(bright music) - Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(bright music continues) (audience applauding) - My name's Chrisstina Hamilton.

I'm the director of the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series, and we're very pleased to be bringing you, bringing this event together today with big thanks to Key Campus Partners, our longtime partner, the Dearly Beloved, University of Michigan Museum of Art, where we are right now.

(audience applauding) A big thank you to Tina Olson, the director who's here with us.

Lisa Borgsdorf, who's not here but worked very hard on this.

And Mahalina, who is, (audience applauding and cheering) works really steady under pressure.

We're also thrilled that we have the opportunity to once again collaborate with Wallace House Center for Journalists, which is just an extraordinary program that we're so lucky to have on campus here.

And I wanna give a shout out to Wallace House Director, Lynette Clementson, who's here with us.

(audience applauding and cheering) Yes, many of you may recall, Lynette has also appeared many times in the Penny Stamps Speaker Series.

During the pandemic, we were able to do a lot of work together, and I wanna especially thank you, Lynette, for your support of Ismail, and particularly in this endeavor today 'cause I know that you really encouraged him to do this talk, so thank you.

- We do, yay!

- Yes, we do.

And there are other events for you to attend this week that I want point out because you can catch Ishi again, along with a couple of his other Knight Wallace fellows in a panel on Migration in Europe, that's Thursday at 4:30.

And then also on Thursday at 5:30, you can rush over to the Michigan Theater for our regular Penny Stamps Series event, featuring Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani, followed by an exhibition of her work at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery.

Please do remember to silence those cell phones.

We are not going to have our regular Q and A here today.

However, there are autographed copies of Ismail's book, "Strangers" for sale in the UMA Shop.

And Ismail will be available after the event upstairs by the shop till 7:00 PM to have a meet and greet with all of you.

So now for a few words on Ismail Einashe, Ismail is an award-winning British Somali journalist, author, and current Knight Wallace fellow whose work on migration and refugee issues has appeared in numerous publications, including Foreign Policy, the Guardian, BBC News, The Nation, The Sunday Times, Frieze, and Art Review.

He is the author of "Strangers", the book upstairs, a book by Tate Publishing that explores migration through the lens of art.

And he co-edited "Lost in Media: Migrant Perspectives and the Public Sphere", a collection of critical essays examining how migrants are represented in European media.

He's a member of the editorial board of Tate Etc., the magazine of the Tate Galleries.

He's also part of a team of journalists, working on a cross border journalism collaborative called Lost in Europe, which investigates the disappearance of child migrants.

I had the great fortune to be introduced to Ismail just before his arrival in Ann Arbor through his great friend Tom.

And I've been so delighted to see him jump in, and take such an active role in the cultural scene here.

And he has such a vibrant addition to our community.

Please welcome Ismail Einashe.

(audience applauding and cheering) Muah.

- Oh.

That was the first rookie mistake.

That's the, oh... Well, can we start again, I'm kidding.

Hi, everyone.

- Hello.

- Can you hear me?

- Yes.

- Is my voice soothing?

- Yes.

- Oh, wonderful.

Okay, oh, yeah, that's gonna go off.

Thank you for your patience.

We had a few technical hiccups, but I feel like it's a good omen for this evening.

So first of all, I just wanna thank you all for being here, and for coming this evening.

I know the weather isn't good.

And thank also Chrisstina Hamilton, and Melissa and everybody else, and Lisa here of the museum who've really helped me greatly.

So the first place that I wanna begin with my presentation is, really, I'm going to start with this image.

This is a photograph that I have of my great-grandmother and me in Somalia.

It's outside my family home in Hargeisa, taken in 1992 or '93.

I just want you just to sit with this image for a moment.

Think about what you're seeing, perhaps think about my granny, what's in front of you.

So let's just take a moment to look together.

So, as you know, as Chrisstina mentioned, as a Knight-Wallace fellow, one of the privileges of being here at the museum, sorry, at the University of Michigan, is the opportunity to be able to audit classes.

And last semester I got to order a class by Professor Niloofar Sarlati, who I believe is in the audience.

