‘Earth began to purge us too’: slam poet brings refugee voices to Glasgow

She heard them when she spoke to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and when she met Syrians at a camp in Jordan: the identical cries of the dispossessed that rang throughout her personal childhood, when she escaped from Darfur.
Now, Sudanese-American poet Emtithal “Emi” Mahmoud – topped world champion on the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam in Washington DC – is carrying the message of these voices to world leaders on the local weather summit in Scotland.
Her mission, she defined to Reuters, is “to just get the most vulnerable people’s voices into spaces where we’re not normally represented”.
“At 11 years old I saw my neighbour’s house crumble before my eyes,” she writes in her poem entitled ‘Di Baladna’, or ‘Our Land’ in Arabic, which she unveils on Monday on the COP 26 U.N. local weather summit in Glasgow.
“Our country was already locked in turmoil and now the earth began to purge us too,” it reads.
As a refugee herself and a goodwill ambassador for U.N. refugee company UNHCR, she has spoken to fellow refugees across the globe. She noticed how a lot they’d in widespread.

“…You realise that the same vulnerabilities and issues and sensitivities and crises that we witnessed during the Darfur crisis are being repeated over and over,” she mentioned.
“I think I try to answer the question a little bit of how it is that we can bring everyone into the same cause that a lot of us are in right now.”
At COP26, she will probably be interesting for pressing motion but additionally highlighting the efforts refugees are already making to adapt to their habitats.
“Is the situation dire? Absolutely, yeah. But can it be changed? It can, and they’ve already changed it themselves. But that work can go to waste if we don’t support them sometime soon.”