The Project
The Haneen Project is a nascent creative arts workshop endeavor aimed at offering refugees and asylum seekers a platform for exploring and sharing their experiences of displacement, in poetry and performance.
The first incarnation of this project has been under Reading Refugee Support Group's "Roots to Routes" platform, led by Theatre Director Jude Haste, RRSG's Culture and Integration Manager. The Roots to Routes project incorporates drama, radio, and poetry. Jude and Yasmine Shamma have been working together to coordinate and lead (respectively) the poetry writing workshops, despite pandemic limitations. The result has been a weekly virtual drop-in session for local refugees. With an "anyone any language welcome" approach, Yasmine has been leading the workshops in English and Arabic, alongside artist and translator Lina Zawati. Fusing Jude's experience working in Theatre, with Yasmine's in Education and Refugee studies, and Lina's in Art and Translation, the project aims to travel thorugh various spaces of displacement as a workshop available to refugees in the UK and Middle East.
Currently operating as a volunteer-created, unfunded pursuit, The Haneen Project will continue in its initial iteration as part of RRSG's "Roots to Routes", while moving into being offered in refugee camps in the future, once travel is permitted again. For more on the project's evolution, see here.
Poems and more will be published soon. Until then, for any queries regarding the Haneen Project, Contact Yasmine.
Recent coverage of the project
The project in collaboration with RRSG's Roots to Routes Covid 19 Digital Platform, was covered by BBC 1:
The project was discussed in context on BBC Radio Berkshire.
The Reading Chronicle has also reported on the project.
The Reading Chronicle has also reported on the project.
On Haneen
Haneen is arabic for "longing," "craving," "yearning," and or "nostalgia." The root of the word is "hanan" which means affection, motherhood, and care. Throughout poetry writing workshops to date, and indeed the interviews chornicled in this "Making Home Away" archive, the haneen that refugees tend to express is for their mothers and homes.
Poet Mahmoud Darwish captures the mingling of the word with nostalgia for home and mother, in his poem, "To my Mother," translated here by Lina Zawati:
To my Mother
by Mahmoud Darweesh
I long for my mother’s bread
And my mother’s coffee
... And my mother’s touch
Childhood catches up with me one day after another
And I fall in love with my years and life,
ashamed of my mother’s tears if I die !
Take me... one day if I come back to you ...
A veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with grass
Baptized by the purity of your heels
... Tie my limbs
... With a strand of hair
... With a loose string hanging from the hem of your dress
I might become a God
... a God I may become!
If I touch the depth of my mother’s heart
Lay me, if I return
Firewood for the hearth within you
And a laundry rope on your rooftop
For I lost the ability to stand
Without your daily prayers
I am older,
bring me back the stars of childhood
So I may join the nestlings
On their ...home coming trip
To your nest that awaits
-Translated by Lina Zawati
Poet Mahmoud Darwish captures the mingling of the word with nostalgia for home and mother, in his poem, "To my Mother," translated here by Lina Zawati:
To my Mother
by Mahmoud Darweesh
I long for my mother’s bread
And my mother’s coffee
... And my mother’s touch
Childhood catches up with me one day after another
And I fall in love with my years and life,
ashamed of my mother’s tears if I die !
Take me... one day if I come back to you ...
A veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with grass
Baptized by the purity of your heels
... Tie my limbs
... With a strand of hair
... With a loose string hanging from the hem of your dress
I might become a God
... a God I may become!
If I touch the depth of my mother’s heart
Lay me, if I return
Firewood for the hearth within you
And a laundry rope on your rooftop
For I lost the ability to stand
Without your daily prayers
I am older,
bring me back the stars of childhood
So I may join the nestlings
On their ...home coming trip
To your nest that awaits
-Translated by Lina Zawati