Refugee Week is a festival established in 1998 that takes place across the UK around 20 June and celebrates the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking refuge.
DISPLACEMENT
Where I am but not where I am. Lost, displaced, out of place. At times we felt that feeling of being out of place, of not understanding and not getting used to a place. Displacement is the inevitable moment of contact between two places, two situations, between where I come from and where I am without finding myself.
The Lipstick
On 15 November, we arrived in Casalecchio di Reno.
I was dumbfounded by the appearance of the inhabitants. They wore clean coats and had shoes on their feet. The ladies had their hair styled and even lipstick on their lips.
I felt a new sensation, which I have never forgotten, that of coming from another world, which had nothing to do with the one I was in.
Could it be that no one was aware of what had happened? Could it be that life in the neighbouring towns had continued its normal course?
My eyes observed the city, but they were no longer those of a child. They were the eyes of a refugee with no home to return to.
Acknowledgements
Will I recognise Kharkiv again?
I don’t know.
Smiling was the memory
of my first time
in Gorky Park.
A disorienting cloud
covers the colours of joy
and now the House of Fear
is truly frightening.
It is not fear of the enemy,
that, ever.
It is the fear of seeing
the effects of his cowardice.
Splinters in the soul
of memory.
Idriss Capitano
The Anger
After the earthquake I found myself out of the house, I couldn’t go back in.
I went to the nearest town with the clothes I was wearing from the day of the earthquake to buy shoes and it seemed that no one realised what had happened to me.
I got angry.
The Snow
I was looking out of the windows of the plane and I could see everything white and I didn’t understand what it was.
I had been told that in Europe, in Italy, everything was white.
And I wondered if it was also all white in the new world I was landing in.
Invisibles
“INVISIBLES” is a play that traces the journey of two African citizens who meet on a beach, and try at all costs to survive the nightmares of poverty by dreaming of a better life on the other side of the barrier.
What would become of our lives if, by mysterious chance, we had not been born here but in the ‘Third World’?
What is taken for granted for us (studying, eating, housing and care, working, even growing old!…) would not be taken for granted at all there.
Thus, in the eyes of two Africans, need doubles the dream.
In this show, Mohamed BA is both the guardian of African tradition and the renewer who sings the historical, social and political contradictions, the dreams, the hopes, the pains of the African communities faced with the drama and the migration journeys and the hopes of those who leave everything behind without forgetting anything.
Displaced
Escaped on the tracks
we dream
the white train of Fortune
to jump on and travel
towards promised lands
to inebriated cities
where they say
Happiness dwells
and while we wait
we discover
crumbling footprints of worn-out soles
lopsided nests
of thorny loves
and blind sunflowers
mottled with autumn
and who knows why
and who knows why
when the train whizzes by
glittering with lights
we avert our eyes
with our hands in our pockets.
Guergana Radeva (from Communitas, vol.43)
Stateless
Thanks to
Magritte, Cornelia, Idriss Capitano, Camilla Urso, Shamsy, Mohamed BA, Guergana Radeva, F.
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