Key Quote
“"my city takes me dancing through the city of walls"”
Carol Rumens · The Emigrée
Focus: “dancing”
The joyful memory of the homeland ('dancing') persists even within the oppressive reality ('city of walls'). Two versions of the same city coexist — one preserved in memory, one destroyed by conflict.
Technique 1 — PERSONIFICATION — THE CITY AS LOVER
Rumens personifies the remembered city as a companion, even a lover: it 'takes me dancing', 'lies down in front of me', and 'hides behind me'. This transforms geography into relationship — the speaker's bond with her homeland is as intimate and emotional as a human attachment. The city has agency (it acts, it moves, it protects), making it more alive in memory than it may be in reality.
The repetition of 'my city' asserts possession — despite being exiled, the speaker refuses to surrender her claim. This possessive pronoun becomes an act of resistance: governments and wars may have taken the physical city, but the city of memory belongs inalienably to the speaker. Rumens suggests that inner landscapes cannot be colonised by political power.
Key Words
RAD — STAGNATE
The speaker's memory is frozen in an idealised past — the city is always sunlit, always beautiful, never changing. While this preservation protects the speaker emotionally, it also represents a form of stagnation: she cannot update her image of home because she cannot return. The real city may have changed beyond recognition, but the memory-city remains perfect and permanent — a beautiful prison of nostalgia.
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Technique 2 — LIGHT IMAGERY / SEMANTIC FIELD OF RADIANCE
The homeland is consistently associated with light: 'sunlight', 'bright', 'white', 'luminous'. This creates a semantic field of radiance that opposes the darkness of the present situation — exile, threat, 'the city of walls'. Light becomes a metaphor for the incorruptible nature of cherished memory: no matter how dark the political reality, the remembered city remains radiant.
The phrase 'it tastes of sunlight' uses synaesthesia (blending senses) — sunlight cannot literally be tasted, but by crossing the sensory boundary, Rumens conveys how completely the memory has been internalised. It is not just visual but embodied — the homeland lives in the speaker's body, making exile a form of amputation from part of herself.
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Context (AO3)
POLITICAL EXILE & DISPLACEMENT
Rumens does not name a specific country — the poem is deliberately universal. It could apply to any exile from any conflict: Palestinian refugees, Eastern European dissidents, or modern asylum seekers. The unnamed 'they' who 'circle' the speaker and 'accuse' her represents any hostile host society. Rumens, a British poet, writes with empathy for the displaced, using the feminine ending '-ée' in the title to signal a specifically female experience of exile.
THE BERLIN WALL & COLD WAR
Written in 1993, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the poem's 'city of walls' resonates with the divided cities of the Cold War era. But it also speaks to ongoing conflicts: the separation wall in Israel/Palestine, border walls between nations. Rumens suggests that walls — both literal and metaphorical — can imprison bodies but cannot imprison memory.
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WOW — IMAGINED COMMUNITIES & DIASPORIC IDENTITY (Benedict Anderson)
Benedict Anderson's theory of Imagined Communities argues that nations are socially constructed — they exist because people collectively believe in them, not because of any natural boundary. Rumens extends this: the speaker's city is an imagined community of one — a nation that exists only in her memory. This connects to the concept of diasporic identity — the experience of displaced peoples who carry their homeland within them, creating what cultural theorist Homi Bhabha calls a 'third space': neither fully belonging to the homeland nor to the host country, but existing in a hybrid, in-between identity. The poem's final image — the city 'lying down in front of me, a child' — suggests that memory is not only a form of resistance but a form of creation: the speaker is not merely remembering a city but continuously remaking it. Her exile is paradoxically productive — loss becomes the engine of imagination.
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