Online project gives refugees a voice
Mediafugees helps migrants tell their stories and interpret new lives
MONTREAL— The creation story of Mediafugees, a new Montreal-based online magazine written about and by refugees, stretches quite appropriately across several borders.
Camille Teste, a journalist, and Nassim Sari, a social worker, are longtime friends from the French city of Marseille. In 2014, they travelled to Beirut, where they were touched by the plight of the millions of Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians and other migrants who have sought refuge in Lebanon.
Teste moved to Montreal a year ago.
She left behind a country torn apart by the political debate over immigration and entered one that was being hit by its own migratory influx, when thousands of Haitian nationals began crossing into Quebec from the United States in order to avoid deportation.
That is when they began putting together what they describe as an experimental media platform that aims to have migrants, refugees and asylum seekers tell their stories, discuss their issues and interpret their strange, new and sometimes frightening worlds all by themselves.
“I think the profession of journalism is one of the greatest in the world and absolutely necessary, especially today,” Teste said in an interview. “But letting people who are experiencing something speak about it with as little interference as possible seems to me to be a necessity.”
The project is still in its infancy. The Mediafugees website only went live last month. But the limited content provides a flavour of their vision.
A first-person story by a John Nyembo, a Congolese man who fled to Zambia and then Botswana after denouncing the army on international television, speaks of the isolation and loneliness after obtaining asylum in Canada in 2015.
It’s not only first-person journalism that the site is interested in publishing.
Teste gave the example of the decision to open Montreal’s Olympic Stadium last summer to temporarily house the thousands of asylum seekers that arrived in the country, fleeing the more restrictive immigration policies in the U.S.
“That could have been treated as a news article written by a refugee writer,” she said.
While newspapers have occasionally turned editions over to celebrities and activists such as Bono and Bill Gates, the French newspaper Libération turned its entire March 7, 2017, edition over to refugee writers, billing it as “France seen by those who don’t usually have a voice.”
The editorial input came from writers, journalists and artists from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and other countries that count desperate and endangered people among their national exports.
Sari said in an interview published last month in France that they realized there was a source of untapped talent because of the large numbers of journalists forced to flee their coun- tries due to war or persecution. Paris is home to the non-profit group Maison des journalistes, which is an actual14-room shelter for reporters who have fled persecution.
Teste said she has been unable to find any such resources in Canada, and other refugees are sometimes reluctant to come forward, either because they don’t want to re-live their trauma or have a distrust of the media.
“They’re so used to journalists coming and listening to their experience and transforming it into a sob story, and then never again having contact,” she said.
The initiative is largely a volunteer effort at the moment. Any money that has been scrounged or donated is being reserved to pay contributors, which Teste — a freelancer herself — said is a point of principle.
A proper funding envelope that might be used to pay writers, artists and, ideally, a staff member with their own personal experience as a refugee to help lead the project, is still on the horizon.
Teste said Mediafugees will be a success if it gives a voice and puts a face to the crisis and if the word “refugee” provokes empathy instead of feelings of anger and fear.
“They are exactly like you or I. They want their families to live in security, to know that they won’t be blown up by a bomb tomorrow, that their children aren’t at risk of sexual abuse,” she said. “They just want to build a family and be happy, like everyone else.”