And she asked me to present to the students and I showed them this image and I got them just to sit with this image and analyze the image.

What are we seeing in this image?

What are the visuals like?

And of course they spoke about the scene you see in front of you, the bullets, the bullet indentations in the wall, the tire, the poverty, maybe, the somberness, maybe, the relationship between me and my great-grandma.

But for me this image is such an important image because it opened the gateway.

It basically transported me back to Somalia.

So in 2014, my aunt had found an image, it was a image which was in a terrible state.

It looked like a long lost Victorian CDV photograph.

And she handed me this image and she says, "Do you know who that boy is in the image?"

And I grabbed the photograph, I look at it and I say, "I don't know who that is."

And she says, "Look again."

So I looked again and then I said, "No, I don't know who that boy is in the image."

It turned out to be me because she blurted out and said it was you.

And that image when I got it and I managed to restore it, allowed me to travel back to this particular memory.

So this was taken, as I mentioned, outside our family home in Hargeisa as the war was going on in Somalia.

And I used to say in London, after I came to the UK as a 10-year-old child, I used to say to my friends when I was 13 or 14 or 15 that I had no memory of the war in Somalia.

But this image allowed me to go back to that moment that it was captured.

And it was captured by the first white person I ever remember meeting.

My uncle had worked for a British NGO, and that day he and this stranger came to visit me.

I used to sit outside our bombed-out house in Hargeisa with my great-grandma because I had an infection in my left leg and I couldn't walk, so I used to crawl.

So I used to sit there, tell jokes, try and get a few coins to buy sweets.

You know, not much has changed.

(audience laughing) And then I would... Thank you for the laughter, 'cause I'm a little bit nervous doing this.

But this image transported me back to that memory, and it allowed me to kind of get a sense of what that moment was like.

If you're interested, I actually ended up doing a piece, a radio essay for the BBC World Service, which is online, in which I basically break down what we are seeing in this image, and also talk about this idea of being transported into the past.

Because in Somalia, the war led to a situation where everything was destroyed.

There are no archives, people don't have passports, buildings were destroyed.

And I have this screen here, black screen, because to me it shows the fact that war had destroyed almost everything.

But looking at that image as I did for the first time in 2014, and then going back to Hargeisa, I went back to that house, which is now the center of an NGO, it's an NGO that's operating from my old house.

And they let me into the building and everything had changed.

And I walked in and I was trying to get to that place, that specific point in which I was sat on the ground with my great-grandma to try and feel something, some kind of connection.

And as I'm thinking about this presentation this evening, and it's, I should say titled Migration as Imagination, which I will explore over the next minutes, there's a concept in Somalia.

In Somali we have a concept called buufis.

It's B-U-U-F-I-S.

And buufis means to inflate, or to blow up something.

It it speaks to that deep yearning, that longing that we have for moving.

And it speaks to that spiritual dimension of migration.

But it's also for me become a tool through which to look at the broken archive, and to look at the histories of violence and war that my family had been through.

And in my life and my work as a journalist, I always try to say something about the emotional impact of moving across borders for people that I interview wherever I am.

And for me, one thing that I've always picked up on is that when you ask someone who's been through something ugly, who's been through a violence, who's crossed a border, who's got on a boat, who's ended up in a detention center, who's been exploited, if you say to them, what is it that you want other people to know about your experience, people often don't say the thing that most of us would imagine would define them, which is the violence they've ended up in, the situation they've ended up in.

People always say the same thing in different ways, but they say that it's how they overcame, how they endured, how they changed, how they moved on.

And I think buufis for me is a concept, which speaks to that.

And this black screen also for me speaks to a moment in 1988.

In May, 1988, the war began in Somalia, in Hargeisa.

In those first few moments, my mother ran outside our family home and she dropped to her knees and she began to dig a hole in the ground.

And in that hole she put our precious family photos.

My mother imagined that she would one day return and retrieve those photos, but our house was destroyed.

And those photos, like so much else, were lost to silence and dust.

