I was sitting in a boisterous café when I first read Mahmoud Khalil’s letter to his newborn son. Someone had left an empty stroller by the window, rocking slightly in the draft. I thought about the detail for longer than I should have. Khalil wrote those words while listening to his wife work over a crackling phone line in a concrete room in Louisiana with seventy other men. He was unable to hold the infant. The adhan could not be whispered into his ear. Since writing was the only thing the guards could not seize, he still gave him the name Deen and wrote him a letter.
As you read it, you get the impression that the letter is doing something more ancient than politics or journalism. It is evidence. Additionally, testimony frequently comes through art when the body is kept apart from the people it loves. A dad writes. A mother sings. A kid sketches.
I keep going back to a project that was run for years out of a small counseling center in Johannesburg, where children who had been displaced—many of them from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—made what their facilitators called artbooks. Paint, crayon, fabric scraps, and mixed media. A fat man with a thin voice, a store close to a child’s home, and the cool pleasure of a strawberry Kingsley on a hot day were all described in one book. The entry is that. That’s the entire first page. It’s the kind of information that no policy paper would consider documenting, but it has greater significance than the majority of them.
Maybe that’s the point. For years, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center has been attempting to measure the impact of displacement on mental health, and the data it has collected from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia is sobering. In Kenya and Ethiopia, more than half of the displaced people surveyed said they felt more nervous, depressed, and anxious than they had before being uprooted. Teachers in Ethiopian camps reported students who had witnessed fathers killed in front of them fainting during exams, a type of grief that is unresponsive to a clipboard.
It makes sense that aid workers prioritize the things that make the most noise: food, water, and shelter. When it comes to mental health, it usually shows up late, if at all. There are rarely enough professionals in low-income host areas to meet the needs, and even when they do, the consultation room frequently lacks the vocabulary for what these kids have witnessed. This may be the reason why a crayon or a piece of paper folded into a book can accomplish tasks that a clinic is unable to.
Something similar was discovered by a researcher in Kashmir. In a study conducted in Myanmar, students from areas affected by conflict were asked to describe what they were unable to say. Not all of the drawings were depressing. A mother crossing a street in Johannesburg with her child, a curtain blowing in a doorway, or a garden someone had planted before they had to flee were all definitely ordinary. Pencil-drawn small victories.
It’s difficult to ignore the pattern. To hide his eyes from the other prisoners, a father in Louisiana writes in the dark. A young child in Mogadishu is disturbed by the unfamiliar sounds of the city. An adolescent in Kashmir is painting a window. Everyone is using whatever tool at their disposal to fight absence. Khalil referred to his loss as “one drop in a sea of sorrow.” Perhaps the only way that the sea is mapped at all is through the art books, letters, and drawings. Not yet, not by aid organizations, but by the individuals within it.
