Immigration or recolonization? On a poem of Carol Ann Duffy

In the essay, a poem of the outstanding English poet of our times, Carol Ann Duffy, is under analysis in the context of urgent immigration issues in Great Britain, its colonial past and its post-colonial present. The works and ideas of the famous ethic thinker, Emmanuel Levinas, are addressed to while analyzing Duffy's poem Foreign. The poem is looked at also in the context of actuality of immigration issues for the British literature of the 1990s - 2010s on the whole. It is shown in the essay how much distinctive Duffy is in her discourse on the issues of immigration, national identity, proclaimed and official tolerance and its real 'face' as a reversed side of the politics of multiculturalism and recolonization and ghettoization of immigrants. It is demonstrated that the poem of four stanzas is constructed as a dramatic monologue, following the genre experience of Thomas Browning; it is written as a blank verse with a variety of enjambment, full stops, line breaks, which enforce psychological drama of the poem. The author of the essay shows how masterly Duffy uses colloquial language, shifts of speech registers and broken English of an immigrant. It is demonstrated in the essay how some additional lyricism emerges due to replacing of lyrical object by lyrical entity, when the poet suggests a reader should become an immigrant for a while to understand what it means to be this person in Britain. This trick sharpens the issue of strangeness and alienation of an immigrant, host country's indifference and even hostility to his life, and immigrants' unwillingness to enter the culture of the host country. It is stressed that Duffy sees the possibility to start overcoming this precipices, which she sees as the incarnation of the notorious hierarchy between colonizers and colonized, by mutual wishes to understand each other. The greater responsibility the poet imposes on a reader, a resident of the host country.