Peers as solace

Life Stories Montreal gets refugee youth
to use photos, videos and each other’s
ears to tell their stories

GETTING KIDS TO TALK THROUGH PAIN:
Elizabeth Miller and Gracia Jalea

“If Canada does not accept you as a refugee, and you had to leave your country, then who are you?”

This was one of the questions posed by one young man to another during a workshop put on by Life Stories Montreal’s Refugee Youth Working Group. The eight-week workshop, held last year and led by Concordia communications professor Elizabeth Miller and graduate student Gracia Jalea, was designed to equip young refugees with skills in digital-imaging, peer-interviewing and video production—with the aim of encouraging them to share their life stories.

Part of the mandate of Life Stories Montreal is to elicit stories in a way that is ethical and empowering for the teller, and peer interviewing is one technique employed with that aim. And so for Miller, this particular question stands out as a moment in which the project’s theory turned into practice.

“The question posed was so clearly the inner question of this young man,” she says. “I learned so much about this group based on the questions they posed to [the interviewee]. These were questions I had never thought of.”

Over the past year, the Refugee Youth Working Group has also held several day and weekend photography workshops at community centres in the city, including la Maison des Jeunes and Projet Refuge.

The organization is currently in its third year of a five-year plan to conduct 500 interviews of Montrealers who have been displaced because of mass violence. Along with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, they are co-hosting an international conference this weekend (Thursday, Nov. 5–Sunday, Nov. 8) at Concordia called “Remembering War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations: Oral History, New Media and the Arts.” On Sunday, as part of the conference, Jalea will be chairing a round-table discussion entitled Youth Visions, in which some of the youth participants, as well as community youth workers, will reflect on the workshops.

According to Miller and Jalea, finding non-intrusive means of facilitating storytelling is all the more crucial when dealing with youth.

“Some of the Holocaust survivors decide at 85 years of age that they have a legacy to pass on, and that their story can make a bigger contribution to society. But that is after many years of reflection. Somebody who is in the midst of a difficult time may not be ready to tell their story,” says Miller.

For this reason, the two believe that offering youth the tools to express themselves in a visual medium is an effective strategy. For example, in the photography workshops, participants are asked to tell a personal story in four frames.

“When you have something like photography or film, it can act like a buffer,” says Jalea. “For people who aren’t able to express their story orally, images provide an outlet for them.”

Jalea suggests that, both in the artwork and in the discussions that ensue, common themes emerge— such as “the stress of being separated from their families, and the sense of instability.” However, she also states that the youth are often “more interested in talking about love and relationships, and things that all youth can relate to.”

She adds that the group tries to refrain from having participants focus on tragic moments—but instead hopes to let the youth tell their life stories as they see fit.

For more info on the conference, see storytelling.concordia.ca/memoire/index.html.