A Childhood Framed in Kodaks: Migration, Memory, and Becoming Scouse…
Memory has a way of clinging to the smallest things — a disposable Kodak, the click of a shutter, the way a mother counts in her first language while her children try their best to stand still. For Amina Atiq, those fragments are more than nostalgia; they are the foundations of identity, inheritance, and resistance. Her poem Cobblestones takes one such early photograph — taken outside St George’s Hall shortly after her family arrived from Yemen in 1999 — and breathes life back into it. Not as a reconstruction, but as a reimagining: a child seeing Liverpool for the first time, a mother shaping the world before her daughter can fully understand it.
Atiq’s Liverpool is textured, political, and deeply lived-in. The poem traces the interplay between migration and belonging, between the histories we carry with us and the ones we grow into. Her father’s resistance to Thatcher’s Britain sits beside the sound of Arabic being spoken on English streets; the personal merges with the civic, and together they form the complex rhythm of what it means to become ‘Scouse’ through experience rather than birthright.
The poem’s structure echoes the city’s cobblestones — uneven, storied, full of movement — a fitting form for a narrative built on displacement, adaptation, and joy. And joy is central here. While migration stories are too often framed solely through hardship, Atiq insists on something radical: the joy of looking back at a photograph and recognising the fullness of life within it. The poem ends with a kiss at the corner shop, a moment small enough to be overlooked yet powerful enough to define a childhood shaped by two worlds.
Amina Atiq’s work has always been rooted in memory and community, but Cobblestones feels like a love letter — to family, to Liverpool, and to the act of turning photographs into living, breathing stories.
Cobblestones
the old city sky was a smug summer
half-perfect shot
caught through my mother’s late 90s Kodak
disposable camera, posing on St George’s steps
She counts, wahid, ithnayn, thalath
two high ponytails, a scruffy fringe laid flat under the iron board
little brother tucked between my arms in his paper- scissors haircut
he smiles an Arab mouth in an English street
the docks trade a prayer in every tongue
between the Mersey River and Granby Streets
in a click of golden bangles, cardamom leaves
rolling film catches my uncle’s retching
laughter, his sandals tap against the Kurdish
fruit stall with Jamaican patty in one hand,
a tunnel-gulp of Shani in the other
loud enough to hold a city
from a starving Thatcher’s empire.
Liverpool’s foreign bricks carry our young’un
CRY me a siren, these journeys fold us gently
between Friday prayers and pocket full of dreams
pocket full of dreams, a dream to love, dreaming to love
but she laughed in our faces, drowning
in utopia, We are English, they said
what about my father’s father and his father
my mother’s mother and her mother?
i look around, my mother drops the camera
to her waist, I hear she sings a Yemeni folktale
between her teeth. Women dancing
before
the rice steamed, the terrace living room
neon light garments,
my mother paints the world
in my three-year-old eyes
father writing poetry from bus routes
his father. sailing through Toxteth flames
aunties pointing their fingers out of dust
i am sixteen candles skipping down Lodge Lane
white dresses for Jubilee, running from boys
who spit slurs, anthem tied
to my throat
i am a tribal song caught in migration
fist clenched in a Malahi heatwave
not starved of diaspora or airport checks
i am a city, i am sweet i am cold
L8 streets die with me, i live with her
so i blow a kiss behind the corner shop
AMINA ATIQ
