High school junior and Afghan immigrant Sobia Abed
High school junior Sobia Abed has been through more in her 18 years than most people will endure in a lifetime. Just over a year ago, she was walking home after a biology midterm when six trucks of armed Taliban militia blocked her path. “Every negative emotion filled my mind,” Abed recalls. “If I ran, I might get shot. If I stayed, they might take me. Standing there in my school uniform, I represented what they hate: a female getting an education.”
Abed made it home safely that day, but she and her family lived the next few weeks in terror, as they watched the Taliban take over their country. They destroyed their cell phones so they couldn’t be tracked and frantically planned a way out of Afghanistan. After several failed attempts and dangerous close calls, finally, on August 29, 2021, they found refuge with the U.S. Marines. Abed’s family boarded a U.S. military plane from Kabul International Airport that brought them to military camps in Bahrain and Germany before temporary housing at Virginia’s Fort Pickett.
“I am so grateful when I look back and see myself at this time last year — I was so hopeless,” she says.
Today, Abed is settled with her family in their own house in Henrico County, where she works and attends school. In May, she was selected as part of the Narratio Fellowship, an annual leadership program for refugee youth. Adopting the Latin word meaning narrative, Narratio encourages students like Abed to share their personal stories through the arts. The program was co-founded by 23-year-old poet and author Ahmed Badr and Syracuse University professor Brice Nordquist. Badr and his family came to the U.S. in 2008 through the United Nations refugee resettlement program.
“Our fellowship focuses on the creative power of refugee youth,” Badr says. “We want to help fellows express themselves and engage with the fullest extent of their stories, their hopes and dreams, and not just their tragedies.”
Badr has run workshops for refugee youth all over the world and is the author of “While the Earth Sleeps We Travel: Stories, Poetry, and Art from Young Refugees Around the World.” While recording a podcast for VPM, Virginia’s home for public media, Badr met Elissa Milanowski from the Virginia Office for New Americans, who ended up playing a key role in bringing the fellowship to Richmond. With help from VPM, ReEstablish Richmond and Commonwealth Catholic Charities, Narratio launched its inaugural Richmond class this year. The 2022 class of Narratio Fellows includes students ranging from ages 14-22 and from five countries.
Narratio Fellowship artist-in-residence Alfonso Pérez Acosta
Richmond resident and Colombia native Alfonso Pérez Acosta serves as the Narratio Fellowship artist-in-residence this year. Known for his powerful drawings and murals, Acosta is teaching the fellows far more than technical art skills.
“My first goal was to create a space of acceptance and healing so the fellows feel safe enough to share,” Acosta says. “We want to give them a sense of belonging, a sense of place. They are dealing with trauma, displacement and major transitions on top of just being a teenager and figuring out where they fit in.”
While the fellows will participate in workshops throughout the year, they have already completed a summer intensive at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and held their first art show at The Anderson gallery at VCU. Acosta says choosing significant locations for the students to work gives them a sense of importance and a connection to the local culture. The fellows will continue to develop, create and exhibit their art in Richmond over the next nine months and will even get the chance to showcase their work in New York — possibly at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“All the fellows have had some kind of epiphany so far,” Acosta says. “Seeing the role art plays is amazing — whether being right in the middle of a difficult moment or in a difficult place in life. These are not easy stories to tell, but at the same time they are miraculous stories. Their narratives are an important part of themselves that they need to explore.”
Having peers around who have been through similar circumstances has also been crucial to the creative process.
“Ahmed and Alfonzo have been really great at making us feel comfortable so fast,” Abed says. “We’ve created bonds with one another in a short period of time. This fellowship is one of the best things to happen to me.”
The students’ art varies in style, theme and skill. Pieces don’t just depict the difficult times but are a reflection of hope and resilience, from happy childhood memories back home to emotions of profound relief to be in America.
Abed has loved what the program has done for her, not only as an artist but as a person.
“I did art before but only for myself,” she says. “Now I have the opportunity to tell my story through art and share that with other people. The more I tell my story, the easier it gets. I’ve learned to express any kind of feeling through art without having to say or write a thing.”
A recent piece of Abed’s is different from her usual black-and-white drawings. On this particular canvas, she’s painted a butterfly in flight. On one side, the veins on the butterfly’s wing morph into branches that burst with pink and purple blossoms.
“I’m finding myself using more and more color,” she says, “and butterflies are my new favorite thing to paint because they signify freedom.”
Abed says that freedom is not common back home in Afghanistan, but here in America, it’s her constant muse.
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