One of the incidental occasional rewards of marking Individual Orals for IB is that you sometimes stumble across new writers or artists in the extracts students select to comment upon. This session has been unusually rich in material referencing the migrant experience. I'm not claiming it's life-altering to see the world through the eyes of those who find themselves displaced and deeply uncertain of where they stand in this world, but it certainly makes it less easy to feel so sure as to your right to be where you are.
Mind you, as someone who's lived most his adult life in a kind of exile, I can't say I've ever taken my right to live in this far place for granted. But my experience has been infinitely more comfortable than those poor souls who struggle for the most basic grip on existence. And it's salutary to rub up against their concerns, if only in imagination.
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