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Wednesday, September 07, 2022
A Syrian academic at the Fringe: why I put on a show to reclaim the stories of refugees like me
theconversation.com: This summer I performed my own one-woman show at the 75th Edinburgh Fringe – a sentence I never thought I would write in my 17 years of living in the UK. But there I was, a Syrian academic on stage in Edinburgh in front of a microphone, high on adrenaline, ready to go.
2 comments:
Maggie Latham
said...
This is an important perspective to tell the story from, especially that of a refugee. It’s often seen that certain people or tragedies are given more coverage than others. You can often see specific tragic events, often involving white or lighter skinned people getting far more attention from the media. Even with smaller scale tragedies like murders, where you see murders of white women getting covered by news and media but there are thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women who no one is looking for for no reason other than they look the way they do and not like the white girls. The reality is that while some individuals and certainly the media may create the idea that some people and groups are more deserving of our respect than others, we should be paying attention to how the world treats everyone because we never know when we might be next.
There is rarely a “single story” for anything. In most cases, the media only reinforces that notion instead of exploring the multitude of stories that are not getting told. It makes me feel hopeful that we are creating spaces to help change this, and I applaud the work of the person who conceived and performed this piece. Coming from an area with a massive influx of refugees, the double standard is all too real. Refugees should not be able to speak the language of the country they landed on because if they do suddenly, they are faking it. They should be uneducated but smart enough to know where to look for safety or how to file documentation. They should find jobs but not the kinds that are desirable to the rest of the population. They need to find where to stay but we can’t help you with any of it. And those ideas just keep going until any refugee becomes part of the greater “group”, indistinguishable from one another.
2 comments:
This is an important perspective to tell the story from, especially that of a refugee. It’s often seen that certain people or tragedies are given more coverage than others. You can often see specific tragic events, often involving white or lighter skinned people getting far more attention from the media. Even with smaller scale tragedies like murders, where you see murders of white women getting covered by news and media but there are thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women who no one is looking for for no reason other than they look the way they do and not like the white girls. The reality is that while some individuals and certainly the media may create the idea that some people and groups are more deserving of our respect than others, we should be paying attention to how the world treats everyone because we never know when we might be next.
There is rarely a “single story” for anything. In most cases, the media only reinforces that notion instead of exploring the multitude of stories that are not getting told. It makes me feel hopeful that we are creating spaces to help change this, and I applaud the work of the person who conceived and performed this piece. Coming from an area with a massive influx of refugees, the double standard is all too real. Refugees should not be able to speak the language of the country they landed on because if they do suddenly, they are faking it. They should be uneducated but smart enough to know where to look for safety or how to file documentation. They should find jobs but not the kinds that are desirable to the rest of the population. They need to find where to stay but we can’t help you with any of it. And those ideas just keep going until any refugee becomes part of the greater “group”, indistinguishable from one another.
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