Description
“The only difference between you and me is a passport.”
These are the heartfelt words of many migrants and refugees seeking freedom and safety. For many, a passport is simply a means to travel, but for millions of migrants and refugees, a passport represents freedom, the right to live and work in other places and a better way of life. It is the golden ticket they need to live, to really belong. Hear Our Stories is a collection of poetry and prose about despair, hope, sadness, gratitude, and a sense of relief told by those who journey to the UK looking for a better life – the opportunity to be themselves, to connect with relatives and families or to work and grow.
Imagine making a long journey around the world; each stage involves a stop-over, a delay. This anthology is divided into different chapters representing the many ‘stop-overs’ migrants face. Each stage of their journey is filled with fear and hope – constantly questioning if they will make it to their final destination. TogetherintheUK and Victorina Press bring together a collection of deeply personal lived experiences of migrants and refugees as they make their journey to a new life in the UK.
The Editors
About the Editors
Teresa Norman
This anthology feels to me like a culmination of so much of my working and academic life. In the 1980s, I studied English Literature at St. Andrews. I gained insight into how literature helps you live, through giving you insight. It also taught me how to create a structure that tells a story.
For over ten years, I have worked in diversity – this has made me aware of the importance of hearing different voices and creating a platform for those voices. This is what the anthology has done. I believe my talent to be
an unusual one, it is to facilitate the talent of others. I am proud of the creativity, quirkiness and literary quality of the authors in the book and that I have played a role in bringing them to publication.
Sinéad Mangan-Mc Hale
Working in the corporate world as both a writer and an editor, I communicate the pros and cons of energy, real estate, financial planning, and so many more diverse commercial products and services, but working on this anthology gave me the greatest joy. Volunteering with TogetherintheUK enables me to use my writing skills to share migrant and refugee stories to show that we all have the same hopes and dreams for ourselves and our families.
As an editor, my role is not to rewrite but rather to enhance the story; to bring an extra layer of depth to the stories the author is conveying. Against all my professional training, in this anthology, I have left much of the writing as the authors intended; with grammatical errors ignored as we, TogetherintheUK and Victorina Press, sought to share the stark honesty of the authors’ stories. To edit their words would have been to rewrite their experiences, to disguise their pain, sorrow, loneliness, hope, joy, or the discrimination they face. We want and need you, the reader, to hear their stories as they told them and lived them.
As a migrant myself, the stories resonated deeply with me. I did not experience a dangerous, abusive journey, but the sadness of leaving my family remains in my heart even after many years. We may never resolve the causes behind the rise of refugees and migrants, but we can always offer a smile and words of encouragement to those we meet.
Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes
The publishing world, artificially, divides books into fiction and non-fiction. But for me, all literary genres use strategies to express truths and realities of human, animal and environmental nature. The spider’s web which makes us co-evolve as we read and write has, since childhood, wrapped me with strong threads which have dressed my travels. In 2017 I embarked on a new cobbled path of books when I founded the publishing house Victorina Press, which is named after my mother. This new journey – like all others I have taken as a teacher, writer, and editor – is strongly rooted in Pachamama and in Chile, my motherland, where volcanoes throw ardent kisses to rivers, mountains, deserts, seas, and forests.
I am an academic, but I like that public space of loitering where I can unleash my creativity. I have been part of several creative writing groups because I like to read, write and ‘to memory’ in solidarity and accompanied, although I also give myself time to be alone with myself. This has resulted in several books of poetry and narrative. In my books of poetry entitled La Liberación de la Eva Desgarrada (1990) and Arena en la Garganta (2010) I try to face that grit that scrapes my throat and my voice when I tell in metaphors what happens through my body now, during and after the torture to which I was subjected in Chile in 1983.
Peter Hill –
Moving, sometimes amusing, immigrants relate the trials and joys of rebuilding their lives in Britain. The poetry, composed in an unfamiliar language, is a special delight, though you might be reduced to tears at times.
James –
A wonderful compilation of stories on migration. The structure is thematic and gives a window into the soul of migration.
Mem –
Beautifully written stories on migration – takes you into the depths of the migrant world. Hopes, fears and emotions are honestly revealed. Very thoughtful and yet just a tip of the iceberg.
Peter –
We all need to hear the stories and poems by migrants gathered in this powerful anthology. I found myself inspired, horrified, filled with compassion and simultaneously amazed by the resilience implicit in its many deeply personal stories. It provides an excellent counterbalance to the often polarised, objectifying dialogue around migration and opens the possibility of a more compassionate response to fellow human beings.
Johann –
I have really enjoyed reading the anthology and it really illustrates the value of learning through lived experiences. The stories were poignant and raw, individually telling a story of emotions, decisions and actions that are so profound in their consequences.
I salute the bravery of the families/authors in sharing their experiences with us, but then also to write about it in order to capture the knowledge for the future.
The editing was sensitively done and I especially loved the fact that the stories were published as they were written – no editorial correction of grammar etc.
I hope there will be further projects from the publishers and organisations who put this together.
Sonja Morgenstern –
A couple of these stories brought tears to my eyes, even though my own story also appears in it I wasn’t prepared for the mental impact some of the other accounts of migration had on me.