Reading A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson
Writer, cultural activist, performer, lecturer and self-proclaimed dub poet artiste Roger Robinson was born in London in 1982 to Trinidadian parents. Presently, Robinson divides his time between England and Trinidad. In a recent interview in The Guardian the poet stated: ‘Since I was 19 I’ve been living in England and thinking I’d go home, but there was a point, around six years ago, when I realised I’m here now: I’m black British.” And it is from this authorial realisation that the poet’s A Portable Paradise is perhaps best approached. In this TS Eliot Prize-winning collection Robinson (from the vantage point of insider/outsider) turns his attention to documenting the experiences of those who dared to dream of better; of those generations that packed their hopes, dreams and idealism in a suitcase and sought out new lives on British shores; of those people who never stood a chance of succeeding because of pervasive social inequality, injustice and institutional racism. The eleven poems with which the collection opens serve as a fitting tribute to the lives lost in the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017. They also serve as a damning indictment of the many institutional failures that contributed to the scale of the tragedy. In its entirety the collection provokes many moral questions, not least about the notion of paradise: where is it and how do we get there? By the collection’s end it is faith – whether that be personal and spiritual or in people – that emerges as a way to achieve some form of transcendence.
This outstanding collection of poems is so entirely of the moment, that you would be hard-pushed to find a more engaging contemporary collection of poems for young adults to study in the English classroom.
So where should you begin with teaching this text?
If you only study one poem with pupils…
Make it ‘Haibun for the Lookers’. This poem - describing the unfolding scene at Grenfell Tower on the evening of the tragedy - is an evocative study of the human response to tragedy. The poem makes really effective use of a range of poetic techniques and would work well as a National 5 Critical Essay text. Alternatively, use ‘Haibun for the Lookers’ as the stimulus for a piece of creative writing in the form of a haibun. This exercise would be a way to put a modern spin on those popular ‘Instamatic Poetry’ creative writing units we like to use in the Broad General Education.
If you want to study a set of poems with a BGE class…
Dip into the first section of the poetry collection (consisting of eleven poems in honour of the victims of Grenfell Tower). Of particular note are the poems ‘The Missing’; ‘The Portrait Museum’; and ‘Blame’. As well as the thematic and contextual links that could be studied, these four poems offer pupils the chance to encounter a variety of poetic forms. Each of the poems offers different broadly creative and broadly discursive writing opportunities.
Looking for resources…
You’ll find a pupil-friendly note pack on A Portable Paradise in the Teaching and Learning section of the website.