And when I think about what that means for a child who goes through a situation like that, you don't remember things in the same way as an adult.

So I was very young when this was happening in 1988.

And as we then moved on through the stages of the conflict into what then became the largest refugee crisis in the world at the time, I ended up in a refugee camp in Ethiopia called Hartisheik, it's just across the border on the northeastern corner of Ethiopia.

And when I ended up there, I had very distinct memories.

I had memories of the dust.

I had memories of the water trucks that would come into the camp.

I also had memories of all this life in the sea of white tents.

And when I think about my mom, and her putting those photos in that hole in the ground, that was a profound act of hope because my mom thought that one day we would be able to go back and that even if our home was destroyed, at least we'd be together in this place.

That never happened.

But to me that was really my first lesson in the power of imagination.

That even in the most intense, dangerous, and ugly situations that people who are moving find themselves in, they always retain a sense of dignity and humanity about them.

I'm gonna now read you a poem, a passage from a poem.

And I think one of the first things that you often hear if you're moving across borders or if you're a refugee, the first question that someone might say is, why did you leave your home?

And I think the British Somali poet, Warsan Shire, powerfully answers that question in her poem "Home".

And I'm going to just read this passage, "Your neighbors running faster than you breathe bloody in their throats.

The boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body.

You only leave home when home won't let you stay."

Nobody would give up the comforts of home.

Violence forces people to make perilous journeys.

For the last decade, I've been covering migration at the borders of Europe.

And what I have seen time and time again is the fact that people have, in the media coverage, in the political discussion, people are sized at the dignity in the humanity of people moving.

And that's why I was very lucky a few years ago to be asked by the Tate in London to write a book, a short book called "Strangers", which you can buy copies of outside.

And my book, "Strangers" looks at migration through the lens of art, but it's also arguing for a different way for us to use the power of art to rethink and humanize how we see migrants and refugees through the various states that they move in, whether it is at the border or within borders or elsewhere.

And I'm gonna show you a few artists, some of them themselves displaced, such as Mona Hatoum and others.

And we're going to discuss this together.

So this image is, well, you can see what it is, right?

It's like two suitcases.

One is yellow and one is green.

And it's connected by long strands of human hair.

It's by the Palestinian British artist Mona Hatoum.

And this work is called Exodus II.

It is from 2002, and it's currently in the Tate Britain in London, which you can go and see.

Mona Hatoum is known for her work in decoding the place of home and identity for those forced to leave their homes because of violence.

She has spent decades engaging in this kind of artistic endeavor, often inspired by her own journey and her own family who were Palestinians and who were forced through the Nakba and ended up in Lebanon.

So this work to me really speaks to that tension that the migrant or the refugee has between themselves and home.

Violence forces them out, but time and circumstances can change the meaning of what home means for them.

But also people have to live with this very heavy weight of the label refugee.

And I think in this work and in the kind of strands of hair, the sort of biological connection, there's something very powerful and beautiful that it really speaks to that.

In 2023, the Tate Britain in London had a rehang, which you can see.

And this work now, which is part of the permanent collection or British art, is sitting inside this enormous room with this kind of 16th, 17th century portraiture all around it.

And I think it's quite interesting because it's trying to bring something contemporary with something historic.

And the ways in which Mona Hatoum has worked for a long time is really taken these things that we think of.

When we move somewhere, when we get on a plane, all of us take, what?

We take luggage, we take bags.

Of course this isn't the reality for people who are forced out.

When the war began in Somalia 1988, people literally had to flee with the clothes on their back.

People didn't have time to pack up and decide, what am I gonna wear on holiday?

Is that the right kind of bikini?

Should I be wearing sunglasses or maybe not.

Will it rain?

You have no time for such thoughts as we might do in our normal lives.

Violence forces you into a great unknown, and many people are then forced to live with this terrible weight or this designation refugee.

This work is another artist from my book and her name is Zarina Hashmi.

She's professionally known as Zarina.

She's an Indian born American artist.

And I won't spend too much time here, but what I wanted to make the point here, was that Zarina often says that she could takes her home wherever she is.

