Soul Theft
by Remi Skytterstad
They built internment camps in red, white and blue: and called them schools. Filled them with mouthless faces, stripped of all colours of home: and called us pupils. There, the rattan cane clapped over tiny hands, for not speaking the language.
We knew what it was like to hurt — but not the word for help.
Remi Skytterstad is from Norway where he studies educational science. He lives with his daughter who attends kindergarten. He is currently in recent issues of Barren Magazine, Tint Journal, and Lunate. Find him on Twitter @Skytterstad.
Photograph of a post-war boarding school in Karasjok taken by Sverre Alex Børretzen (1921 – 1993) for Aktuell. (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 NO)