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| Frage | Antworten |
| subject | The poem is set at the border of Iran. The date is 1979, the year that Choman Hardi returned, with her family, to their homeland of Kurdistan, an area to the north of Iraq. The poem is therefore partly autobiographical. The idea of national borders is also something that interests Hardi, Iraq contains the remains of some of the very earliest human cities. The boundaries of the current country, however, were only drawn up in 1920. |
| form and structure | The poem follows no set poetic form. The length of the lines and stanzas varies. There is a sense that where the lines break is arbitrary – in other words follows no rules: Many of the lines are end-stopped (have some kind of punctuation at the end). Some are broken by sounds (the 'd' of lines 4-5). Others flow naturally as single phrases (e.g. lines 12-14 and 17-19). This reflects the main theme of the poem – national borders are arbitrary, they do not mark out divisions that are in any other way 'real'. They are wherever a person or government has decided to put them. The story is organised around four different perspectives: the guards, the adult refugees and the two children (the five-year-old narrator and her sister). Stanza one – the border guard and the families. Stanza two (lines 4 and 5) - the private reflection of the child. Stanza three - the focus shifts to the sister. Stanza four – the mother. Stanza five – the families and mothers crying. Stanza six – another reflection from the child, repeating the theme of stanza two. The list of events in the final stanza then moves focus in each sentence until we have a final, concluding observation from the child in line 27. |
| language | The poem does not use a lot of 'poetic' language but much of the language has many connotations. For example, the word "border" could be a border between life and death, youth and age, innocence and experience. The date of the title fixes this poem in a particular time and place. There are very few adjectives and these are mostly unexciting: "last" and "different". The more colourful adjectives ("clean", "beautiful" and "kind") come from the child's mother. However, the contrast with the boring wait at the check-point and the child's lack of excitement makes it seem like the mother's promises are not real. This sense is confirmed by the following line: "Dozens of families waited in the rain". This uses the anticlimax of a dream being replaced by reality to create a poetic effect called bathos. Describing the "homeland" as "Muddy" in line 26 shows the contrast between the adult's romantic vision of the place, and the child's simple, clear view of it. |
| themes and ideas | The poem dramatises a core experience of being a refugee: the growing distance between the adults' idea of home and the reality. The child is cold and distant not just because she is tired. The lands they are coming from and going to are meaningless to her. The older sister can play and the adults can dream, the child is already cut adrift: where is home for her? In this way, the final line ("The same chain of mountains encompassed all of us") is ambiguous. The repeated 'ai' sounds suggests weariness. So the observation could almost be about how we are all chained to ideas of 'home' that may not be 'real'. The inclusive feel of "all of us" is therefore not entirely positive. They may be home but they cannot leave themselves, or their problems, at the border. |
| comparison to 'Flag' | Flag – this poem also explores the way ideas (of home and nationhood) can be expressed in symbols. Like Hardi, Agard had early experience of different cultures and saw the way differences were created by politicians. Where Hardi's poem is rooted in a real time and place, however, Agard's is abstract – creating an imaginary conversation to explore a world of ideas. |
| comparison to 'Poppies' | Poppies – this poem seems on the surface to be very different, but it provides a number of interesting contrasts. At the Border, 1979, is a child's recollection of her family, focusing on her mother. Poppies is a mother's recollection of her son. In Hardi's poem, the child cannot understand the symbolism of the border and the meaning adult's give to it. In Weir's work we are shown how even a popular national symbol, the poppy, can be filled with the strongest most personal feeling. |
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