Uplifting Unheard Voices

رفع الأصوات غير المسموعة

What is the human cost of war?

Refugees have answered this question time and again, but few hear them. From Ukraine and Syria to Yemen and Ethiopia, war and violence continually underscore the need to celebrate and uplift our common humanity in the face of the darkness and inhumanity of war. It is vital that we hear the refugees’ words and bear witness to the impact of war on their lives. What better medium is there to amplify their voices than music?

Focusing on Rome as a principal crossroads for refugees fleeing to Europe, I traveled there in 2021 funded by the Presser Foundation Graduate Music Award, with the assistance of my partner organizations and informal guidance from the Vatican, to meet these brave men and women and hear their experiences for myself. In 2022, I expanded my interviews to include displaced Ukrainians living in the US to incorporate their stories and experiences too.

I will weave the refugees’ stories from these interviews into a series of multi-lingual libretti and set them to music. By amplifying refugees’ words this way, I hope to motivate listeners to demand change, making our societies more welcoming to refugees and, one day, helping to end the conflicts refugees flee.

“PLEASE DO NOT TREAT US LIKE WE ARE INVISIBLE.”

I traveled to Rome in October 2021 with grant funding from the Presser Foundation and conducted interviews with recently-displaced refugees fleeing conflicts in Africa and across the Middle East. Throughout 2022, I collaborated with members of the Ukrainian diaspora in the U.S. to expand my project and interview displaced Ukrainians in the community, as well as one young woman who called in from Lviv to share her experiences between missile strikes.

In all, I conducted interviews with 33 courageous individuals of all ages from 11 different countries—Afghanistan, Gambia, Ghana, Iraq, Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen—who spoke about their experiences in Arabic, Bambara, English, French, Kurdish, Persian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yoruba. They told me about their journeys, experiences, and memories as engineers, business owners, teachers, interpreters, and allied combat veterans before being displaced.

The Rome interview stage of my project was facilitated by and conducted at the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center (JNRC), an aid-and-advocacy organization assisting refugees and asylum seekers at St. Paul’s Within the Walls in Rome, Italy. I have also received guidance from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the Community of Sant’Egidio’s Humanitarian Corridors initiative.

In all these interviews, the refugees and asylum seekers told me in detail about the impact of war on their homes and loved-ones. Interviewees in Rome described many experiences including: fighting alongside coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; enduring torture at the hands of ISIS, the Taliban, and human-traffickers; being sold into slavery in North Africa; surviving a US airstrike on ISIS-held oil fields in Syria; imprisonment and escape on the island of Malta; traversing deserts for months on foot; and braving the treacherous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea. Displaced Ukrainians described the opening hours of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; life in Russian-occupied cities and escaping under fire; trying to maintain contact with family and friends scattered across the world; and their hopes for a future free from war.

I was struck by the incredible similarities between the stories these refugees shared despite their variety of backgrounds and countries of origin. At the end of each interview, I asked the same question and I received variations of the same answer. To the question, “Do you have any messages you would like to share with the world?” They each responded, “Please do not treat us like we are invisible.”