"We have to talk about the uncomfortable thing": refugee artists explore issues of identity and home

SBS Australia

20-06-2025

Listen to Australian and world news, and follow trending topics with SBS News Podcasts . "My childhood was an attempt to belong in a world that refuses to see me." This is the internationally renowned slam poet Huda Fadlelmawla, known as Huda the Goddess. She says the power of the spoken word is what she uses to advocate for refugees. "My job as a poet is to have a conversation with a strangers' soul and I'm at the most rawest part of your existence. And we in ourselves write the history that is felt, it might not be kept in a book but the way we make each other feel is eternal." Huda has her own refugee story. Fleeing Sudan as a five-year-old, Huda and her mother sought refuge in Cairo, enduring poverty there before arriving in Australia when she was 10. "I think poetry helped me make sense of the chaos, the displacement. Helped me make sense of my mother's struggle to live and her always being stuck in security and survival chasing. Poetry is the only thing that has enabled me to truly feel within myself." The award-winning poet focuses on improvised poetry, often at Black Ink, the Brisbane-based open mic venue she founded that showcases the talents of Black, First Nations and people of colour. She also has a mentorship platform for young women of colour to help them tell their stories. "The greatest gift that I have been able to pass to people on is that you are in charge of your own story, and even if you feel caged in it there is freedom because you hold the pen." Huda is also now the UNHCR-SBS Les Murray Award winner. The award is named after the iconic sports broadcaster and host of The World Game on SBS the late Les Murray who fled Hungary as a refugee in 1956. "This win for me is a win for my community it is an invitation for every young black woman out there that this is absolutely you. That everything that you see in me, every award that I've ever accomplished." Also on the spotlight for World Refugee Day is another form of art: photography, namely a work that's a recreation of the photographic portrait Three Women by acclaimed South Sudanese artist Atong Atem. It's currently placed in the heart of Sydney's CBD. "Because Martin Place is such a busy area, I hope that they take a second to look at the work, maybe read a little bit about it, see who it's sponsored by, and engage with the existence of refugees and displaced people, and, you know, maybe carry that with them." Ms Atem was born in Ethiopia and says her parents were born in Sudan at the time, before it was South Sudan. For the majority of her life she grew up in Australia, coming to the country in 1997 and settling on the New South Wales Central Coast before later moving to Melbourne. "We left on foot from Ethiopia to Kenya via Sudan. So we were also in Sudan, at the border of Sudan for a couple of years, before arriving at a refugee camp in Kakuma in Kenya, which is where we spent a couple of years again, until we were able to fill in the correct paperwork and receive refugee status and be declared kind of recipients of a humanitarian visa. And that's how we ended up in Australia." Atong says it was a challenge to pursue art as a refugee. "So you kind of, you know you do well enough to say, go into architecture, which is what I studied straight out of school. But you really want to go to art school, because you love art, and you want to be, you know, with the people that have like brightly coloured hair and piercings and all that fun stuff. So it took me pursuing what I thought I was meant to do out of a sense of duty, out of a sense of survivor's guilt, and all those complex kind of refugee traumas and then realising that I wasn't very good at it because I didn't love it. Then that kind of failure led to, well, I've got nothing else to lose. I may as well try the thing that I'm passionate about and see where it takes me." Her work explores migrant narratives, and the concepts of home and identity, as well as postcolonial practices. "A lot of my practice is about the impacts of colonialism, which I, you know, I directly have been impacted by colonialism through the civil wars of South Sudan. And, you know, my existence in Australia as a migrant is a ongoing, you know, part of that ongoing effect of colonialism. So it's really hard for me to kind of see history as something outside of myself. I'm a participant in it. I'm a descendant of it. I'm continuing it." She hopes to provide a more nuanced representation of refugees through her work. "Just by existing as someone who has A refugee background, as a former refugee, as a migrant, as a black woman, all of that stuff. And making work that isn't stereotypical, maybe making work that is questioning a lot of socially accepted kind of beliefs and ideas, making work that's even challenging my own things when it comes to this this sense of like survivors guilt, which a lot of former refugees and migrants have. Or challenging this notion of being, you know, an upstanding, quote unquote kind of member of society as a refugee." Rebecca Eckard is the Director of Policy at the Refugee Council of Australia. She has told SBS Cantonese these types of conversations are important, given Australia is set to welcome its one millionth refugee since the end of World War Two, between September and November this year. "You think about people from a smaller refugee background. They're again a smaller percentage of the overall Australian population. They've made huge contributions and they are core part of the fabric of our nation." Trudi Mitchell is the CEO at Australia for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "It's showing a vibrant approach to these refugee women, that they are more than their refugee story and that they're contributing so much to Australian society." Ms Atem hopes her art can inspire others like herself to pursue their passions, no matter their background. "I don't want to be the only. I think it's very lonely being, you know, the first or the only or the few. I hope that within my lifetime as an artist, I am surrounded by other South Sudanese artists that are doing even more amazing things than I've been able to accomplish, and that our conversations don't have to be about displacement and they don't have to be about the trauma and harm that we've experienced. I'm excited to see a future where you know, South Sudanese artists, migrant artists, refugee artists are as diverse in their expressions as they are in their experiences and their, you know, personalities." Huda Fadlelmawla says she hopes society can talk about refugees in a better way.
"And the fact that we are talking about them like they're numbers and figures, and a tragic story and the labelling is absolutely absurd. It is easy in this generation for feelings to be silenced and for stories to become something that is dismissed. But let this be an invitation to the world through art. That we have to talk about the uncomfortable thing and re-examine the way that we look at people."