By co-author Valerie Sinason
One year ago, with a committed Books Beyond Words team, we brought out A Refugee’s Story. Little did we realise more of the world would be on the move from trauma, dispossession, exile than at any other time.
The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as: “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”
A refugee is someone facing loss at the deepest level, losing everything that was known and familiar, losing home, work, sights, smells, loved ones only to face too often further fear of death, racism, poverty, unknown language. At Books Beyond Words we are focussed on art telling a story so that children and adults with a learning disability and/or another language can have access to feeling they are seen and understood.
Having been involved with Professor Hollins since the beginning of Books beyond Words, I was determined that this subject should be covered. As well as realising clinically that refugees with a learning disability had even more to bear, I had a personal reason.
At the age of 75 I was able to properly realise that all my grandparents had been refugees from Russia and Ukraine and that my maternal grandmother, my loved Nanna, who lived with us until she died, had a mild disability through trauma. With Books Beyond Words you provide a possible story line and it is transformed by the knowledge of different team members and then the artist makes our knowledge become visible. We trial it with different people, alter story and art and then it is ready, shaped like a beautiful sculpture by all who have been involved in it.
And a woman in Kiev, working with adults with a learning disability right now, told me she had used it and it helped. I have the chance to thank my brave grandparents for making it to safety, thank the UK for receiving them and thank Sheila and books Beyond Words for understanding.