Identity and belonging: who you are when the place is taken away

What was the Welsh Not? In some Welsh schools in the nineteenth century, a child caught speaking Welsh could be made to wear a piece of wood round the neck, often described as marked with the letters W N. It sounds like a name tag. It was a punishment. The child's own language was turned into a mark they had to wear, and the mark said they did not belong in the classroom. Take away someone's country, their history, the language they were taught in. Something is still left, and the poems in this strand are an argument about what. Every person at their centre had that thing decided for them first, by somebody else. What survives, and in what form, gets argued poem by poem.

The claim: identity in these poems starts as something other people decide, and it is never quite taken away. It survives as a mark, a voice or a silence, and four moves show each one. Move one: The Emigree. The speaker's identity is a mark on her body, not an opinion: "I am branded by an impression of sunlight". And the new place pushes back: "They accuse me of being dark in their free city." The city that calls itself free is the one doing the excluding. Move two: Checking Out Me History. Agard starts with no verb of his own: "Dem tell me Dem tell me Wha dem want to tell me". Identity begins as something done to him. What they tell him does damage: "Bandage up me eye with me own history." "Blind me to me own identity." The teaching works like a bandage over his eye. What it keeps him from seeing is his own identity. His last lines are "But now I checking out me own history." "I carving out me identity." What has changed about who does the verbs? He has them now. At the start, dem did the telling; by the end the verbs belong to him, and carving says it is slow, physical work. Move three: Tissue. The paper structures, maps and records, give way, and what is left is a person: the poem ends "turned into your skin". And move four lands the claim. In Kamikaze, belonging is taken away by the pilot's own household: "my mother never spoke again in his presence". Now a different question: how can a silence take away someone's belonging? Because nobody has to say he is out; they simply stop speaking to him. The family decides without a word, and he cannot argue with a silence.

So that is what is left. Identity in this strand starts as something other people decide, and it is never quite taken away. It survives as a mark on a body, a verb somebody takes back, or a silence a family imposes, and which of those a poet picks is the comparison.

Tissue can feel too vague for a question like this, and that hesitation is worth answering. The poem is about identity that sits outside a person: on maps, in records, on paper. That is called externalised identity, and the poem links it to a person's sense of self. Dharker shows it at the back of the Koran, where a hand "has written in the names and histories, who was born to whom". A family's whole line of belonging sits on a page, outside the people it names. Externalised identity means who you are as written down outside you. So the habit is this: if a question asks about identity, Tissue is a real option, set beside a poem where identity is lived in a body or a voice.

Now a practice question to plan: compare how two poets show that who a person is depends on where they are from. Three steps help. Ask what has been taken in each poem. Then ask what the speaker still has. And look at how each poem is printed on the page, not only what it says. Pause it there and work it out for yourself: two poems, taken, kept, and the page. One plan pairs Tissue with Kamikaze. The claim: one poem lets identity outlive the papers that record it, and the other shows a family erasing it. Tissue: what is taken is the structure, the map, the record; what is kept is the person, turned into skin. On the page, the last line stands alone, set apart from the stanzas. Kamikaze: what is taken is his place in the family; what is kept is only the guess at the end, "which had been the better way to die". On the page, his own voice never appears. The ending: Dharker trusts the person to outlast the record, and Garland shows how quickly people who share a home can erase one of their own. Two wrong turns to avoid. Opening with the poet's life story delays the answer. And listing structural features, the stanzas and the line breaks, without saying what they mean gets you nowhere.

Four last questions on this strand, and the fourth brings in a poem from another one. What are the three forms identity survives in, across this strand? It survives as a mark on a body, a verb taken back, and a silence imposed. Now The Emigree: branded by an impression of what? Sunlight. Her identity is the sunlight she carries, burned in. Try Agard: what is he carving out, at the end? Me identity. He is carving it himself, slowly, at last. One more: in Blake's London every face has marks of weakness. Chosen identity, or marked? Marked. The city's power has left its marks on every face, the Emigree's brand in reverse: damage carried, not a light kept. A wooden mark round a child's neck tried to say who did not belong. These poems show identity surviving marks like that, in a brand, a voice or a silence.

Able to tell what each speaker keeps once everything else is gone and you're sure of it: up goes the thumb. Not sure, park the video; nobody holds four poems at once on a first watch.

Next in the chapter: Bedrock poems: the six to know coldest, and why. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, two two.

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