Teaching Poetry to Refugees

We go slowly. We get good at waiting and listening.

We repeat.

Last night we talked about metaphor. We read a poem where a man compares himself to a tiger. The tiger lives in the woods and stalks animals, kills them and drags them to its young. The man, because of the war, escaped to the woods, stalked animals, killed them and dragged them to his children. I am you, tiger. I am animal.

Can't we just write stories? Why didn't he just say "The war is bad. I hunt rats."

Lets think of a metaphor for winter. Homelessness, they said, winter is the inside of a dark cave. They wrote a poem about what they like and don't like. They wrote I Hate Metaphor.

We had a talk about why poetry is art, and why it is more powerful to use a comparison to express a feeling. The poem isn't just about acting like a tiger, hunting for rodents in the woods. It is about being reduced to a primal level, being treated like an animal, watching your babies starve. It's about oppression. War. Desperation. Writers use poems and comparison to tell stories that aren't just about a man in the woods in Laos. There is more there. Do you see now that there is more?

A man from Sudan said Yes, I know how this man feels. I have felt that. It is same. All over the world war feels same. Learners nod at each other--they're from 8 countries and 4 continents all together--then look back up to me with a respectful You don't know. They're right--I don't.

In the end, they put on coats and gloves and walk to catch busses and go to work at the stop sign factory and day care center and tall office buildings where they dump trash and sweep coffee grounds in the middle of the night. They go off to do their homework, to underline words for me to define next week for them: What is distance? What is glow? What is this: has made all the difference?

Did anyone understand? I get in my car and drive home with a stack of I Hate Metaphor poems and think next week, I will try something else. When I return to the stack, there is this:

A Poem by Wang Chue Xiong, Hmong freedom fighter living in Saint Paul, Minnesota:

Catch a dove
to lock in the cage
It lonesome (lonely)
endure suffering, It
live in the cage is a
silver cage, gold cage.
but a dove doesn't forget
the wood (tree).

same as me. moved to live
in the propress country.
I'm lonesome (lonely) and
endure suffering. live in a
big house, big apartment many
floor, but I don't forget my
homecountry, don't forget my
native language, don't forget
ricefield, fence and garden,
don't forget my cousins, my
friends, my Hmong people that
risk in fighting to protect
themself, from killing and
destroy by communist vietnam
and lao communist military
power, and they still fighting
untilnow.