São Paulo – On May 12, the São Paulo Library (BSP, acronym in Porguese) will hold an Arab Storytelling event organized by the refugees Nour Koeder from Syria and Rawa Alsagheer from Palestine. The storytelling will use tales from the books “Histórias árabes” [Arab Stories] by Ana Maria Machado and “Azzi in Between” by Sarah Garland. Between stories, it will also be held a reading mediation using children books donated by the Kalimat Foundation from Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
The event is part of the project Creative Displacement, which connects refugees and migrants to the creative economy in São Paulo. “In this project, we work with a Syrian and a Palestinian refugee but we also assist people from countries that are not in war but in extreme poverty and struggle such as Senegal, Angola and Nigeria; these are not legally described as refugees but are very vulnerable,” explained the project founder and manager Maria Nilda Santos.
“We had the initiative to train migrants to become storytellers, and we’ve started with Arab stories,” said Santos. According to her, the idea came from the precept that literature is a human right, and that working with the source culture minimizes the displacement impacts.
According to Santos, storytelling is an almost theatrical performance, without the book, with external elements, while the reading mediation is done with a smaller group of children where they all sit and read the book together, looking at the pages, the illustrations. “The stories in the Arab books from Sharjah are more graphic and will be better used in the mediation where children have more contact with the book, while the storytelling will have other titles with more elements of the Arab culture, she explained.
The storytelling will be done in Portuguese to integrate both languages and cultures but according to Santos, if there are Arab children in the event, there will be an Arabic translation for them.
About the project
Creative Displacement is a social impact project conceived to map and shine a light on the economic production and participation of refugees who live in the city of São Paulo and who partake in the creative economy. Other goals are identifying individual talents, struggles and needs in order to foster the creation of solutions so the migrants may have a structure; raising awareness for the initiatives and opportunities for getting closer to the creative economy market in the city; and contributing to sustainable organization of this migrants, and the integration of diverse cultures and knowledges and fostering a peace culture.
More information in the project’s Facebook.
Quick Facts
Arab Storytelling by Refugees
Creative Displacement project
May 12 (Sunda), from 12:15 to 4pm
São Paulo Library
Av. Cruzeiro do Sul, 2630 – São Paulo
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
