Refugee Week: Singing in Colour

For this delicate Irish 'blow-in',  summer brings sneezing and slapping on the factor 50 and going incognito in sun-hat and dark glasses. But it also brings festivals and the special joy of people gathering to celebrate each other as well as the season. I was especially pleased to be invited to do a set on the 'Acoustic Stage' of Leicester's Red Cross Refugee Week bash in the Town Hall Square on Saturday. The images captured by Ambrose Musiyiwa, our resident community photographer, offer their own feast. Here were lawyers, trumpeters, passers-by, singers, refugee case-workers, volunteers, asylum seekers, doctors, drummers, children, pensioners and at least one poet 'shaking out their colours'. Weddings spilled out on the Town Hall Steps. Sun-worshippers laid themselves out on the crocheted blankets the Red Cross provided. Teenagers moved through a complex choreography of Tai-Chi and/or pop dance on the lawn. The Red Leicester Choir emblazoned the square with harmonised anthems from the heart. A series of musicians with guitars and homespun lyrics seduced us under the sari-dressed tent. As the pictures show, people danced, picnicked, laughed - shared jokes, shared their culture and their stories, and Leicester, at its best, strutted its stuff.

My own set was woven from the collection called 'Songs of a Blow-In' which threads together two stories. The first is perhaps the oldest story, narrated by the archaeologist Dr Alice Roberts in her wonderful TV series The Incredible Human Journey some years ago. That inspired for me a sequence of poems tracing the footsteps of Homo Sapiens as they trekked out of Africa and found their way around the continents of our planet. The other story is taken from my personal memories, fragmented like the shards archaeologists dig up, of my family's move from Fermanagh in the North of Ireland to Bolton in the North of England, swapping one childhood world for another. They are both stories then of Memory and Migration. It turns out that our people, the humans, have always been migrants. We are, in the words of my first poem, 'always on the move/ always at home' ; two states of being that define us as a species. We leave and migrate; we settle and create. We bring our skills and our songs, our prayers and our stories; we share food and jokes and we build communities out of all these shared gifts. This is our story - we are the human race.

It goes without saying that this year's Refugee Week celebration was especially joyful and much needed after a tide of racist vitriol against migrants in the recent election. Our corporate media - which also managed a complete 'news-block' on the peaceful 50,000 strong March Against Austerity this weekend - would have us believe there is an anti-immigration consensus in this country. But Leicester's Refugee Week told another story and the city will undoubtedly host a summer of such festivals, a polyphony of songs from its many communities and bands and performers. Between the hills of Bradgate and Highfields, the air will thrum with colour.