THE IMMIGRANTS Margaret Atwood They are allowed to inherit

The immigrants are immediately dehumanised and isolated; they are not named, but repeatedly referred to with the non-specific resumptive third-person pronoun they. Indeed, the immigrants are never explicitly identified as such in the poem. Even in the first line, the agency of the immigrants is diminished: they are allowed to do, rather than to do of their own volition. This is a perspective maintained throughout the poem: the immigrants are defined by their relation to the poet and the other denizens of the immigrants’ new home. This reflects the position of the immigrants as ‘the Other’, mutually constituting themselves with their new community.

the sidewalks involved as palmlines, bricks exhausted and soft, the deep lawnsmells, orchards whorled to the land’s contours, the inflected weather

only to be told they are too poor to keep it up, or someone has noticed and wants to kill them; or the towns pass laws which declare them obsolete.

The notion of inheritance suggests familial belonging and care. But the enjambment belies this presumption: instead, the new country supplies the immigrants only with homelessness. The dream imagery in this stanza, enhanced by the euphonic [ɔː] repetition (lawnsmells, orchards, whorled, contours), renders the sidewalks a bed, exhausted and soft, the deep: they must make a home out of the streets. The language of belonging is ironically used to describe the abject rejection of the immigrants. The stanza break delays this emphatic rejection of belonging. This stanza presents the inhabitants of the new country as fortified against immigrants by the subjugating forces of wealth and law, strengthened by strong active-voiced verbs, but also as uninterested, taking only cursory notice of the immigrants, as apparent in the jarring contrastive force of someone // has noticed and wants to kill them. Even the obsolescence is relegated to an afterthought by a nonrestrictive relative clause which declare. Once more, Atwood leaves the brutal power of subjugation for after the enjambment — someone // …wants to kill and the towns // …declare them obsolete. The myriad sources of oppression are varied by the polysyndeton of or and the immigrants continue to be they and them.

I see them coming

For the first time, the responder finds the first-person poet (in this case, a character in the anthology). This pronoun encompasses the othering force of the previous and subsequent stanzas, reinforced by the nominative I and accusative them.

up from the hold smelling of vomit, infested, emaciated, their skins grey with travel; as they step on shore

The stanza is filled with strong imagery — visual and olfactory. The asyndeton draws out the abject condition of immigrants, but it is important to note that the stanza frames it as a highly subjective and whorled perception on the part of the persona. The abundant sibilance that succeeds the introduction of the persona reflects the association between sibilance and derision known to classical rhetoric, presenting a powerful alienation between the immigrants and their community. The phrase with travel borders on the figurative, inviting the responder’s notice of the subjectivity of the problematic perceptions of the immigrants. This notion of perception underpins any understanding of belonging, for connection is driven by reciprocal perception.

the old countries recede, become perfect, thumbnail castles preserved

The tension between the immigrants’ adopted country and their homeland is introduced. The metaphor of the castle is rich: the memory of the homeland is an idyllic one, but represents only a specious impression that does not correspond to the realities that made them emigrate. The notion of a castle simultaneously suggests safety and protection (in contrast with the exposed danger of the new country) but also the mythical unreliability of memories of home.

like gallstones in a glass bottle, the

towns dwindle upon the hillsides in a light paperweight-clear.

They carry their carpetbags and trunks with clothes, dishes, the family pictures; they think they will make an order like the old one, sow miniature orchards, carve children and flocks out of wood

like gallstones in a glass bottle is a defining simile in the poem. It brings about medical imagery of premodern surgical removal of a gallstone, which was then preserved in a jar. The idea of a gallstone suggests that memories of home are an intrinsic part of the immigrants, like an organ, which figuratively carries their genetic material. But it had to be removed, drawing out the implicit factors conducing their emigration—the gallstones necessarily involve past pain and suffering; the surgical removal emphasises the importance of emphatic choice in this transition of belonging. Nevertheless, the immigrants carry the figurative gallstone around with them, inexplicably attached to this part of themselves. This continues Atwood’s exploration of attachment to home being a barrier to an immigrant’s belonging.

The stanza concludes with a final metaphor. The preserved memories of home are exposed as an artifice, figuratively kept only as a superficial memento in a paperweight.

