When he was a child, Ibraheem Abdi fled from Kenya with his family after a neighboring tribe rampaged his town with spears, bows and arrows to gain territory. Now, the 21-year-old Syracuse University sophomore is telling his story through poetry and art to the Syracuse community.

Abdi is one of the student artists being showcased at a photography exhibit called Intertwined Journeys: Poems by the Narratio Fellows, which will be on display at the Community Folk Art Center through Jan. 31. He and the other fellows, who are also resettled refugees, will be performing their poetry at a reception Friday, Jan. 24 from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

The exhibit will feature poetry that the fellows wrote during the program last summer. A photograph of an object that each fellow chose from the collection at the Ancient Near Eastern Art department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will complement their poetry, said Brice Nordquist, an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric and director of graduate studies at SU.

Nordquist said that one of the goals of the fellowship was to create a space for resettled refugee youth to tell their life stories in their own way.

“A lot of representation of refugees and immigrants are primarily about trauma and violence and displacement,” Nordquist said. “And all of that is real and important and a part of these individuals’ lives. At the same time, they have rich and varied lives and deep cultural heritages that are very rich and complex.”

Nordquist began his journey with the fellowship when he met Ahmed Badr through his work with the North Side Learning Center in Syracuse. They both developed the four-week program and curriculum, featuring lessons in storytelling, workshops and field trips to institutions like The Met in New York City.

Objects that included Abdi’s arrowhead, a button and a cup represented the more human aspects of the collection compared to the larger works, said Sarah Graff, the associate curator of the Ancient Near Eastern Art department at The Met.

“We couldn’t have chosen better if we had assigned them to them,” she said. “They chose things that were really indicative of the breadth of the collection.”

Graff said she has worked with Badr in the past, after meeting him at an art exhibit that he worked on. Badr then approached her about working with The Met for the Narratio Fellowship, which allowed the fellows to view the collection and perform in one of the galleries last fall.

She also added that the Ancient Near Eastern Art department is working to put excerpts from the fellows’ poems on temporary labels that will hang next to the displayed objects. The display will also have links for people to listen to an audio file of the fellows reading their poems in the spring.

“It’s hard to put into words, but it really does bring in new life to the collection to have young people engage with them, studying them from their own vantage points and adding their own layer of interpretation,” she said. “It really makes our collection more relevant, I would say, and increases our engagement.”

Abdi recites his poetry from memory, a skill that he brings to performances like his appearance at the United Nations in the fall. He speaks with strength and confidence, he said, and will bring that same energy to his performance at CFAC on Friday.

In addition to the performances, Badr will speak at the reception. He said the speech will follow a summary of the fellows’ work from the past couple months and provide a small preview into the future of the fellowship. Badr also hopes to expand the fellowship to more locations, like Richmond, Virginia.

However, the fellowship’s inaugural year has given Abdi a new perspective on storytelling.

“It’s like everybody has a story,” he said. “People may not share it. Sometimes they don’t know how to share it. But Narratio gave us that lift of this is the way to do it, and you’ve always had the way of doing it.”

Published on January 22, 2020 at 10:22 pm