Project News: Celebrating Immigrant Youth Stories of Resistance
StoryCenter’s Amy Hill interviews Beshara Kehdi and Zaynah Hindi with Palestinian Youth Movement, and workshop participant Kumudra Nyun reflects on her experience of creating a digital story.
Editor’s Note: Last April, StoryCenter collaborated with the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco on a digital storytelling workshop with a group of immigrant and refugee youth attending Mission High School in San Francisco. These young people had been organizing an all high school youth-led social justice leadership project over a period of 12 months with support from their adult allies. The digital storytelling workshop was an opportunity for the youth to share stories from their own lives as short videos. Working with PYM, the youth later integrated the videos into a dance and spoken word event performed in San Francisco and Oakland. In this article, StoryCenter staff member and workshop facilitator Amy Hill interviews PYM members Beshara Kehdi and Zaynah Hindi about the project. The article closes with a reflection by one of the youth storytellers, Kumudra Nyun.
In her story, Kumudra talks about the Burmese New Year Water Festival.
Amy: I had such a wonderful time working with PYM and the group of young people who produced stories about their experiences as immigrants and refugees. Can you talk about what that process was like for you as adult allies, and what about it really stuck with you?
Beshara and Zaynah: Collaborating with you all at StoryCenter to highlight and share our youth’s stories was a really remarkable experience. We appreciated how caring and supportive you and Eunice (the second StoryCenter facilitator), were. You created a space where the youth were encouraged, and not forced, to share stories about their immigrant and/or refugee experiences. We are extremely proud that these young people responded to the challenge, dug deep, and were powerfully honest. They spoke their stories first, and then had the patience and resolve to edit them down to bite sizes that pointed to the heart of their journeys. As adult allies, our job was to support, not to direct the youth to some preconceived goal. They made the process their own; they controlled it. It was inspiring to see them take full ownership of their experience of the workshop. It takes courage to be vulnerable and share a personal story; it takes a community with purpose to release those stories to the world. I’m deeply humbled and empowered by these youth, and by the StoryCenter process.
Amy: After the workshop, you worked with the youth to integrate the finished videos into a dance performance. Can you describe dabke for those readers who aren’t familiar with it, and share your inspiration for using storytelling as a piece of the performance?
Beshara and Zaynah: We had been working with the youth for nearly three years to teach them dabke, a traditional folk/line dance indigenous to the fertile crescent, i.e. Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. It’s a celebratory dance performed with young and old, men and women together, during weddings and at parties and other events, and it can also be highly creative and choreographed. Dabka has taken on additional meaning as both a form of and expressive vehicle for cultural resistance against colonization in Palestine and elsewhere, with dancers asserting the very identities that oppressive states and conditions try to deny them.
Even before the 2016 presidential race and the vitriol and hate it has made visible, the lived realities of colonization and alienation were written on the bodies, genealogies, and stories of immigrant and refugee youth around the world. Rather than directly engaging this toxic rhetoric, the young people we worked with wanted to challenge it from a more authentic place. As we’ve worked with the youth on dabka, we’ve asked the questions “what do you dance for?” and “what story do you want to tell through this dance?” to connect the dabke to issues that are important them, and remind them that they as artists have a platform to speak about those issues and their society.
Storytelling, and digital storytelling, was a natural extension of this. It’s also an important skill we wanted the youth to learn and experiment with. Media today is so often about sound bites and the 24-hour news cycle of spectacle that bombards people with sensationalism and gratuitous imagery. With so much getting lost, this media environment is a call to action for many of us who struggle for social justice. We have to synthesize our messages and use media when we need to, by countering stereotypical portrayals through self-reporting. If we can share a story in a format that complete strangers can understand in just a few minutes, this creates an opportunity for connection, understanding, and empathy. So with all the anti-migrant, refugee, Black, Latino, Muslim, and Arab sentiment and policy platforms being openly advocated, our youth wanted to speak about their own experiences that too often get silenced, shamed, or flat out denied. They are teachers, and the rest of us have a lot to learn. Both the emotional responses and showering of enthusiasm they received by those who saw their performances and videos indicate that the young people’s stories really hit home for a lot of people.
Amy: Can you talk about the process of collaborating with the youth on the performance? About the challenges you grappled with, getting ready for the shows?
Beshara and Zaynah: The performance we developed with the youth integrated dabka, storytelling, and spoken word to commemorate the Palestinian Nakba, the process culminating in 1948 by which over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and dispossessed of their homes and properties, and made refugees, leading to the creation of the state of Israel. In teaching the youth the dabke folk dance, we were also teaching them the history of the dance, the cultures of the peoples who do this dance, the Palestinian people’s struggle to maintain an identity that is constantly demonized and rejected by Israel and the United States, and the importance of culture, to maintaining identity.
While all of the youth dancers are immigrants or refugees, none are Palestinian, so the question of ownership and who gets to tell whose story was omnipresent. As a result, the onus was on us to teach them about the Nakba. Through collaborations with youth leaders from PYM and other adult allies, and through conversations, movie showings, independent research, and more, the youth gleaned the information and insight they needed to create a presentation that educated audiences about the Nakba and honored the story of Palestinian displacement, resilience, and resistance. Rather than speaking for Palestinians, they learned to speak with and alongside them, adding their own stories to a chorus of transnational solidarity with oppressed people’s struggles to exist, resist, and demand justice. Together with the youth, we chose to organize the stories, dances, poetry, and songs thematically within a three-act performance, starting with displacement, continuing to resilience, and ending in resistance. This provided a framework for the show that was expansive enough to encapsulate both the Nakba and the diversity of the young people’s experiences, but specific enough to hit home the messages of the event.
Amy: If you could put out one hope you have for what these powerful stories will achieve, in the world, what would it be?
Beshara and Zaynah: We hope that these stories continue to move people and remind them that there is no cookie cutter immigrant or refugee experience, just a multitude of human experiences of survival and connection, in spite of often-dehumanizing personal and political choices. Honoring these stories begins by listening to them, but listening isn’t enough. Crocodile tears over the young people’s stories, without an effort to understand and respect their current realities, are largely meaningless. These youth and their communities have rights that need to be fought for and respected. We hope their stories pierce through the shrouds of ignorance and bigotry that plague the United States and countries around the world, and signal that change is coming, with young people leading the charge.
Find out about the Palestinian Youth Movement.
Special thanks to the Akonadi Foundation, for funding this project.
On Creating a Story and Sharing it During the PYM Performance …
By Kumudra Nyun, youth storyteller
The digital storytelling workshop was enjoyable, though I felt I was in a rush to finalize my video in the two and a half days that we had for the project. The best part was feeling joyous while watching all our videos at the end of the workshop. It was fascinating to learn about a person through their story.
The hardest part of the process for me was actually sharing my story, because I did not think I had one to share, and even if I had one, I did not think it mattered. But at the beginning of the workshop, when my friends started to tell their stories, I realized that I have one important and recently experienced story to tell. So, I decided to share my experience as an immigrant who lives in the United States; trying to maintain my own culture while adapting to a new one. I also decided to share how it is lucky I feel to have a unique cultural background and be able to appreciate it.
During the performances, I felt scared and worried to see the audiences watching my story. In a fun way, I was shy to hear my own voice as everybody was focused on my video, listening to every single word I said. Most importantly, I was nervous to see how people would react after seeing my video. I hoped they would understand where I came from, learn that many immigrants have gone through the same situation as me, and value their identities and backgrounds.
- Kumudra Nyun