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THE ALLEYNIAN 710
HOLDING HUMANITY IN OUR HANDS
Students responded with imagination and empathy when they connected to the idea of displacement in a Refugee Week art workshop, says Georgia Mackie Allowing students to reflect on the talks they had heard during the week, the workshop gave them an opportunity to further explore the human implications of statelessness. The students used plaster-casting techniques to investigate the ideas of memorialisation and vestiges: the tangible and intangible traces we leave behind, and those which are carried with us in the act of forced departure. Capturing the voidal spaces inside their clasped hands, the resulting sculptures are both delicate and haunting in equal measure: at once a ghost, a vertebra, a dove, but above all else a poignant trace of a human identity.
WORDS OF CONNECTION; DISPLACED VOICES
Writing a collaborative poem during a Refugee Week creative writing workshop offered Year 12 students a chance to imagine small moments of connection during a refugee’s journey, says Josephine Akrill Creative writing offers us a way of connecting imaginatively with the experiences of others: experiences which we are lucky enough not to have undergone personally, but which can, and should, affect us all, as members of humanity. At the start of the workshop, the small group of three Year 12 writers (Diego Lacheze-Beer, Arjaan Miah and Jamie Chong) decided to put together a collaborative piece, entitled ‘You’, which reflected on the journey of someone fleeing conflict in Syria, and aiming to reach Paris, where they plan to seek asylum. After looking at a map, to help plot out a route, each of the participants wrote about part of the journey in either prose or poetry, using the second person narrative voice, so that the idea of ‘you’ connected the different parts of the story. The poem does not always make clear who ‘you’ is, but most often it refers to a person encountered by the speaker on their journey, and with whom they connect in some way. One of the writers added a kind of ‘chorus’ – a brief news report of the kind with which we have all become too familiar, recounting in stark, detached tones the tragic loss of human life during a sea-crossing by migrants who are hoping to find safety. The detachment of this part of the narrative contrasts with the rest of the piece, which aims to explore how the speaker witnesses deeply moving, often traumatic, events, but is also moved by the small human connections which they are able to foster along the way.
YOU
I sold my home in Damascus and left for Lebanon. I saw you along the way, bleary-eyed, rubble-ashen, and confused. It wasn’t your fault, the British bomb that beat your mother’s back as she threw herself over you. Her body jumped and fell limp from the impact, and you were trapped under her weight. You met my eye and I held back tears, under the crushing weight of recent memory, stung by fresh wounds. You could never have survived the night and perhaps that makes you the lucky one. And yet, we bow our heads in shame to remember how we passed you by and didn’t stop to take your hand.
I never knew your name but two shoelaces the colour of flame still snaking through the twelve holes of my shoe, was your gift. And your smile – a real smile, with the eyes, not through clenched teeth; you reminded me of my mother. Your warmth, your jasmine perfume, the way you passed by, then came
back, seeing me lying in the bus shelter. You noticed my sneaker; pointed, with a question mark in your eyes,
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