Climate migration doesn’t look like you think it does – Grist

Last updated: 2024/09/18 at 5:13 PM

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The vision The spotlight More exposure Image Credits:

Narratio Fellowship

The vision

“Narrative agency is most important when reminding people of their own ability to actually do what they’re capable of.” – Ahmed Badr, co-founder of Narratio

The spotlight

When Rayan Mohamed was 4 years old, her family left their home in Mogadishu amidst the Somali Civil War. For nine days, they traveled by bus throughout the country. “We moved to different cities that were a little bit safer, and it didn’t work out,” Mohamed recounted. “And my mom decided that it was time to move out of the country.” Eventually, they arrived at the Awbare Refugee Camp in neighboring Ethiopia, intending to spend just one night there. But, with the possibility of returning to their home country narrowing, Mohamed’s family decided to apply for asylum in the U.S. They would spend seven years in the camp before finally being granted the opportunity to move to Syracuse, New York, in 2014.

In recent years, Mohamed has created short films and poems about her time at the camp. “Anytime that I want to draw from an experience, it’s always going to be in Ethiopia, because that was the most pivotal experience [of] my life,” she said. She described her time there as extremely difficult, with her day-to-day governed by stifling mundanity.

“Waiting for answers that may or may not come,” she recounts in one of her poems, “yearning for something that exhausts our wishes.” But, she was also bolstered by support from her tight-knit family of women — her mom, grandma, and sisters. Their steady closeness cultivated an emotional resilience that Mohamed carries with her to this day.

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A parting shot

Musician and composer Ameen Mokdad performs at “Sounds of Ink,” an event in the Met’s André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments prior to the Narratio fellows’ storytelling showcase this July. Originally from Iraq, Mokdad is a self-taught musician who had to carry out his art in secret — risking his life to do so — between 2014 and 2017, when the city of Mosul was occupied by ISIS.