CPD Week 3

Literature as Remembrance

How do we remember a disaster without reducing it to facts and figures? Literature, and poetry in particular, can do something that reports and timelines cannot: it can hold grief, absence, and community in a single breath. For educators, literary responses to Grenfell offer powerful ways to centre humanity in the classroom.

Read & Listen: ‘The Missing’ by Roger Robinson

Roger Robinson’s ‘The Missing’ is an elegy for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, from his T. S. Eliot Prize-winning collection A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press, 2019). The poem evokes the shock and aftermath of the fire through surreal, dreamlike imagery, bodies becoming weightless, a community suspended between presence and absence. Its closing lines draw a quiet, devastating line between those who were lost and those who remained.

Robinson is also an educator: his workshops have been recognised by organisations including the Gulbenkian Museum Prize, and he co-founded the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen. His work demonstrates how poetry can bear witness without sensationalism.

Reflect

Robinson uses surreal, weightless imagery to describe loss rather than graphic depictions of the fire. How might this kind of literary distance help students engage emotionally with a disaster without exposing them to traumatic content, and how does this connect to EDJ Principle 1, start with humanity, not the horror?

Show suggested response

Metaphor and abstraction allow students to feel the weight of loss without encountering graphic imagery. This creates space for emotional engagement on their own terms, exactly the kind of entry point EDJ Principle 1 calls for.

Reflect

The poem ends by distinguishing between “the city of the missing” and “the city of the stayed.” What might your students make of that division? Could this poem open a conversation about who is remembered after a disaster, who is forgotten, and whose responsibility it is to keep bearing witness?

Show suggested response

The division invites students to consider their own position: are we among “the stayed”? If so, what obligation does that carry? This reframes remembrance as active responsibility rather than passive sympathy.