Beautiful. I’m very curious, for someone like yourself, an Iraqi refugee, what does it feel to you to be able to go and do this work? I feel at this age, for many of us, in our early twenties, we tend to look back at who we were when we were like, twelve, and think about how our twelve-year-old selves would see us today. Do you feel like you're satisfying something within yourself? You’re having, not a return, but a revolution in yourself?
I don't know if I would say it's a revolution with myself per se, but I think it's something that I find deeply inspiring. A question I've always thought about is, ‘How are my own experience and my story creating other spaces for other stories to exist side by side and beyond it.’ And I think this project is a way of concretely doing that. And in a way that is the most personal thing I have ever been able to do. Because back in high school and early college, I felt I had the privilege of sharing my story with so many amazing humans, but I thought, ‘Okay, well, I want to make sure that the story is always connected to the work and a larger mission of trying to amplify and work with stories of those that happen to be displaced, not necessarily stories of displacement, just stories of those who happened to be displaced.’ And so this book was a way of trying to present that through all of these different, amazing individuals. Even though the process of collecting the stories and the different expressions, there were moments where, in a meeting with someone or I was doing a workshop, connecting with folks, having very personal conversations, I felt familiar. There was a familiarity already there. And personally, growing up here in the States, I haven't had access to too many folks that speak Arabic my age, besides my family of course.
And so to be in a place where I can just speak Arabic for an entire day or a couple of days was something that I hadn't experienced for a long time and, In a way, it just like made me feel so appreciative of the whole experience, but, it allowed me to engage deeper. And, as an Iraqi and an American, these are things that feel are sometimes competing. Through this project, I feel like I got to work with both and in ways that are productive and also engage with the absurdity of both sometimes. I'll never forget the first time I was preparing to do a workshop in a camp. A Syrian man came up to me and started speaking in English and was speaking to someone who was my boss at the time in English. And then all of a sudden I switched to Iraqi Arabic and he was like, ‘What is this?!’ And for a moment, he couldn’t fathom that these two things can be in one person, you know? I spent many weeks there and got to know everyone, but it's kind of small moments like that where your duality is facing you. And you're like, ‘Oh yeah, my Arabic might not be as good as it used to be, but it’s still there and we're still able to connect them and communicate in that way. This project in a way unlocked all of those experiences.
You mentioned earlier that you weren’t trying to find ‘refugee stories’ but stories of refugees and how do you navigate that? How do you go about making sure that within the workshops or even within your work, you aren't pandering to some sort of like Western appetite for these sorts of stories?
Absolutely. I think it just comes down to telling the full story. Oftentimes when we hear of stories of refugees, it's just about why they left home and that's kind of where it ends. It's the story of tragedy. And what I think I mean by that phrase, ‘Stories of displaced folks rather than displaced stories,’ it's to tell the fullest extent of that story and to meet people where they're at and ask them and give them the option to represent themselves in whatever way they want to.
For example, the Narratio fellows whose poems are all featured in there. The program was focused on poetry and all of their poems that were featured were rewriting labels of objects in the Ancient Near East Gallery at the MET. Some of them address displacement in some way, shape, or form, but most of them don't. So it’s not necessarily a story of displacement, but a story of someone who has experienced displacement in the past. So I think it's just embracing the fullest extent of someone's story and not having it start and end with tragedy.
A question I grapple with myself a lot as a journalist that I think all journalists should never stop asking is around representation and who is best suited to speak on what issues, and it’s something I think about a lot with your work. You’re telling stories from the point of view of someone that's experienced the subject. I'm curious to know your thoughts on representation. How do you feel about people who have not experienced displacement, or no one close to them has experienced displacement, writing about displacement, or writing stories of displacement? And what can be done to make representing these stories more accurate?
I'm not saying that everyone who writes about displacement or shares stories of displacement has to have experienced it or have been surrounded by it. I think that adds a different layer to that story or to whatever kind of you're trying to produce. But I think for folks that are writing about displacement we have to make that distinction. Are you writing about a so-called a ‘crisis,’ so-called? Are you saying there's a refugee crisis and this is one of the stories of someone who is experiencing it? Or are you saying, this is the story of someone who happened to be in this place at this time, at this moment, in this context who is experiencing displacement?
So at first, I think we have to be clear about the parameters. But ultimately, again, it goes back to honoring that person's experience to the fullest extent that they feel comfortable in. You have to be clear about your parameters, but you have to again, meet that person where they're at and what they want to express. And be honest. Make sure that that person knows what they're signing up for and where their story will go and where their story would travel. They could be the central guide, if not the teller, of how the stories are represented. Through the stories in the book, you know, most of the interviews, I edited them for clarity, but I tried to preserve that person's voice as much as possible. It wasn't just me digesting what they told me and then putting it together. It was directly saying what they said. And then be clear about your positionality to the story as well. It's not an easy job, but I think these are all things that will make the job easier.