And I think what's really interesting is that for the displaced home moves from being a fixed place to a map of identity.

And home then becomes a place that one can visit in their memory.

When violence comes, war destroys everything.

I mentioned at the beginning that the war destroyed everything in Somali.

So there are no buildings standing.

So how do I now, as an adult, now as a writer, as a journalist, looking back decades on, how do I try to revisit that home that my mother buried those photos outside?

And I think through the power of art, one is able to do that.

But also there's a profound tension for the refugee, for the migrant between the past and the present, between the need to remember and the need to forget.

And in that liminal space, all kinds of things can happen.

And I would argue, as I do in strangers and in this talk this evening, that migration as imagination, the artists can really delve into that space.

For example, on Thursday, Shahida, is one of the artists that's coming.

I wrote about her work a couple of years ago, and she really does that work very beautifully.

She's able to talk about her family's experiences in Iran, and that is imbued in her artwork in really beautiful ways.

So you should definitely go see the exhibition.

And the other point about the home for the person who's displaced is, you know, what do you do when you end up having to go somewhere?

You have to leave.

In my case, we left into Ethiopia and then subsequently to the UK.

How do you root yourself again in a foreign land in a new situation?

The Italian Somali novelist, Cristina Ubah Ali Farah once said to me, I was interviewing her for a piece for the BBC.

And she just said to me, one of the things that she thought about when she was forced out of the violence in Mogadishu, at the age of 18, she was pregnant at the time.

She just thought, how am I gonna root myself again in a completely different land?

How am I gonna find sense of home?

What do I need to do to survive?

How do I move on?

And that's something that we often hear.

Now I'm gonna get this, this is me and my teacher, when I was 15 years old, Mr.

Crabtree.

He has a very, sort of like a teacher's name, Crabtree, right?

I also had an English teacher called Ms.

Pyles.

So Ms.

Pyles, who's my English teacher, and Mr.

Crabtree, who's my history teacher.

I think we're gonna have an audio if that's possible.

(instrumental) ♪ Baby if you've got to go away ♪ ♪ Don't think I could take the pain ♪ ♪ Won't you stay another day ♪ ♪ Oh don't leave me alone like this ♪ ♪ Don't you say it's the final kiss ♪ ♪ Won't you stay another day ♪ - For those of you who aren't from Britain, I don't know if anyone's from the UK here, but if you don't know, East 17 are, like, legends.

And they're pop band from the 1990s, from East 17, which is a postcode in, like, London, in Walthamstow.

I was obsessed with them.

And in 1994, I arrived as a 10-year-old child to London.

And I came a few days after Christmas.

So it was snowing and I felt for the first time the sensation of snowflakes on my hands, but also my lips cracked.

And I've had to basically put on permanent lip balm ever since.

It's never recovered, but it's nothing like a Michigan winter, I'll tell you that much.

People ask me this question a lot about London.

I'm like, no, no, no, it's chill.

It's chill, mate, it's chill.

In, like, Michigan weather.

But when I came in 1994, you know, I didn't speak a word of English.

I was 10 years old and all I could say was thank you and please and maybe how much, or sweets, I could just point at something in the shop and give them the coins that they needed.

But nobody prepared us for what life would be like in the UK.

But I began to discover this new culture, and I obviously began to discover it through food.

And I would eat custard creams, their biscuits, you guys call it cookies.

It doesn't make sense, it's biscuits.

But they're lovely and they're delicious.

It's like two, like, layers of, like, kind of like cake, well, biscuits with like little cream in the middle.

And when I got to the airport to Heathrow in 1994, I was really happy because I suddenly saw these walking machines.

I had never seen escalators before.

In Addis Ababa, where we flew from, before I left there was the neighborhood in which I lived, which is called Bole Michael.

It was a neighborhood which is full of refugees, people going to all kinds of places.

And there was a woman that would sell sweets and Fanta and sodas to children.

And when we were good, and got a few coins, we would run and then try and buy something.

I always bought the same thing, which is a Fanta in a glass bottle, really cold.

Oh, great.

