea urn, then made another, and took it across to the head of English, Miss B. She stuck it on her door, just above the handle, so that everyone entering or leaving her classroom had to read it.

3. Our school, Oxford Spires Academy, despite its lofty, English name, meets every marker for deprivation and its students spoke more than 50 different languages.

4. But none of them talked about it much. We are always, in this country, obliging refugees to tell their arrival stories. In our school, there is a code of silence. Teachers, on principle, accept each new arrival as simply a student equal to all others, and try to meet their needs as they appear. Students follow suit, speaking to each other in English, of English things, in mixed racial groups. This, mostly, is a good thing, but it does leave a layer of stories untold. The more terrible the place they have fled, the more likely they are to have seen things that leave an awful, lingering sense of shame.

5. “I don’t remember,” our students say. “I came from my country when I was six but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember my language. No.”

6. Priya’s poem, though, was like a magic key. I read it to my class, then asked the students for a list of things they definitely didn’t remember, not at all, from their childhoods. In half an hour, we had 30 poems. Sana had written about her mother tongue: “How shameful, shameful, forgotten.” Ismail, who had never written a poem before, who rarely spoke, covered three pages with sensual remembrance, ending: “I don’t remember the fearless boy I used to be / no, I don’t remember my country, Bangladesh.” So many of them – and so good, so clear.

7. I decided to create a poetry group. I also decided, just for once, to limit my group to girls. Several of the students I had in mind came from strict homes: it would help them speak freely if there were no boys around. And so it was that I asked the English department for some Very Quiet Foreign Girls.

8. For two terms, starting in Easter 2013, we met every Thursday lunchtime, in Miss P’s tidy room. None of the girls were put off by difficulty. The stronger and stranger a poem, in fact, the more rhetorical and “poemy”, the more they liked it.

9. By May, Miss P’s room was filled with babble. As the girls grew more confident, they became noisier, less pliable, more human, and talked to each other more. So much, in fact, that my goal of producing pure, medalwinning poetry sometimes seemed in danger of disappearing. Sometimes it was frustrated: Shakila on her furious quest for words; the low moans of Maryam suddenly giving up mid-poem, and insisting that each line she had written, each word, was in some indescribable way wrong.

“I don’t remember her in the summer, lagoon water sizzling, WKH NLQJÀVKHU OHDSLQJ or even the sweet honey mangoes they tell me I used to love.” - Priya ´0\ SRHP LV D MDFNIUXLW WKH VPHOO RI LW FOLQJV DQG WKH LQVLGHV IHHO like the gooey ink P\ EURWKHU SXWV LQ KLV UHG FDU HQJLQHµ - Maryam

10. There was the day Maryam said, as I wondered aloud at her spelling: “Don’t laugh, Miss, but I didn’t write till I was 10. Didn’t read or write, not any language.” We all agreed, immediately, not to laugh. There was the time Fatima took us through her family’s visa problems, circuit by circuit of the Dickensian Circumlocution Office. We all agreed that the visa system was bust and unjust. How could you make a distinction between Kala and Shakila, who had left war zones, and Eszter and Fatima, who had left economic disasters, caste and class prejudice, corruption and hopelessness?

11. Sometimes, the same linguistic intuition that allowed my Quiet Girls to use music in their own poetry seems to preclude them writing critically about other people’s. Several of them can write exquisite, musical poetry while being completely unable to master the language to talk about it. Maryam, for example, not only struggled to get to an E grade in A-level English literature, but also got a D in AS-level creative writing in the very same year – and for the very same poem, that won her a place in the top 100 of the Foyle award. The piece in question began: My poem is a jackfruit the smell of it clings and the insides feel like the gooey ink my brother puts in his red car engine 12. Though what mark indeed would you give that? The impossibility of grading such ineffable mixtures of innocence and profundity, such magnificent protrusions of an entirely foreign accent, has become known in the English Department as the “jackfruit problem”.

13. And we didn’t win. None of my Quiet Girls’ poems actually won the Foyle award in September that year. But the students love each other’s poems, and gain much from them. Best of all for teaching purposes is My Mother Country by Priya, which started the whole thing. I must have read this poem to a dozen classes now, and asked 200 children to write down what they don’t remember about their native land: her comforting garment, her saps of date trees, providing the meagre earrings, for those farmers out there in the gulf under the calidity of the sun.

14. Each time I read it is like casting a spell: out come memories of lost grandparents, poppy cakes, paprika pots, chickens, mountains, languages.

“her comforting garment, her saps of date trees, providing the meagre earrings, for those farmers out there in the gulf under the calidity of the sun.“- Priya

15. That is better than prizes, really. But I still carry a resentment that her poem – that none of her poems – ever won one of those national competitions, that the sweet soulful kids from Westminster and St Paul’s who did – the kids who will, most probably, run our future publishing houses – were never confronted by Priya’s experience. It wasn’t for want of trying. I sent My Mother Country out eight times.

16. In our school we value this poem especially, and have blown it up 6ft-high, framed it and hung in the English corridor, next to Miss P’s room: a life-sized permanent 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: or the mosquitoes, droning in the monsoon, or the tipa tapa of the rain, on the tin roofs, dripping on the window, I think.

17. Blown up to that size, 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.

“I don’t remember the fearless boy I used to be no, I don’t remember my country, Bangladesh" - Ismail