Something I was wondering about, you know, none of the people whose stories you’re telling come from the west, and a lot of them don’t even currently live in the States. How do you feel presenting these stories to a western audience through a western publisher? How do you feel about your audience? What’s your relationship to it?
That’s a great question. I mean, the audience is key, and first of all, I want the book to be accessible to multiple audiences. But first and foremost, the audience of most priority is the folks that are represented in it. I hope that I've made them proud through how this is represented, or have the book has come out. Beyond that, I think ultimately I want it to be an educational tool and hopefully, something that inspires you, I don't want it to be the kind of the end all be all. But the audiences that I want to reach are varied. I want to reach educational institutions. I want to reach folks that have maybe never related or have never heard a story of someone who has been displaced. But also because of the multimodal nature of the work, I hope that it presents this three-dimensional view or expression of the complexity of individuals who are artists, are poets, are storytellers, who are, in this case, united by this experience of displacement.
But also I hope that it becomes clear that there is no universal experience of displacement either and beyond that there's no universal expression of displacement.
There was something I read in the book, something beautiful the Iranian guy in Greece named Erwin said, ‘Everywhere you go, the sky is the same.’ And it made me think, ‘What was the aim of this book? At least in the initial process of curation. Was it to portray a common experience of displaced people or were you aiming to show that displaced youths are a part of a greater community of creative youths regardless of their displacement. Or maybe you’re dealing with a little of both.
I don’t know. When we were making it I didn't want to come out and say, ‘Okay, well, this is what you should think and this is what you shouldn't think.’ I wanted folks to speak for themselves and express themselves in all these different ways. But I think ultimately it's a call to action to create spaces and create the potential for the creative expression of displaced young people to be amplified in global ways, in ways that are on par with the art and poetry and stories of those that aren't displaced or haven’t experienced displacement.
I think part of it is to create this three dimensional and very complicated expression of what someone who has experienced displacement is going through. Also in what they want to say to the world on their terms, and then beyond that to just meet folks through their kind of expression and not necessarily think of that expression as any lesser than folks who haven't experienced this placement. It’s an effort at kind of equalizing access to that creative expression as well. And making sure that folks feel, you know, first and foremost, comfortable in what they're trying to express, but also in sharing that in a way that's hopefully thoughtful and engaging and accessible.
You mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to know about the process behind including your work in the book. There are all of these beautiful, heartbreaking, and raw and hard to process stories throughout the book and it very much felt like your works sprinkled throughout were sort of a guide for the reader across the eclectic experiences presented. You have such a style and you’re a beautiful writer and having your work interspersed between it felt like I was with you finding these stories.
I’m so happy that that's what you got from it. I'm glad that it's a mediating force. It took a couple of tries, a couple of drafts to try and figure out, ‘Okay, well, do we want to put everything in sections? This is the poetry section. This is the photography section. This is the story section.’ And then where does my work fit into it? I was like, ‘Should I even include any of my own work? Is that necessary in this case?’ So it was just a lot of trial and error and ultimately again, trial and error with this idea in mind that all of these works have to be in harmony with one another, ideally in a perfect world, but also could stand on their own as these individual pieces. So that was a key consideration throughout. Like, does your own work add to that harmony or does it take away from it? I wanted to make sure that the former is the case. I'm not just stepping in for the sake of stepping in.
I was wondering as well how your work with Narratio and the Resettled podcast and all the other work you do influence your process with this book. Did you feel your relationship with the book changed as your other projects progressed? How did those projects help your growth as an artist and a curator?
It's a great question. I think it was the growth of Narratio’s work but ultimately was completely independent of it. A lot of the workshops that I did are drawn from my experience from the Narratio projects we conducted. I was doing these one-off workshops over a couple of years and the Narratio Fellowship was born a year after I went to Greece. And I thought, ‘Okay, let's create a program specifically for displaced young people where we could work together for at least a month and work on these expressions.’ And I thought, ‘I know what it's like to a one-off workshop. What about a program? How would that shift the expression? What kind of spaces can we cultivate over time?’ I think that's one thing that has stuck with me and I've tried to hold on to and work with and grow from, this constant, constant, constant critical engagement with the work itself and with what I’m able to contribute to it. I think the book and Narratio are complimentary in different ways and I hope that they improve upon each other.