Solvable: Stereotypical Refugee Narratives

his displacement alone. Well. First, I think you have to realize that you have a story to tell, and then you have to realize how you can tell that story. His Boter entered high school, he started to explore his identity more and more. I started to kind of grapple with what it meant to be an Iraqi American Muslim refugee. It was just a beginning. Yes, he realized he was a refugee, and yes he was displaced, but he was

also a poet and later a college graduate. He began to carve od a space where all the parts of his identity could coexist. As a young person, publishing is this thing that's so exclusive and this thing that's only the few of us get access to, and I thought, okay, Well designed the website and then started by just me begging my classmates to submit. Botter's website expanded and then

it evolved into a platform called Narratio Today. Narratio published his work from eighteen different countries and both partnerships with the UN and the MET that created spaces for displaced young people to feel that they can transcend the tragedy that may have initially caused their displacement. A generation of people transcending the stereotypes put upon them. Botter has compiled their stories and poems into a new book. It's called

While the Earth Sleeps. We Travel in moving from Baghdad to Syria, to South Dakota and later Houston, Texas, Botter realized his story was weady, but that didn't mean it had to weigh him down. We're faced with a negativity loop. When we hear the word refugee, we immediately think of pain, We immediately think of tragedy. But by creating spaces where refugees themselves can go from passive victims to individuals who

have full control of their stories. This is solvable. My co host Ann Apple Bomb spoke with Botter about his platform, the radio, and how he's helping young people around the world see their own potential and put it into words. So this palm as in the middle of the book, and it's called Our Earth and Yours. I wrote this a couple of years ago, Our Earth and Yours. Some

boats ask the sea's permission before sailing. Others have no choice but to introduce themselves hurriedly, forcefully, holding bodies that tell stories in dark rooms, over rusty space heaters and pristine rugs. They say that a country lives inside a body, but it will always die outside of it. What is a border but a stubborn scar, a past pain that no longer persists, but a reminder that you will never return to your previous form. Permanence is an illusion we

are forbidden to taste. My name is Amat Bedder. I'm an Iraqi American writer, social entrepreneur and former refugee, and on July twenty fifth, two thousand and six, our home in Baghdad was bombed. I wasn't home, I was away with my grandparents, and I came home the next day and found out what happened. Luckily everyone survived. It was a dead missile. And then, you know, a week later we moved to Syria, which was taken in refugees at

the time. This was before the war, to be clear. Yes, this was between two thousand and six and two thousand and eight. We were going back and forth between Syria and Iraq just to visit family. My parents were on paid leave, you know, they were civil engineers and baghadad

for over twenty years. And then during one of those trips, we heard about this UN program that would we settle refugees, and my dad thought, we really don't have, you know, anything to lose, and he applied and we were very lucky to be among you know, just the one percent of all refugees that are resettled. And we landed in

the US on May nineteen, two thousand and eight. So after two years in Syria, we left Iraq in two thousand and six and flew out from Damascus and to Budapest and then Budapeshi New York City, and then New York City to Chicago, and then Chicago finally to fall South Dakota. That must have been very jarring that transition from Iraq to Syria to sell to Koa. You know, it was exciting. Yeah, two thousand and eight, so it was just nine going on ten. And that age is

so exciting because you're just a sponge. You just want to take everything in. And I remember trying to compare everything I was experiencing to American movies I had seen, you know, I had seen all these action movies with Bruce Willis and all of these kind of films that framed how I understood America to be. And all of a sudden, you know, we spent the night in New York City before flying out to Chicago, and I was just like, Okay, where's Bruce Willis. I can't find him

where all these people? But it was exciting. It was exciting. Obviously it was a completely new place, you know, to fall South Dakota is very different from from Syria, and we were living there. But I was eager to kind of just dive in and meet people and get a chance to connect. My English wasn't really great at the time. I had taken some classes in Syria, so I had to adapt quickly. But you never felt any sense of displacement. Initially, I don't think I understood what displacement meant or my

own relationship to it. But I thought, well, this is just a new place we're moving to. But I think as I got older, as I started high school, I started to kind of grapple with what it meant to, you know, be an Iraqi American Muslim refugee. I was like, we call this immigration, we call this, you know, moving from one place in another, We call this displacement. Did you feel at that time or do you think about this now that the either that a kind of a

stereotype was being thrust upon you. You know, you are a Muslim refugee at a time when people are worried about Muslim refugees. Did you have to grapple with that? Did you disagree with being typecast that way? I think I didn't realize what I was up against in terms of those identities until I actually started to realize how I can claim them and how I can express them and maneuver and negotiate each of them and their intersections

and their tensions. So, for you, telling stories was initially a way to solve this personal problem, this personal question of how you fit in exactly. It was a way of asking, Okay, well what is my personal story? And then how can I share it? And who will listen? And once I figured out that folks were interested in hearing it, then I quickly learned how I could begin to tell it. And then that's how the journey began.

