Little Amal: 3.5 metre puppet of migrant girl passes through Yorkshire

Toni Stephenson on 1 November 2021

Little Amal, a 3.5-metre puppet of a Syrian child refugee, is making an 8,000-kilometre journey across Europe, via Yorkshire.

The puppet has been created by Handspring Puppet Company, the creators of the War Horse puppets, to represent the tens of thousands of displaced refugee children in need of assistance to rebuild their lives after leaving their war-torn countries.

Little Amal originated as a character in the play “The Jungle” created by Good Chance Theatre in 2015 in their temporary Dome theatre based in the refugee camp of the same name in Calais, France.

The Dome theatre became a cultural hub in the camp, offering a safe and creative space for residents, through programmes of workshops and weekly “Hope Shows” to showcase their work. The population of the camp hit over 8,000 migrants at its peak, before demolition in October 2016, when the Dome theatres moved to continue their work in Paris and London.

The character of Amal, which means “hope” in Arabic, is a 9-year-old displaced refugee searching for her mother and a better life. The project of her journey has been named “The Walk” by the theatre company undertaking it.

The puppet is operated by one person on stilts inside the torso moving the legs and head, and two people on either side operating the arms. 

The creators of Amal highlighted that she does not have a voice since she is traveling to countries that don’t speak the same language as her. However, the operators share one mind in embodying the character of Amal, making her a great non-verbal communicator and empathiser.

Following Amal on her walk is a festival of art directed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. 

Good Chance said: “The Walk is a celebration of migration and cultural diversity that will tell the story of the contributions made by refugees and immigrants. It represents the refugee story as one of potential, success, respect, hospitality and kindness.”

In each city Amal visits, local creatives, artists and communities have been invited to greet her. 

By live streaming events, Good Chance has offered the opportunity for us to invite Amal and the festivities into our homes.

The Walk began at the Syrian-Turkish border in July, and since then, Amal has travelled through 65 cities, towns and villages across Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, France before reaching the UK in October.

In addition to raising awareness, Good Chance wants to rewrite the narrative following migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

Nizar Zuabi said: “It is because the attention of the world is elsewhere right now that it is more important than ever to reignite the conversation about the refugee crisis and to change the narrative around it.

“Yes, refugees need food and blankets, but they also need dignity and a voice. The purpose of The Walk is to highlight the potential of the refugee, not just their dire circumstances. 

“Little Amal is 3.5 metres tall because we want the world to grow big enough to greet her. We want her to inspire us to think big and to act bigger.”

October 22nd saw Amal pass through London, exploring Shakespeare’s Globe, Somerset House and the South Bank Centre before being met by 4,000 people as she arrived in Yorkshire on October 29th, reaching Sheffield on a canal barge.

All this has been made possible by an international team of 17 puppeteers, videographers and technicians who have been operating Amal and recording the festivities across the continent, highlighting the sense of global community.

Amal completes her journey on November 3rd reaching her final stop in Manchester.

Image credit: BBC

Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? is Her Third Piece to Snapshot a Generation

Toni Stephenson on 14 October 2021

It has been 18 months since the screen adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People entranced audiences worldwide with the electric relationship between Marianne and Connell. One pandemic later, Sally releases her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?

Moving away from the students who previously featured in her novels, this book focusses on four characters in the 30s, fumbling their way through professional life. The two women are both in the literary industry. Alice is successful author whose two novels have recently shot her into the limelight, drawing parallels with Rooney herself. Alice’s best friend Eileen, on the other hand, is struggling to establish herself as the editor of a literary magazine. While Simon sails through life in a white-collar office job, Felix works shifts in a distribution centre. BWWAY? promises to expand on themes of class, gender and capitalism previously explored in Rooney’s novels and lead us on a journey to find beauty in a world which is dictated by a toxic relationship with profit.

During a rare Q & A at London’s Southbank Centre on publication day, Rooney gave insight into why she tackles these themes. She revealed that as a socialist novelist she doesn’t input her beliefs and values into her books to convince anyone that they are correct, rather she does it to open the floor to discuss them. When asked about how she writes in a way that Millennials and Gen Z resonate with, she jokingly admitted that she has no idea if readers will find the characters or situations relatable, as if her talent for capturing life so accurately is a pure gift.

