Children in Exile by James Fenton
"Children in Exile" by James Fenton is a poignant poem that explores the experiences of Cambodian children who have fled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime during the late 1970s. The poem, structured in 49 stanzas, opens with a child's reflection on identity and actions, highlighting the impact of their traumatic past. Despite escaping physical danger, the children carry psychological scars from their experiences, grappling with fear and troubled dreams even in seemingly safe environments like Italy.
As the narrative unfolds, the children begin to heal amid the beauty of the Italian landscape, fostering a sense of curiosity and belonging. The poem contrasts their current safety with the painful memories of their homeland, where they were victims of political violence. While they assimilate into a new culture and strive to reclaim their lost education, the poem subtly critiques broader geopolitical complicity, including the role of the United States in Cambodia's suffering.
Fenton employs a melodic ballad form, which balances the gravity of the children's plight with moments of levity and hope, creating an atmosphere of resilience. Through vivid imagery and relatable themes, "Children in Exile" ultimately conveys a message of optimism, emphasizing the children's potential for a brighter future despite their past traumas.
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Subject Terms
Children in Exile by James Fenton
First published: 1982, in The Memory of War: Poems, 1968-1982
Type of poem: Narrative
The Poem
“Children in Exile” is written in forty-nine stanzas of four lines each, an extra line space being inserted in the last stanza. The poem begins with a direct quote from a child in exile, who states one of the keynotes of the poem, that what one is is less important than what one does. Readers then are made aware of the general subject of the poem—that it involves children from Cambodia in exile in a strange country (readers later learn that this is Italy) in roughly the late 1970’s. Though still children, the exiles “have learnt much.” Far from being innocents, they have experienced ordeals that most of the adults who take care of them cannot even begin to imagine. They have escaped from the mass killings perpetrated by the Cambodian regime of Pol Pot, in power from 1975 to 1979, which was preceded by a civil war (in which the United States intervened) in which many were also killed and wounded. The children have physically escaped from their ordeal, but psychologically they are still wounded, and their dreams are troubled.
The “I” of the poem, a friendly Western adult observer, sees that the children are still in pain from their experiences. He muses on the tragic situation; these children were punished not for their own actions but because they happened to be children of people who were political opponents of the regime or who were otherwise persecuted. The children also, in a way, symbolize the entire Cambodian nation, which was so rent by civil conflict and government-sponsored killings that its own survival seemed in doubt. The children in exile are now free, but they do not realize their own freedom. The fear from their old experiences still troubles them, even in safe, touristy locales such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, where a child becomes afraid even though there are only friends around who want him to have fun. Yet amid the Italian spring the children’s suffering begins to heal, and they evince curiosity about the landscape and people that surround them. Duschko the dog and the doves in the hayloft are part of the harmony of the landscape, which welcomes and accommodates the children.
Surrounded by love instead of fear, the children hurry to catch up on the education they have missed in their native land and to assimilate the culture of the West. One of the children has a twin sister who had escaped to America and has given birth to a baby. The children see America as the promised land; the narrator, on the other hand, deems the United States to be partially guilty of Cambodia’s ruin. Regardless of whether they find the happiness they associate with America in America itself or in Europe, the children will flourish in the future. The narrator wishes them well and wishes them the freedom to dream of whatever future they want. Though the children are in exile from their homeland, they have found freedom and safety at last.
Forms and Devices
The most striking aspect of “Children in Exile” is that it is at once a serious political poem and an old-style, melodic ballad. Its stanzas are quatrains (four lines each), of which the second and fourth line rhyme. This form allows tremendous clarity, but it also allows breeziness and wit. Most of all, it connotes the poet’s desire to tell a story. Given the subject of the poem, this is by no means an inevitable choice: The poem could be an elegy for the dead in Cambodia, for example, or a lament for the psychological trauma sustained by the children. However, the ballad form structures the poem as the story of the children’s recovery in exile. It provides a kind of reassurance to readers, shielding them from the horrors of war much as the lush Italian landscape begins to shelter the children in the poem.
Fenton often plays havoc with the reader’s expectations, as with the long digression about Duschko the dog and the doves in the hayloft, which not only provides a lighthearted, almost nonsense element that alleviates the poem’s seriousness but also lulls the reader into accepting the children’s safety and happiness, rather than their suffering, as a given. There is an exuberance about the poem that gives it an air of celebration despite its stern witness to the horrors of the Cambodian killings that have forced the children so far from home.
There is also a mock-epic aspect to the poem, as when Duschko the dog goes “mad” and eats “all those chickens,” mimicking in a far more minor key the killings in Cambodia. The chickens are animals, not people, and in this mini-play a kind of restitution unfolds that is not admitted in the outer world. The dog, first suspicious of the children, comes to share his home with them and to love them. Within the fictive world of the poem, the brutal laws of external reality are softened and inverted.
Fenton’s style is urbane and sophisticated, yet the poem is understandable to an educated reader after reading it once or twice. The poem’s occasional nonsensical tinge may distract those who are looking for a traditional sort of political poem that seeks to rally people to a cause. For instance, the last line, with the children dreaming “Of Jesus, America, maths, Lego, music and dance,” seems curiously anticlimactic; it is not a peroration that will whip a crowd into a frenzy. Its very modesty, the way it looks into the hearts of the children and sees what is there rather than imposing a grandiose adult agenda, is at the heart of the poem’s winning combination of modesty and eloquence.
Sources for Further Study
Booklist. LXXX, June 15, 1984, p. 1433.
The Georgia Review. XXXVIII, Spring, 1984, p. 166.
Library Journal. CIX, May 1, 1984, p. 902.
The New Republic. CXC, May 14, 1984, p. 31.
New Statesman. CVI, December 16, 1983, p. 39.
The New York Review of Books. XXXI, October 25, 1984, p. 40.
The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, September 30, 1984, p. 45.
Poetry. CXLV, November, 1984, p. 111.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, February 10, 1984, p. 192.