The Project
The Poetry Sanctuary 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.
This project was born of my own long-standing interest in engaging refugee youth in the telling of their own stories. My very first teaching position was as a volunteer in a refugee camp in Lebanon. The students called me, jokingly, "Mrs. Watermelon," making a clever pun in Arabic on my surname. I have taken that sense of the knowing wink: an informed humor, and honored it, carrying it with me in my teaching, leadership, and scholarship, to encourage students from the historically underserved in further refugee camps, to the historically well-served, at, for example, Oxford University, in accessibly serious studies of the written word. Throughout my classrooms and many projects, the light and the heavy comingle with a serious enthusiasm.
The first incarnation of this project wasunder 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.
The Poetry Sanctuary continues to move and grow, from offering writing worskhops to Afghanis recently displaced and awating resettlement out of UK hotels, to those recently dispersed from Gaza. The Poetry Sanctuary will pursue longer term offerings in refugee camps in the future. For more on the project's evolution, see here, and for more on its more current offerings stay up to date by following @thepoetrysanctuaryproject on Instagram.
Poems and more will be published soon. Until then, for any queries regarding the project, Contact Yasmine.
This project was born of my own long-standing interest in engaging refugee youth in the telling of their own stories. My very first teaching position was as a volunteer in a refugee camp in Lebanon. The students called me, jokingly, "Mrs. Watermelon," making a clever pun in Arabic on my surname. I have taken that sense of the knowing wink: an informed humor, and honored it, carrying it with me in my teaching, leadership, and scholarship, to encourage students from the historically underserved in further refugee camps, to the historically well-served, at, for example, Oxford University, in accessibly serious studies of the written word. Throughout my classrooms and many projects, the light and the heavy comingle with a serious enthusiasm.
The first incarnation of this project wasunder 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.
The Poetry Sanctuary continues to move and grow, from offering writing worskhops to Afghanis recently displaced and awating resettlement out of UK hotels, to those recently dispersed from Gaza. The Poetry Sanctuary will pursue longer term offerings in refugee camps in the future. For more on the project's evolution, see here, and for more on its more current offerings stay up to date by following @thepoetrysanctuaryproject on Instagram.
Poems and more will be published soon. Until then, for any queries regarding the 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.