Asyndetonic objects represent the luggage (figurative and literal) that the immigrants bear. family pictures is a clear sign of the enduring power of belonging to family; one kind of belonging may persist even in the face of another sort of alienation. In the broader structure of the poem, these lines (cohered by a halfrhyme) link Atwood’s antecedent description of the burden of memories of home with her subsequent account of how the hope to belong to a new country is inclined to disappoint. This second section is introduced with they think they will make an order // like the old one, which also emphasises the ironic tension, hitherto implicit, of the immigrants’ desire for the past and their desire for renewal. The reader is already familiar with the old order, but Atwood describes how this idyllic pastoral memory might be recreated.

but always they are too poor, the sky is flat, the green fruit shrivels in the prairie sun, wood is for burning;

and if they go back, the towns in time have crumbled, their tongues stumble among awkward teeth, their ears are filled with the sound of breaking glass.

If the absurdity of carving life from wood was not enough, the enjambed result makes it clear: belonging is not readily found in the immigrants’ new home. The run-on sentences develop the notion of detachment and colour the experience of alienation as one of despair and tedium. These lines underline the importance of circumstantial factors to belonging — the immigrants are not named, and are only the subjects of a stative clause, diminishing their agency. Instead, the landscape is agentive; this is telling, given the poem’s exploration of belonging to place and the relevance of tree and sun imagery in the Journals collection.

If the immigrants should return to where they feel belonging, they are ironically alienated due to their misconceptions of home. The vivid crumbling of the towns and the anthropomorphised stumbling tongue, which suggests interpersonal alienation, belie any hope of belonging again. The stanza’s lucid run-on sentences conclude with their ears // are filled with the sound of breaking glass. The core meaning of this description connects it to the other textured imagery of the poem — crumbled, shrivelled, soft — to describe the destruction of the immigrants’ imagined sense of belonging. This contrast between imagined and actual belonging underpins an important contradiction between the roles of perception and reality of belonging, and defends belonging against the notion that it might be a mere construct of perceptions. Moreover, the line has incidental connotations of Kristallnacht, historically alluding to a noted connection between the social rejection of the Other and the symbolic force of breaking glass.

I wish I could forget them and so forget myself:

The narrator enters the poem for only the second time. This antithesis is nonetheless a pivotal one. The poet importantly incorporates the notion that the process of othering is more a construction of the self than the Other. The immigrants remind the poet of her own vulnerabilities of belonging insofar as her sense of connection is a highly contingent product of her social milieu. This connection is adduced through the correlative force of the generic accusative plural them with the reflexive pronoun myself and the repeated forget. The poet explicitly makes her sense of belonging, which might seem secure, a product only of the exclusion of the Other. Through processes of exclusion and differentiation, the self can form a more coherent collective identity that enhances a sense of connectedness.

my mind is a wide pink map

The metaphor of the wide pink map is a curious one. The most fundamental denotation is the association of the poet’s consciousness with her knowledge of the rest of the world. In particular, the requirement that belonging to a place or community be predicated on the understanding that there are others who do not belong to that place or community (alluded to earlier) is the foremost impression of the metaphor. This is enhanced by the subsequent lines, which suggest that the disconnected immigrants are a useful opposition to the poet’s belonging, a notion underlined by the repeated year after year and further and further, themselves isocolonic. In this way, the poet’s belonging to a community and a place is a product of the immigrants’ lack of belonging to a community or a place. A connected effect of the wide pink map metaphor is an allusion to the 20th century world map, in which the Commonwealth is coloured pink. This is particularly relevant when one considers that the immigration is to Canada (apparent in the earlier reference to a prairie and the Journal collection generally).

across which move year after year arrows and dotted lines, further and further,

people in railway cars their heads stuck out of the windows at stations, drinking milk or singing, their features hidden with beards or shawls day and night riding across an ocean of unknown land to an unknown land.

The poem begins to conclude with the cadence of the conduplicatio doublets: year after year, further and further. Processes of belonging are drawn out. They are correlated to places and mapped against literal and figurative movement. After a poem of dehumanisation, the immigrants are not the ones who move; rather, the arrows and dotted lines—the impersonal migration as imagined by the self—are anthropomorphised into movement.

The immigrants are finally humanised as people. But they are not individuals. They have human qualities, but in the mind of the self, they are homogenous: their features hidden with beards or shawls. The tone of the final lines of the poem is a more joyous and hopeful one. The evocative last words, riding across an ocean of unknown land to an unknown land, suggests not only the indeterminacy of immigration but also connects it to other ideas of “knowing” in the poem: my mind, forget, and the language of memento and misconception.