How did you get from that personal realization from the understanding that stories would help you to the founding of Naratio, which is designed to help other people sell their stories. The summer after my freshman year, I was invited to a conference in DC Journalism conference and for the conference, they said you have to make a website or a

blog for your work. And this was the first time that I realized that me trying to figure out what it meant to be an Iraqi American list some refugee was actually of interest to other people who were either going through the same thing or we're just interested in what that exploration meant. And so from there I thought, Okay, well I want to explore this and I'm going to do that through my writing and through my poetry and through this kind of initial website and then that website

that they had us create for that conference. All of a sudden, I had classed me into asking me about it, reading the work and saying, okay, well, I didn't know that this is what it meant to be an Iraqi American Muslim refugee, or I didn't know about you know, that specific aspect of those identities, And all of a sudden I thought, okay, well, this was good and this was empowering, but why not make it something that's available

to other young people. And then in my junior year of high school, I decided, okay, well, let me start a website where I can invite other young people to publish their work, whether that's poems, whether that's stories, whether that's artwork or films, and I have a space that cultivates this force, this creative force of young people, and

to make it publishing accessible to them. And then it grew to do to workshops and so the very first art a workshop I did here in Houston with a local resettlement agency, I met with an amazing group of recently arrived refuge youth and we talked about stories. We talked about our own stories the ways that we can

share them. But ultimately that workshop was the first time I was able to go beyond my own story and think about the spaces that my own story can create for other stories to exist beside it and beyond it. Narratio kind of that came out of this realization that

we need to make publishing accessible. And then now what's grown to include, you know, not only just the online publishing, but also a fellowship program that we have in partnership with the MET, you know, different partnerships with the un different collaborations, and now we published work from eighteen countries and you know the work. The work has grown and what is the problem that this site is designed to solve?

How would you describe it? Is it the problem of people feeling displaced or there or there are other kinds of issues you're trying to get to. What it's really trying to do is allow for a space that allows displace young people to share the fullest extent of their

experiences on their own terms. What oftentimes tends to happen when we think of stories of displacements or the stories of those that happened to be displaced, we think of war, we think of violence, we think of persecution, and that's definitely part of the story, but that's all we hear about. With Narratio, we wanted to create a platform and a series of initiatives that created spaces for displace young people to feel that they can transcend the tragedy that may

have initially caused their displacement. And so for the fellowship specifically, the first year was focused on poetry, and so I

spent some time in Syracuse. I met with the fellows for the month organize a series of workshops and partnership with the university there and the Ancient New East Gallery at the MAP And the co director for the program was a professor at Syracuse, professor by Snort Quists an amazing, amazing human And what we did was each fellow selected an object from the Ancient East Gallery and reimagine their labels as a poem, but taking to account their own

personal stories, their own personal identities, and then they get to perform those poems at the Royal Assyrian Court in those galleries by the end of the summer, and that program has continued. They've been able to perform their work at the un They've had a photography exhibit in a performance at Christie's, in addition to local performances and exhibits

in Syracuse. And so we're really trying to create a collective of cultural producers that then can take control of their own stories and redefine the kind of the singular narrative that you know is dominant around displacement, which tends to focus on tragedy. Explain to me why the dominant tragedy narrative is a problem. How does it trouble people,

how does it affect them? The dominant narrative that's limited by the tragedy really ends up creating this story of victimhood as a story that's limited by victimhood, and we have to be able to move beyond that. But we have to be able to move beyond it by asking those very individuals how they want to be able to share their stories. We can't just have an agenda and then say, oh, this is where your story fits in,

