Three refugee women spoke last week at the Off the Shelf Festival of Words. Our media officer went with them on the trip from Glasgow to Sheffield
Blog by Karin Goodwin, Media Officer
It all started with an email out of the blue, Jackie Kay told the audience at last week’s Off the Shelf Festival of Words event. She was introducing three very special women to the stage.
I sent that email to Jackie Kay – acclaimed Scottish poet, novelist and, according to the British Council, “national treasure” – back in March hoping she could help with our Stop Destitution campaign.
The aim of the campaign was to highlight the injustice facing many people seeking asylum, who had their decisions refused, their support stopped and accommodation taken away making them completely destitute yet too afraid, or even completely unable, to return home.
I had met women like Naomi, a 50-year-old from Zimbabwe who had fled looking for protection and found herself sleeping on a floor mat in a night shelter and often going hungry. Others had similar tales to tell.
I wanted to get these stories out there. But I understood only too well, why they didn’t want to speak to journalists or talk at events.
Surrogate story-teller
Instead I introduced three women to Jackie, who listened carefully and then went away and wrote three wonderful poems about them.
These were published in the Scotland on Sunday, along with an interview, and Jackie read them at events in the Glasgow Women’s Library, at the Scottish Parliament and at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
She took their stories into the world with the hope they would inform, influence and with any luck, change minds.
So, when Jackie Kay had been asked by Off the Shelf Festival of Words in Sheffield to curate her own day of events, luckily for us, we were already in her thoughts: She wanted Scottish Refugee Council to take part.
Outsiders
The theme she chose for the Crossing Borders series was ‘Outside’.
And who better to talk about that theme than refugee women, who find themselves outside in so many ways – outside of their countries, of their circle of friends, families and supporters?
As asylum seekers they are outside our normal systems – with no right to work, no mainstream benefits.
Even after getting status there are many hurdles to jump, from getting qualifications recognised to gaining citizenship.
We found three inspirational women who had plenty of experience to draw upon and invited them to Sheffield. For a start, Mubina Ifran, Samira Selman and Remzije Sherifi of Maryhill Integration Network, had all recently taken part in a Refugee Survival Trust project called ‘Making it Home’, looking at poems (including one from Jackie Kay) before making films based on those poems with the assistance of Media Coop.
Inspirational women
Measured and level headed, Mubina is not only super mum of three, but a key member of our Refugee Women’s Strategy Group putting pressure on policy makers.
Remezije – or Rema – heads up the uber active Maryhill Integration Network and her tireless work in the community has been recognized with a clutch of awards including Migrant and Refugee Woman of the Year.
And Samira is her own tour-de-force, whether guiding women’s walks or tending Maryhill’s new community garden.
At Off the Shelf the three women spoke about what they knew – Mubina about the ‘choice’ involved in fleeing domestic violence in Pakistan, and Rema about finding her second home in Scotland after her evacuation from the Kosovan conflict.
Free as a bird
It was Samira’s job to move dark to light. Instead of the problems and challenges she talked about her garden full of flowers in Iraq, and how an afternoon at the botanical garden in Glasgow could suppress her longing for home. She spoke of the River Clyde and the way it stopped her missing her native Tigris River in Bagdad.
And she explained how watching the birds – which swoop and dance across our skies as they migrate from north to south, gave her hope that one day people would also be so free.
She made our hearts soar. And together, these fabulous women hopefully inspired that room full of people to think a little differently, a little more deeply, about the importance of offering someone who finds themselves forced to flee, refuge.
I think that would be a nice thing to come from one email.
