​Leaving Turku, Finland, with a full heart. Such intense memories of this week co-facilitating songwriting, community-building and intercultural dialogue in Turku, Finland. Sponsored by the University of Helsinki and facilitated through the Finnish Red Cross, three facilitators, a lead organizer and myself worked for four days with seven participants from Angola, Iran/Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Venezuela and Finland, each with their own story of how they arrived in Turku, each with their own musical and poetic skills which, when combined with the skillsets of other songwriters in the group, created exquisite, vulnerable and completely unique songs reflective of their life experiences until this point.
 
There are so many stories that stick with me, each poignant and powerful. Fouad, a saz (double-coursed string instrument) player and anaesthetic nurse from the Kurdish portion of Syria now training to become a bus driver, writing and recording a song called “Connection” with a classically trained violinist from Caracas, Venezuela, Vanessa; they ways in which they accommodated one another as one played in an Arabic maqam (kurd and hijaz) on a saz and the other in an equally tempered scale on a classical violin, as they sought to literally connect and write a “bridge” in their song to span the diversity of their musical styles between the verse and the chorus. How Fouad, on the fourth day of the workshop, began to share his experiences growing up in Arab-dominated Syria, where he was disallowed from speaking his mother tongue in school or even in public places, and where even his own Kurdish city of Kobanî was renamed with an Arabic name (Ayn al-Arab) and how, for him, refusing to identify as Muslim since moving to Finland has become his own form of self-decolonization.

​And yet, the level of connection Fouad developed with other Arabic speakers in this group, including three Iraqi musicians, was profound. At one point, Raad, an ‘oud (lute) player and former Economics Professor, was searching for an ‘oud to play and write songs on, as he had sold his own ‘oud once his life in limbo began after two family members in Iraq were killed. And so, on day 3, Fouad turns up with an ‘oud in his hand, borrowed from a friend, and by day’s end Raad has purchased this ‘oud and restrung it (he is left-handed), allowing him and his beautiful wife Nora, a biologist and singer, to make the sweetest music all day I’ve ever heard, on the day after his seven-hour long immigration interview which will tell him if he is to become a permanent resident of Finland, or no.
 

​Songs and places are also linked in other ways. On this final day, as we all take our turns in the recording studio to record the four songs that have been written that week, I speak with Ahmed, a poet, journalist and translator from Mosul, Iraq, who comments on the sweet strangeness of hearing Raad and Nora’s Iraqi folk song from the 1950s being performed here in an ecumenical center in Turku, Finland. “They’re beautiful, but they don’t belong here. They are of that place [Iraq], but not this one.” He goes on to say that, when he hears Iraqi music in Finland, he immediately sees palm trees and everything else that, to him, is Mosul and Iraq before 2003 and the beginning of the war. But he also has to practice self-care, he tells me, and so, if he’s not able to go to that place emotionally, sometimes he needs to not be in earshot of certain songs; he has to listen selectively, and strategically, because place and songs can also be linked to trauma, and one needs to be able to choose to visit these emotional spaces. So for this cowritten song, he writes a song describing his spirit as a seagull no longer sutured to place, where he’s able to travel beyond geopolitical borders and the smallness of sectarian violence and where he insists on keeping a broader view. “You touch me like the wind/wiping away my trace on the sand/My spirit travels with the seagulls.”

​As I prepare to make my way from the land of the Northern Lights to a very different musical culture and climate on the Italian island of Sardinia, I am humbled by the work that songs—and telling our stories through songs—can do in building a sense of connectivity, community, and allowing people to speak their truest truths. As cofacilitator Naomi Sunderland put it, “songs have jobs,” and this, I think, is one of them.

Credits:

Initiator/Lead Organizer: Klisala Harrison (University of Helsinki)
Cofacilitator: Naomi Sunderland (Griffith University)
Cofacilitator: Kristina Jacobsen (University of New Mexico)
Local Arranger: Rosa Rantanen (Finnish Red Cross)

In-Kind Venue Facilitator: Jussi-Pekka Paija (Yränän kohtaamispaikka)

Funder: University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts (Musicology), Guest Researcher Program

In-kind sponsors: Finnish Red Cross, Åbo Rock Academy, Yränän kohtaamispaikka (Turku, Finland), Academy of Finland, Griffith University School of Human Services & Social Work, Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre at Griffith University, Aabo Rock Academy, Yränän Kohtaamispaikka.

25-28 June 2018, Turku, Finland
 

​After an intensive first time leading this songwriting retreat on Navajo Nation in 2017, my cofacilitator and I shared a lot of fear that there would be no way to replicate the level of depth and sharing that happened in the inaugural year of this retreat. How could we recreate the sense of safety, sharing and exquisite songs that had been written and shared (40 in total) in that first year, and how could we as facilitators bring the same degree of freshness and energy to a second year of cowrites with a brand-new group? And we were right: there was no way to replicate that. Rather, the second year’s group of participants (a brand-new group of ten songwriters with one returnee), from Navajo Nation, Denmark, Indiana, Colorado, New Mexico, California and beyond, brought their own unique voices, perspectives, vulnerabilities and desires, and went even deeper in their writing and level of engagement with this place known as Carson Mesa, or Tó Sikání in Navajo, Many Farms, Navajo Nation, than we could have anticipated or hoped for. Not the same, or better, but completely, and inalterably, different. To witness this was, indeed, a little slice of magic. It’s also about creating space and laying a platform for intercultural and intergenerational dialogue.
 
This year, for the first time, we had two high school participants, both from the central part of Navajo Nation. The level of hunger, engagement and truth put forth in the cowrites of these two young people, both of whom had never written a song before this retreat, became role models and beacons for the rest of the group of adult songwriters, ranging in age from twenty-two to fifty-five, teaching us to speak (or rearticulate) our own truths. The songs that emerged from these cowrites are exquisite: vulnerable and place-specific, they are windows into what it means to be a young person from a rural place speaking truth to power and laying plans for college, careers, navigating family relations and newfound senses of self. 

​Songwriter and Berklee College of Music professor Pat Pattison says “don’t let the facts get in the way of the truth.” From a songwriting perspective, I take this to mean to not let the details get in the way of the emotional authenticity of the story you are trying to convey in the song you write. But there’s another way to interpret this quote, which is to not let that fact that you’ve never written a song keep you from writing one anyway, and keep you from speaking your truth, loud, clear, and sung in your own newly found voice, when you do it. This is what these students offered to each of us, and role modeled in a most profound way.
 
As I write this on the Monday morning after the retreat, I remain humbled, deeply grateful, and experiencing the intense withdrawal symptoms one has after leaving a deeply connected group of humanity like the one created on Carson Mesa in this past week. It is one of the most profoundly connective and deeply humanizing experiences I know, and it reminds me as both songwriter and anthropologist why I write songs to begin with: to connect deeply with a small sliver of humanity, to open up broader avenues for intercultural and intergenerational understanding and communication, to heal and speak my own truth, and to break the isolation of my own daily routine by reminding myself there is, indeed, something bigger. And, to this end, we will not only hold a third retreat next May on Carson Mesa again (May 24-31 2019), but also one in Sardinia, Italy, in May of 2020. Ahéhee’, t’áá ano[tso, and e ci aggiorniamo, li!