Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson
October 28, 2022
Author Ahmed M. Badr discusses life as a refugee at the First Year Common Reader event
For too long, the global conversation about the refugee crisis has excluded the voices of refugees themselves. Ahmed M. Badr, an Iraqi-American author, poet and social entrepreneur, is working to change that.
In 2006, Badr’s house in Baghdad was bombed by militia troops. He and his family moved to Syria, where they lived as refugees for more than two years before receiving approval to move to the United States. When he was a teenager, he started writing about his family’s journey.
Freshmen at the University of Delaware read Badr’s book, While the Earth Sleeps, We Travel: Stories, Poetry and Art from Young Refugees Around the World, before arriving on campus this fall. Badr discussed his book with members of the UD community Thursday, Oct. 20, in Mitchell Hall.
“When I was in high school, I tried to figure out what it meant to be this Iraqi-American Muslim refugee,” Badr said. “I wanted to understand what it was like to claim all those different identities and to claim them proudly, recognizing the difficulties, tensions and complexities they entail. And I started to explore that through writing, through poetry.”
A UD tradition administered by the First-Year Seminar Program, the Shared Reader offers first-year students an opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation with fellow students and begin to participate in the life intellectuals of the entire University community. In addition to the main speaker event, the Common Reader Program organizes exhibitions and other cultural events around the theme of the book throughout the first semester.
“It’s not a book about refugee stories,” Badr said. “It is a book about the stories of individuals who are refugees. And that’s a key distinction I’d like us all to keep in mind tonight as we explore this topic [and] this theme together and amazing individuals who have experienced displacement, but again, are not defined by that displacement itself.”
Emily Davis, associate professor of English, moderated the discussion.
“When we think about the contemporary climate crisis, and especially the mass displacements it is producing, our discussions are full of numbers. But the numbers are not enough. We know the numbers, Ahmed reminds us. But we need to know the stories,” Davis said. “Ahmed’s work, and the work of the Narratio Fellows, highlights how much we need to hear each other’s stories.”
As a teenager, Badr founded Narratio, an online platform that publishes the poetry, art and stories of young people around the world, with a focus on highlighting the voices of refugees and immigrants. In the summer of 2019, Narratio launched an annual Storytelling Fellowship for displaced refugee youth in partnership with Syracuse University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
After the discussion with Badr, four Narratio fellows shared their poetry with the audience and answered questions about the Fellowship and their lives as refugees.
Bedri’s book includes poetry, art, photography and narrative; Papers were collected through workshops and interviews in camps, community centers, sidewalks, cafes, and parks in Greece, Trinidad and Tobago, and Syracuse, New York.
“What really amazed me was that he used so many different tools to get the message across,” said Sophia DiFabio, a first-year human services major. “I’m more of a visual person and art is really what captures me and helps me see things more clearly. So being able to see pictures and paintings really just moved me in a way that writing can’t always do.”
Annie Blimmel, a first-year environmental studies major, said the book and discussion helped her expand her mind.
“It made me think a lot about how sheltered I’ve been,” she said. “Even though I may not be a displaced person, I shouldn’t shame or shy away from people who are, and I should reach out to them and raise their voices and give them a platform to speak. Reading the book opened me up to this more. It was just amazing to hear from people and their stories, which, as they were talking about tonight, are often hidden.”
Michaela Hodges-Fulton, a first-year neuroscience major, said the book was easy to relate to because it’s made up of stories of people who just happen to be refugees, and at the heart of it, they’re just human stories.
“The biggest part I learned tonight is the importance of storytelling and the importance of being open to hearing stories that maybe you haven’t heard before,” she said.
Essay Contest Winners
Eight students were awarded prizes in the 2022 Common Readers Essay Contest in response to Badr’s book. The winners are:
First place: Kabmata Kargbo, a nurse from New Castle, Delaware
Second place: Annie Blimmel, an environmental studies major from Ocean View, Delaware
Third place: Isabella Thiele, a medical diagnostician from Oak Creek, Wisconsin
Fourth place: Amelia Seydel, an environmental studies major from Long Beach, California
Honorable mention: Diya Jackson, a marine science major from Clarksville, Maryland
Honorable Mention: Sophia DiFabio, a human services major from Mullica Hill, New Jersey
Honorable mention: Michaela Hodges-Fulton, a neuroscience major from Reston, Virginia
Honorable Mention: Hannah Feng, a nurse practitioner from Plainsboro, New Jersey
