Tales of refugees told at UN event
WEDNESDAY, February 21, is the United Nations International Mother Language Day.
It is being celebrated in our borough by Rochdale Literature and Ideas Festival in partnership with Rochdale Pioneers Museum through Refugee Tales.
At this event, three award-winning contributors, Ian Duhig, David Herd and Anna Pincus, will be reading from Refugee Tales II as part of Manchester’s UNESCO City of Literature series of events.
The books, Refugee Tales and Refugee Tales II, are not fiction, nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe’s new underclass – its refugees.
Poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of being refugees.
Refugee Tales II, the focus of this event, is modelled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained.
Written by top authors, in collaboration with refugees, these stories include such as:
“Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country, hiding in the back of a freezer lorry.”
“After years of travelling and losing almost everything – his country, his children, his wife, his farm – an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger’s home.”
“A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system.”
The UN International Mother Language Day has been observed every year since February 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
More than 50 per cent of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken in the world, due to globalization processes, are increasingly under threat or disappearing altogether.
When languages fade, so does the world’s rich tapestry of cultural diversity. A total of 96pc of these languages are spoken by a mere 4pc of the world’s population. Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given pride of place in education systems and the public domain and less than 100 are used in the digital world.
Refugee Tales is on Wednesday, February 21, from 5.30pm to 6.30pm at Rochdale Pioneers Museum, 31 Toad Lane, Rochdale. Entry costs £3.50, including refreshments.