And I would go up to this woman and she would say to each child, she'd say, "Where are you going?"

I would say Finland, Netherlands, Norway, UK.

And then she'd say to me, "Where are you going?"

And I'd say, "Oh, I'm going to London."

And she'd say, 'Ah, do you know that country has four names?"

And I'd go, "What, a country that has four names?

That's odd."

And then she'd say, "Yes, it's called London, England, UK, Europe."

And she said to me, "When you get there, you will not need to use your legs because they have magical walking machines that do the walking for you."

And as a 10-year-old child, I was like, what, so I can leave at Addis Ababa with all this like dirt on the ground, and, like, puddles of water and street dogs and I could be just like, you know, living my life just going on a, no, I'm not gonna do a catwalk, but on an escalator.

And I thought, yeah, I'm down for that.

I think I'd like that.

So I was so, so excited.

And I got to London and then I saw escalator.

I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing.

And then we left the airport, and we had to get on the tube or the subway as you say here.

And I was very disappointed when the escalators ran out and I thought, "Crap, are you telling me I'm going to have to use my legs after all?"

London was different to, I just have, indeed, London was different to Hargeisa, but it wasn't necessarily easier.

I had to learn a new tongue.

I had to be in a different culture.

And many of us in this room will know this who come from first generation, second generation migrant families.

When you're the first person to learn the language in your family, you often are the person who has to translate for people.

So I ended up in some awkward situations where I'd be translating for elders in my family, which obviously is a very cool place for them to have been in, but also for me.

But what I realized is when I didn't see these walking machines, I realized, you know, moving to London wasn't about that.

It was about being able to walk on my own two feet, one step at a time.

Okay.

So this work is by Francis Alys, he's a Belgian artist based in Mexico.

And this is also the cover, well, zoomed in version of this, of my book "Strangers".

Now Francis Alys's work here, which is called the Nightwatch from 2004.

It isn't specifically about migration.

It's actually about surveillance, and it's a video installation and it's just an image of a fox.

Yes, he did release a fox in the National Portrait Gallery in London where this is.

But for those of you who've been to London, you'll know foxes are very common in London.

You'll even find them queuing up to go to the ATM or sometimes the pub, you know.

Well, I haven't seen the pub situation and that might be fake news, but foxes are just a regular part of London.

So this work, the Nightwatch, he released this fox in 2004, and here you can see where it ended up.

So the National Portrait Gallery is sort of gilded cultural heart of London.

And you have this fox, this invader, this wily crafted creature that I'm obsessed with.

I love foxes, but they have this image, right, that they're wily and dangerous and intruders.

And it's... This fox is, you know, found itself here by this glorious portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, and her mother, Anne Boleyn.

There's some argument about that.

But it's class in the National Portrait Gallery as her mother.

And you have this situation where this invader, in this case, this fox has been allowed into this cultural space that it shouldn't be in.

And it kind of reminded me of migration as I was going through the national collection of British art.

As part of my book "Strangers", I was able to go to the national archives and look through and work with some of the curators there.

And this work really spoke to me 'cause I thought, ah, it speaks to migration.

'Cause migration is about moving through various states of control and it's about surveillance.

And migrants and refugees are, you know, insiders and outsiders.

They're allowed in yet not seen nor welcomed.

They're often framed as invaders.

And I think this work really speaks to that and the idea of strangers.

Because as we know, strangers obviously are someone who's foreign to us, someone who's alien to us, someone who's not part of our group, someone who don't know.

But a stranger can also be a guest.

They could also be a friend.

They could become a friend.

So in my thinking around the visual language around depictions of migration in my book, this work was really powerful in that it allowed me to think about this idea of control and what happens to migrants because we know that migrants are moving through various states of control.

In Europe, I'm meeting people all the time who've crossed on boats, people in the internal borders within the EU, people who end up in detention.

And the last many years we've seen the fact that across the world that states, particularly liberal states, have built these sophisticated infrastructure to keep migrants out.

And to also detain and harass people.

And that infrastructure has just gone crazy.

And with AI, we have no idea where it might end up.

