Key Quote
“"And if the whole world crumbles, you make your own"”
Roger Robinson · A Portable Paradise
Focus: “make”
The active verb 'make' transforms paradise from a place you find to a thing you create — resilience is not passive endurance but active construction of joy in the face of destruction.
Technique 1 — IMPERATIVE VERBS & DIRECT ADDRESS
Robinson uses imperative verbs throughout — 'pack', 'trace', 'smell', 'make' — giving the poem the quality of instructions or a recipe for survival. The direct address ('you') creates an intimate, one-to-one relationship between speaker and reader, as though the grandmother is whispering advice into the listener's ear. The imperatives do not merely suggest but command: this is not optional advice but essential wisdom for survival in a hostile world.
The instructional tone evokes the oral tradition of Caribbean culture, where wisdom is passed down through spoken narrative rather than written text. The grandmother's voice carries the authority of lived experience — she does not theorise about resilience but demonstrates it through practical, embodied instruction: trace the ridges, smell the scent, carry it with you. Knowledge is not abstract but physical, rooted in the body and the senses.
Key Words
RAD — PROGRESS
The poem enacts a remarkable progress from external loss to internal resilience. The speaker begins with the recognition that the external world may 'crumble' — that home, safety, and belonging can be destroyed by forces beyond one's control. But the poem does not end in despair; instead, it offers a radical alternative: if the world takes your paradise away, you build one inside yourself. Robinson suggests that true resilience is not about returning to what was lost but about creating something new — a portable paradise that cannot be taken because it exists within the self.
Key Words
Technique 2 — TACTILE / SENSORY IMAGERY
Robinson fills the poem with tactile imagery — 'trace its ridges', 'smell its piney scent' — grounding the abstract concept of paradise in concrete, physical sensation. Paradise is not a theological concept but a lived experience: it has texture, smell, and weight. This sensory specificity makes the poem's central metaphor feel real and achievable — paradise is not a distant, unreachable heaven but something you can hold in your hands.
The sensory details are drawn from Caribbean natural landscapes — pine trees, warm air, the textures of tropical foliage. These images function as synecdoche for an entire cultural heritage: each scent, each texture carries within it the memory of a homeland left behind. Robinson suggests that the body itself is an archive of cultural memory — the senses remember what the mind might forget, and paradise can be reconstructed through sensory recall.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
GRENFELL TOWER & THE WINDRUSH SCANDAL
Robinson wrote the poem in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire (2017), in which 72 people died — many from immigrant communities. It also responds to the Windrush Scandal (2018), in which British citizens of Caribbean origin were wrongly detained, denied rights, and deported. Both events demonstrated that Black British people's homes and citizenship could be destroyed by institutional negligence and hostility.
TRINIDADIAN HERITAGE & GRANDMOTHER'S WISDOM
Roger Robinson is a Trinidadian-British poet. The poem draws on Caribbean cultural traditions of resilience, particularly the role of the grandmother as keeper of wisdom and heritage. The T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection 'A Portable Paradise' (2019) celebrates the capacity of diasporic communities to carry their culture with them, transforming displacement from a tragedy into a source of strength.
Key Words
WOW — HOMI BHABHA'S 'THIRD SPACE' — DIASPORA AS CREATION
Robinson's poem exemplifies Homi Bhabha's concept of the third space — a hybrid cultural location that belongs to neither the homeland nor the host country but is created by the experience of migration itself. The 'portable paradise' is not Trinidad and it is not London; it is a new space, carried within the body, that combines elements of both. Bhabha argued that this third space is not a compromise or a loss but a site of radical creativity: displaced people do not merely survive between cultures — they create entirely new cultural forms. Robinson's grandmother embodies this creativity: she does not mourn a lost paradise but teaches her grandchild to build one. The poem's final line — 'you make your own' — is both a survival strategy and a manifesto for diasporic identity. It insists that home is not a geographical location but an act of imagination, and that the most resilient cultures are those that can be carried, shared, and remade anywhere in the world.
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