An extraordinary novella with echoes of Once and The Road; set in an otherworldly plain with hints of magical realism.
I am the son of a refugee, but that is not the reason why I wrote
Child I.
When I was a child I was a recipient of free school dinners, and
charity bags full of toys and suchlike at Christmastime. We were a
charity case and I had a foreign-sounding name - Tasane - and
difficulty speaking English well. But in some ways, the worst thing
of all, was that my father then deserted me and my three brothers,
and my mother. We were a broken home. I hated being a 'broken'
child.
I grew up intensely envious of my friends who had a father. I grew
up feeling the same otherness that my father must have felt as a
refugee arriving in the UK.
Child I is not my story. But it draws together the links between my
own shattered upbringing and that of young refugee children growing
up in today's crisis-defined world. Nothing has really changed. We
just want to belong. We just want to not be hungry. We just want to
be able to laugh and play. We want to be.
And that is why I wrote Child I.
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