There is no doubt that Rooney is a gifted writer, and her eloquence on the issues of shared rented housing, unsustainable consumer habits, and the hierarchical classification of different categories of labour were unmatched with anyone I had heard speak before. Rooney is also, of course, commended for her realistic depiction of intimate relationships. When asked ‘Sally, how do you write good sex?’ Rooney laughed and responded there is only a limited vocabulary she can use without cringing. The main point she shared was that every interaction between her characters happens because it drives the narrative and therefore, in every interaction there must be a shift in power. Unless something significantly affects a character when they go to the shop, the trip to the shop won’t be featured in the text. It is this, along with the exploration of the unknown and guessing what the other person is thinking, that Rooney credits for her success of capturing intimate relationships.

Rooney has been dubbed the quintessential millennial novelist, encapsulating the mood of a generation (or more accurately two) and uniquely representing their delights and their worries. She can touch on the seriousness of the climate crisis that we have little to no control over and in the next page have us chuckling at her witty account of mundane activities as relatable as using the ‘find and replace’ feature in a Microsoft Word document. As always, it is the love and friendships developed between the characters that deliver the beauty in Rooney’s novel. Beautiful World, Where Are You? has already received rave reviews from critics and has been hailed Rooney’s best work yet. If her previous novels are anything to go by, this one is certainly worth a read.

Image Credit Chris Boland / www.chrisboland.com

Hurricane Ida hits Louisiana on sixteenth anniversary of Katrina

Toni Stephenson on 4 September 2021

On August 29th, exactly 16 years after Category 3 Hurricane Katrina caused widespread devastation in the South-Eastern states of the USA, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana.

Ida is the ninth named storm of the current hurricane season, which spans from June to November. Hurricanes are prone to developing in the Atlantic at this time of year due to warm sea surface temperatures driving the conditions needed for tropical storms to form. Current rising temperature levels in the atmosphere and sea surface only serve to increase the likelihood of a catastrophic hurricane developing. Scientists report it is no coincidence that Hurricane Ida and last year’s Hurricane Laura are tied in second place as the most destructive Hurricane on record after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

LaToya Cantrell, the Mayor of New Orleans had ordered a mandatory evacuation for residents who live outside the levee flood barrier protection system, but the speed of the approaching hurricane made it impossible to impose a mandatory evacuation for the whole city. Furthermore, many of its inhabitants find evacuation too costly.

President Biden had visited Lake Charles, Louisiana in May, where he promised to improve emergency response facilities following hurricanes. While the National Guard were on stand-by, Mayor Cantrell urged residents to learn from the lessons of Katrina, where emergency responders were delayed by days because of the destruction to transport infrastructure, imploring people to check on their neighbours, friends, and family. “We are first responders, all of us, our neighbours, we’re all first responders,” Cantrell said.

Ida was given hurricane status just before it hit Cuba and intensified over the Gulf of Mexico reaching category 4 on the Saffir–Simpson scale before making landfall in Louisiana, with wind speeds peaking at 150 miles per hour (mph). Category 4 hurricanes see wind speeds between 130–156 mph and catastrophic damage to built-up areas including structural failure and flooding. Power outings across New Orleans left 1.1 million people in blackout and those who found evacuation too pricey reported they were not aware of the government provisions available to them. Two weeks later, 25% of New Orleans remain without power.

While the official death toll is currently 26, the indirect deaths resulting from Ida make this number a significant underestimation, with people having died from carbon monoxide poisoning following the use of power generators and other deaths having been catalysed by extreme heat during the outages.

While the South-Eastern states of the US begin their journey on yet another road to recovery, if the Biden administration wants to see a significant decrease in the human and economic costs of extreme weather events, climate scientists suggest they need to focus not only on emergency responses, but on significant long-term action to lessen the carbon emissions that will continue to accelerate the conditions that cause them.

Photograph: Scott Olson