Portfolio Entry #9: Refugees (Writing Project)

 

Refugees

Refugees are people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country.

They often have had to flee with little more than the clothes on their back, leaving behind homes, possessions, jobs and loved ones.

Refugees are defined and protected in international law. The 1951 Refugee Convention is a key legal document and defines a refugee as:

“someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”

By the end of 2017, there were 25.4 million refugee men, women and children registered across the world.

Refugees, U. (2020). What is a refugee?. Retrieved 27 September 2020, from UNHCR - What is a Refugee

The subject of refugees and how they are treated is quite sensitive, and their situation has inspired numerous artists to speak up, to write poems like the following: 

We Refugees | A Benjamin Zephaniah Poem from Red Café on Vimeo.

‘’We can all be refugees’’, and we have been. We are the descendants of refugees who had to flee their homes to be safe, to escape from wars and natural disasters. Our families were faced with this terrifying situation before, so why is it that we lack compassion for those in need? Have we not learnt from the struggles of our own families? Must we experience it in the flesh first? No one desires to become a refugee; and they should not be mistreated for it. When tragedy strikes one day and we end up in their position, wouldn’t we like to be treated with kindness?  

Refugees by Brian Bilston. Read by David Gordon. From David Gordon on Youtube.

With only one poem, Brian shows how refugees are treated by the people: those who want the refugees to leave their country and put the blame on them, and those who want to give them a hand. Both sides are depicted in a single poem, with a creative writing technique. By the end of the poem (or the beginning, depending on how you read it), he is denouncing the opinion of Donald Trump and his supporters when he writes ‘’build a wall to keep them out’’, as they are the ones openly attacking and insulting refugees and illegal immigrants.

Just like in Zephaniah’s poem, the idea of us one day becoming refugees is also found here, when you read the poem from the bottom upwards ''these haggard faces could belong to you or me’’. The idea that they should be treated as people, that we should accept them and give them the opportunity to live somewhere safe. They fled their homes to protect their lives and their families, they cannot go back even if they wanted to. We should not judge them because of the situation they found themselves in, we should be trying to give them a hand, as we would like in their place.

• Writing Project: Writing an Essay 

As part of a writing project, we will be writing a comparative essay on the topic of refugees and immigrants. But before that, we need to revise the basic structure of an essay and how to formulate a thesis statement.

 

After watching the videos and taking down notes, I put them together into an interactive board such as Padlet.

Metacognitive Analysis

Having the opportunity to write an essay or some other type of academic writing is quite exciting, as well as frustrating: is what I am writing attractive? Am I using my sources correctly? Am I making any sense? The change of style is quite abrupt, and the mindset one must have when writing is a lot more different, even if its only a 5-paragraph essay. 

But if I had to mention the most frustrating aspect of this writing project: It was choosing a subject, a topic. The possibilities are, in some way, endless. I discarded different topics before settling for one, and even when I was writing, the topic of the essay changed at least 2 times, depending on the sources I found the most interesting. While I enjoy a ''free subject'', that is, the possiblity of choosing whatever topic as long as it is related to the prompt; I would rather like to have some suggested topics to research and write about. Other than that, it was a nice and exciting challenge.