Joining us via live-stream from the Netherlands, We Are Here will present performative responses and share thoughts about the relationship between poetry and protest. Through discussion between the group and audience, the reading group will explore how poetry can support protest and give voice to those who are denied the right speak.

Rejected by the Dutch Immigration system We Are Here live in the so-called ‘asylum gap’, unable to return to their home countries, but not acknowledged by the State. The ‘asylum gap’ is a political vacuum where people without documents are deprived of many rights and opportunities. Over the past three years We Are Here have brought attention to the plight of refugees in the Netherlands through various forms of protest.

In September 2015 a small group of We Are Here members and artist Coco Duivenvoorde formed a reading group. In their weekly sessions they collect and read stories, poems and other texts that inspire them, and use those to write their own powerful texts. The reading group sets out to explore the role of language in protest and looks for ways to represent and strengthen the We Are Here protest through poetry.

Reading list: 

Home, Warsan Shire, 2015.

 I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King, 1968.

Situations 1, video, Claudia Rankine and John Lucas, 2015.

Black Skin White Masks, 1 – 3 pg., Frantz Fanon, 2008, Pluto Press.

Black Skin White Masks, 84 – 86 pg., Frantz Fanon, 2008, Pluto Press.

Invictus, Book of Verses, in the section Life and Death (Echoes), William Ernest Henley, 1888.

Reading group materials are available in advance, please contact:

bryony.gillard@arnolfini.org.uk or the Box Office on 0117 9172300.