This work is by the Armenian American artist, Arshile Gorky.

And it's called Garden in Sochi Motif.

It's from 1942, it's one of three paintings that the artist did.

And this one is in the Tate Modern, which you can go and see.

Gorky survived the horror of the Armenian genocide.

He lost his mother, and by the time he was 16, he ended up in the United States where his father was living in.

This work is almost impossible to decipher.

If you look at the colors, it's got the brood in black, the smattering of bright orange and blue and yellow.

Some Gorky experts say that actually this image is him trying to recapture a Armenian butter churn made of goat skin.

But the fragmented style reflects his fragmented memory and it reflects a loss that is impossible to reconfigure.

Gorky had a profound impact on American art in the 20th century.

He was not alone.

Other strangers like him, naming a few, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, had a profound impact on American art.

Strangers, people from somewhere over there.

And what is really powerful and beautiful about this work is Gorky is trying to wrestle with his memory of his childhood home in Armenia.

He's trying to remember his mother.

He's trying to remember that connection.

A garden in his family home.

But because of the violence he endured, and because of the century of denial around the Armenian genocide, it's very difficult to make sense of it.

Particularly for artists like Gorky who come from places where everything has been destroyed.

In the case of Somalia, the archive was destroyed.

In the case of Armenia, there was complete denial, still continued denial of what happened.

So how does one go back to that home, to that boy and his mother if you have nothing to go on?

Gorky in his remarkable life, and the remarkable art he produced, was able to depict it here.

In 1948, on the 21st of July, in his studio in Sherman in Connecticut, Gorky was found hanging.

And by a... There was a crate nearby the studio, and on that crate written in white chalk, was this.

A beautiful and haunting end to a remarkable life.

It can often be a terrible weight for those who are survivors, for those who are left behind.

And for those who have the heavy burden of memory, of remembering what happened to others.

In this case, with Gorky, unfortunately his life was cut short, but he left a remarkable legacy.

But trauma is not destiny.

One does not necessarily need to end up where sadly Gorky ended up.

One can rise, like the phoenix from the ashes, one can be resurrected.

The next slide I'm going to show you, there'll be sound coming in a minute, is by a musician called Chris Obehi, a Nigerian.

I interviewed him many times, including for pieces for the BBC, which you can read online.

And he survived like many people around 2015 to '16, the so-called migrant crisis in Europe, which to me was really a crisis of solidarity and empathy.

He went through a profound journey and he survived the Mediterranean, he became a BASCA and he went on to become a very famous singer in Sicily where he lives in Palermo, and he also sings in Sicilian and Italian and in many other languages.

So with the help of my friend in the back, we're gonna play Chris Obehi "Non Siamo Pesci", which is in Italian means we are not fish.

If you're able to play the audio, please.

(instrumental) (foreign music playing) - So that message I think is very powerful.

We are not fish, we are humans, we're not fish in the sea.

And he went through an extraordinary experience of violence, which I won't go into, and in which he shares that in common with thousands of other young migrants.

In fact, he was a minor when he arrived in Italy.

But he was able to, through the power of music, heal.

And not just heal, but spread a message of hope and love, which is extraordinary, right?

After you go through that experience.

Now we're gonna move on to... I'm gonna tell you when to play the sound.

Thank you so much.

I'm communicating my pal on the back 'cause we have some technical issues.

So now we're gonna do it this way.

But I wanna take you back a little.

After 1988 we fled from her Hargeisa when the war began in Somalia, and we left with the clothes on our backs, like many other people.

Initially, my family tried to find a shelter and a place in the city, and my aunt said to me that they were very reluctant to give up our family home.

They didn't want to leave, so they tried not to.

And that's what happens when violence comes to your home.

Nobody wants to leave, nobody wants to give up what they've got, and their language and their culture and their food.

But eventually the war was just too much and the violence was just too great.

So we were forced to camp, called Hartisheik, it was the largest refugee camp in the world, and it housed 600,000 people at its peak.

And that's where I spent portion of my childhood.