or your story of tragedy fits in. We have to meet folks where they're at, ask them about the fullest extent of their experiences, and then ask them how they want to be able to represent themselves. What's the risk for young people who don't have this kind of opportunity. Well, first, I think you have to realize that you have a story to tell, and then you have to realize how you can tell that story. What you're risking if that doesn't happen. Is again that narrative of tragedy being becoming

the dominant one. And also there's so much personal development that happens once you realize that you have something to share with the world and that you are in control of what you want to share with the world. And also want to be clear that not everyone should be forced to tell their own story. That's another aspect of this. This is an invitation rather than a mandate, right, This is something that we try to kind of offer and then if it's something that's of interest, then you know,

we work with those young people. But if again, this work and this mission is really aimed at providing these spaces and then opening up opportunities for those spaces and those individuals to grow on their own. And again, ownership and agency is at the heart of this work. Your new book, While the Earth Sleeps, We Travel is a collection of poetry and prose, is by you, some by fellow young refugees. Tell me about how you choose the

pieces for the book and how you organized it. Yeah, So, beginning in twenty eighteen, I started traveling to Greece and Trinad and Tobago and across the US, but mainly in Syracuse, really doing the storytelling workshops and interviews with displace young people in camps, outside of camps, and really asking this fundamental question of how do you see yourself and how do you think the world sees you? And what's that relationship between those two questions and how would you define

it through your own respective medium? Do you want to write a poem, do you want to share a photograph? Do you want to share a painting? Now, in terms of the process of how it came to be, you know, it was a year of the collection process and then about a year just trying to figure out the structure of it. You know, how do you fit a drawing by a six year old girl with you know, an interview and a series of photographs or paintings by a twenty three year old man, you know, from all different

parts of the world. You know, there's a series of my own poems that are structured throughout as a mediating force between you know, all of the pieces represented, and so it's a really multimodal collection that's been the labor of love for the last couple of years, and I'm very, very excited to share with the world. Do you think that the effect both of your book and your work, and of of course, of narratio is likely to have

an impact on the narrative itself. Want to change the way society speaks more broadly about refugees or is the point really to help the refugees themselves. I think we can do both. I think one amplifies the other. You know, the mission is to create this global collective of displaced young people that are trained to tell their own stories on their own terms, as stakeholders in their communities, as leaders, as cultural producers, and we hope that by doing that

work then we can change the narrative. What do you think readers will gain both from the book and from the material that's produced onto radio. I hope that readers realize that kind of this distance we assume when we hear that word refugee, the distance between our experiences and theirs is actually much less than we think it is.

There are issues that folks who happen to be displaced to have experienced that anyone can relate to, regardless if they've experienced displacement or not whether it's my own parents struggling to find jobs even though they had master's degrees in civil engineering, or you know, me and my younger sister trying to figure out, you know, just being high school students and where we fit in and and our

own identities and negotiating those identities. These are all struggles that are universal and we can all relate to in some way, shape or form. Critically, the book is not about displacement. It's just about the expression, the creative expression of young people who happen to be displaced. It's a key distinction that I hope is clear and that I hope,

you know, folks would appreciate. What are three things that listeners could do themselves to support the livelihoods of displace people, to support the integration of refugees, maybe in their own communities. So first, I think, you know, think about the stories that you've heard about refugees, either you know, in the news or in your own community. Think about the experiences you've had with folks that you've met, and really critically

examine how that presentation is happening. And then from there, reimagine what comes to mind when you hear that word refugee. You know, it doesn't have to be this thing that's always so far away. It could be a neighbor, it could be someone that your kid goes to school with, a coworker. And then lastly, I think just learning to

lead with your own personal experience. If you meet someone that happens to be displaced, or if you're happened to be highlighting the experiences of someone that happens to be displaced for an event that you're holding, allowed that individual the space and the opportunity to speak beyond the tragedy

that may have been part of their story. Those three things are really key as we think about displacement, the narratives around displacement, and we lead this mission to create a three dimensional approach to how we think about displacement, how we think about migration, and how we think about refugees. Ahmed Botter is the founder of New Radio. You can find more information about his new book, While the Earth Sleeps, We Travel At Earth Sleeps, We Travel dot Com. Remember

to check out our show notes to learn more. Solvable is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our show is produced by Camille Baptista, Senior Producer, Jocelyn Frank. Catherine Girardo is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Special thanks go to Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Carly Migliori and Kadija Holland. I'm Jacob Weisberg.