Home, Identity and the Politics of Belonging

About the animation

In Suad Aldarra’s award winning memoir I Don’t Want to Talk About Home: A Migrant’s Search for Belonging, the central question is not simply where home is, but who has the power to define belonging. The memoir follows Aldarra’s journey from Saudi Arabia to Syria, Egypt, the United States and ultimately Ireland, examining displacement, migration, gender, memory and the emotional costs of crossing borders. Yet it also implicitly raises another question: what role do documents, citizenship regimes and state bureaucracies play in determining whose stories count and whose mobility is permitted? In the book, we learn of the different paths Suad and her now husband Housam have to take because they each possess different documents, based on their birth and heritage. The inherent chance, the luck, good and bad, that emanates from these different circumstances raises questions about inequities that are inherent in laws around the world, but why do they exist? These were questions I was interested in exploring when I wrote the grant that created HIDDEN: The history of identity documentation in European nations, a network funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology organisation (CA21120).

The animation produced by Outburst Design, helps to fulfil the network’s mandate to find publicly accessible and educational ways to communicate the core research of this large group of researchers approaching the issues of identity documentation, citizenship and migration from different disciplines and personal vantage points. Many within the network have lived experience of migration, including the experience of statelessness and being a refugee and they brought this knowledge and experience to the different events and outputs HIDDEN has produced, and will continue to produce, as the last outputs are published.

Jennifer Redmond

Ideas for using the animation

The animation has been produced as an accessible way to understand the research that academics within the HIDDEN network are known for. As such, it can be enjoyed simply as a snapshot of the memoir, I Don’t Want to Talk About Home which addresses the war in Syria and the migration crisis it provoked as well as the strategies that can be used by migrants to flee war conditions and establish lives elsewhere. It can also be used as a teaching tool at different educational levels. This chimes with one of the aims of the HIDDEN network to provoke more educational conversations about the challenge of migration in Europe by using personal stories and examples to humanise this experience. This was also something that Suad Aldarra worked on in her academic research in the field of data science. Her MA thesis, which tackled the spreading issue of misinformation about refugees and migrants in the news, won several awards and international recognition and can be found here. The word clouds created by Aldarra in this work could be used to promote conversations linked to the animation and one or more of the 535 works noted in the HIDDEN bibliography. At primary or second level, the animation could be used as a resource for classes in the curriculum that engage in education about citizenship and the wider world. It could also be paired with exploring one of the other artistic pieces noted in the Art Repository on the HIDDEN site (there are over 100 examples to choose from). Finally, the animation could be used in analysing storytelling, biography and autobiography, engaging with it as a response to a longer written piece and analysing the ways it does and does not capture Aldarra’s wider story.

Credits

• AnimationOutburst Design
• Created byDr Jennifer Redmond, Chair of COST Action HIDDEN (CA21120)
• Based onI Don’t Want to Talk About Home by HIDDEN member Suad Aldarra (Penguin, 2022)
• FundingCOST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), funded by the European Union