I went back in 2019 and I wanted to get a sense of where I had come from, to find myself in this world in flux, to find some meaning.

And when I went back in 2019, it was an extraordinary journey for a number of reasons.

Not just because of my own return, but because there were political issues going on in Ethiopia at the time.

And the internet was down, and I was on assignment for the BBC, I was doing an investigation about a Chinese-built railway in Addis Ababa to Djibouti, which didn't work out.

And I ended up got into trouble with Ethiopian government because I did a story and I proved that it wasn't working.

Anyway, another story.

But I ended up then flying to the eastern part of Ethiopia to Dire Dawa, and then eventually to Hartisheik, which is right on the border with Somalia.

And I had this memory of the camp, which I mentioned at the beginning of a dust, of, like, the water trucks.

Just this endless dust, which is covered everything, you know, our clothes, our bodies.

And this dust even infringed into my memory, into my nightmares.

And when I turned up in 2019, I had to check and I walked out to the place where the camp was, and what I saw was just fields as far as I could see of long, green grass, of yellow flowers.

It was so beautiful and alluring.

And I just thought, okay, memory is playing trick on me here, what is going on?

And I realized that I had come to this place to try and find my forgotten memories, but this place had forgotten what it had been.

And then I realized, well, maybe I got this a bit wrong.

And maybe I wasn't returning to find what I had fled from or what I had experienced as a child.

Maybe it was just to confirm that this place was real, and the dust and the land, all that was within me, and as I did.

And I was lucky then to end up finding some family cassette tapes and many other items.

And before I played the sound of this, I'll just explain, Somalia is an oral culture.

Spoken word is key, poetry is key, it's a nation of poets.

Orality is so important to us.

Somalia only became a written language in 1972.

And with the war, the entire record of the country was destroyed.

Everything was gone.

So here I was in 2019 trying to look back and only having a few images, snippets, things to go back and to try and remember, to try and reconstruct something.

Obviously, bringing the lens of having them been educated in Britain, if you like, the sort of western lens.

And being frustrated that I ended up in Ethiopia at this camp and that there was no archive.

As I went on with my journey, I realized that the oral tradition in Somalia is different to the tradition in the West, but it's not worse.

It's in fact so powerful and so strong.

And I discovered this many cassette tapes and one of them contains poetry.

It's actually, it's whole tradition called Sitaad.

It's practiced amongst women.

It's really a very spiritual kind of genre.

And it's also about devotion and it's about Islam and and faith.

And as a child, I distinctly remember that I would be with my mom and my aunts and they'd be performing.

So we're gonna hear this now.

(gentle foreign chanting) - So now I want you to move with me from this moment in this camp in Hartisheik, to another camp, to the north of France to Calais.

And we're going to watch a video, which hopefully will play, I'm gonna try, by a grime afro artist called Afrikan Boy.

He was born in Woolwich in London to Nigerian parents.

And this song is from 2015.

It's called "Border Business".

And this song also was recorded in Calais.

For those of you who don't know, it's often referred to as the jungle, which I don't really like, but that's how people refer to it, including the people who lived there often.

But it was a staging post for people that were attempting to cross the English channel to Britain.

So I'm gonna try and see if I can play this next.

(instrumental) ♪ SOV Afrikan Boy ♪ ♪ So they know who it is ♪ ♪ Uh, border business ♪ here, so pay witness ♪ ♪ Ain't no human fitter ♪ than an immigrant ♪ ♪ You know we're so broke ♪ we can't pay attention ♪ ♪ We bring out AK's to ♪ the voting conventions ♪ ♪ Give them bras cause ♪ they fake ass implants ♪ ♪ I go commando ♪ ♪ Hey, I got no pants ♪ ♪ Music is my visa, see ♪ that Lepa she's my plane ♪ ♪ She love my pounded yam ♪ belly, never complain ♪ ♪ Life ain't sweet, sour mango ♪ ♪ Haters, chickens get cooked in Nando's ♪ ♪ I don't buy Gucci ♪ ♪ Me I wear Gucki ♪ ♪ Yeah, it's got the letter 'k' ♪ ♪ But (beep) it that's the real me ♪ ♪ Me no speak no Anglais ♪ ♪ Mo fe so Yoruba ♪ ♪ Oti ati dodo mofe shayo dada ♪ ♪ This is border business ♪ ♪ If you don't gerrit, ♪ that's your business ♪ ♪ Immigration never enter ♪ like Jehovah Witness ♪ ♪ Yo no se, el porque ♪ ♪ Mi amor se fue ♪ ♪ Yo no se el porque ♪ ♪ Mi amor se fue ♪ ♪ No se ♪ ♪ Border business, border business ♪ ♪ Yo no se, el porque ♪ ♪ Mi amor se fue ♪ ♪ Yo no se el porque ♪ ♪ Mi amor se fue ♪ ♪ No se ♪ - I think I wanted to pick up on this point, it's actually from the lyrics in the song, "Border Business", "Music is my visa."

Well, art is my visa, food is my visa.

And the idea here is that culture and art for me can be a way to communicate the experience of moving across borders, why?

Because as I mentioned a few times now, I feel like politics in the media have often failed to adequately do that.

And I think there's a space, there's a liminal space, between, like, us and the things that we move in in our lives.

Whether it's just eating, whether it's going to gallery, whether it's listen to music, all those sorts of things that connect us all, we all do that here.

I think it can powerfully connect to the migrant experience.

And I think Afrikan Boy here is saying something really very powerful.

So music is his visa.

Now, he grew up in London, but he went to Calais.

And the people in that camp don't have documentation.

Many of them are held in detention, many of them experienced the violence at the border, violence of traffickers, smuggling and so on.

So how does one retain a sense of imagination, a sense of hope, even in the ugliest and the most dangerous of situations.

And I think art and music and culture broadly can really allow us as people, particularly people who are moving, to do that.

And that's why I wanted to show you this clip of this video, but you can watch it.

There are actually a number of artists that have engaged in the space of migration around this era.

One of them is another British artist we might have heard of M.I.A.. And she did a song called "Borders", which she also filmed the video of, which I'd recommend you guys to look at.

Okay, we're gonna move on.

So I'm gonna come to my dear friend and colleague, Kate Stanworth, who's a British photographer that I work with.

And this image is taken in Palermo, in Sicily, one of my favorite places in the world.

I first went there 10 years ago reporting on migration.

I go back every year to tell stories of migration.

And this image is really powerful for me, why?

Because it's not the image that we tend to see of migrant representations in the media.

When you think of the Mediterranean and you close your eyes, you could think of a boat or you could think of barbed wire fences and so on.

And here in this image by Kate Stanworth, the wedding, you know, it's a wedding, and it's happening in this neighborhood in Palermo called Ballaro.

And this wedding is the wedding of a Nigerian woman.

She had been trafficked to Sicily for sexual slavery, and she had fled her traffickers and she had found love.

And this particular moment is just a moment of love, celebration, and beauty.

I'm going to end here on this work by the Somali artist and photographer Mustafa Saeed.

He was born in Hargeisa and he still works in Hargeisa.

And this work is called Monument.

And it's part of Saeed series Home and Me.

And this work for me is really important 'cause it takes me back to the feeling of home, the sensuality of home.

As you can see, this image is kind of framed with these incense burners.

In Somalia frankincense grows abundantly.

In fact, something like 90% of the world's frankincense comes from Somalia, especially from the north west of Somalia, Somalia land where I'm from, right, by the Red Sea.

And for me, this is also a depiction of the Somalia landscape, which is not what we usually see in the popular press, if you think of Somalia.

Or you might listen to politicians who speak about us or about the country, you might hear something different.

But it's a rich culture and a rich history.

And the landscape itself is rich.

And frankincense has been coming from Somalia for generations as far back as the Egyptians.

And for me, also, this work speaks to the power of imagination, because to cross borders, to board dinghies, to scale metal fences, these are not only acts, profound acts of survival, but these are acts of imagination.

And as art shows us, imagination knows no borders.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.