In Flux
Toni Faleh
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Toni saw snow fall in Ontario because bombs fell in Kuwait. Two weeks after he was born Iraq invaded his home country, causing his family to flee until they ultimately arrived in Canada. It would be years before he fully understood the effect that trauma had on his family, and how ultimately healing without the support of others caused damage too. Now a resident of Victoria, listen to his interview to hear him describe the importance of community, and how having an open mind changed his life.
Participant Reflections
In Flux
Toni Faleh
Each workshop produces a creative participant reflection – a personal take away from the story they just heard – that is voluntarily shared with the wider community.
We believe that personal narratives have the power to connect individuals across socioeconomic boundaries, and that the rich creative ability of our community is the most effective tool we can wield against the stigma that prevents necessary social change.
Featured Artist
In Flux
Toni Faleh
Nicole Neidhart
Featured Student
In Flux
Toni Faleh
Kaia Bryce
Community Ally
In Flux
Toni Faleh
Annabel Howard - Writer and Sessional Instructor at the University of Victoria
The thing that impacted me most when I listened to the speaker address our group was the extraordinary fortitude he’s shown in the face of adversity. He brought a generosity and a centredness to his talk that was very inspiring.
All the events that negatively impacted the speaker’s life were beyond his control. They could have happened to anybody. The speaker was born stateless, spent the early years of his life exposed to the trauma of war, and endured a significant head injury in early adulthood. It is sobering to realise that, though I do not condone (and I did not think I believed) the narrative that paints homelessness and vulnerability as the fault of the individual, the sheer magnitude of the events the speaker described still came as a surprise. On some level this surprise indicates how deeply embedded the narrative of individual responsibility is in modern thinking. The need here is not only to empower individuals to tell their stories but, more broadly, to shift the narrative around homelessness and vulnerability. The Existence Project is beginning this shift one story at a time. Persuading people to tell their stories – giving them a voice – is the first step. Finding a platform to give these stories a broader audience would be, in my mind, the logical next step to expand the reach of the project to the types of people who woouldn’t ever come to a workshop.
Besides the nature of the story itself, two other things that stuck out to me were very positive. The first was the speaker’s experience of immigration to Canada. His family immigrated from Kuwait and he perceived this, unequivocally, as a good thing. Canada has provided a place that he can call home. There is a lesson here that feels especially relevant in the face of the mass migration and xenophobia that’s so rampant in 2018. The second thing was the extent to which the speaker was able to rely on the support of his family for his recovery. Not everyone can rely on family, but everybody does need support. I don’t know how this kind of support can be established on a broad scale, but Anawim House and the workshop itself seem like good places to start.
In terms of playing a personal role in the future, I feel like it is my responsibility to make sure that people know about stories like this – both the negative and the positive aspects. I have been shocked, since I started to discuss The Existence Project and what I heard at the workshop, how many people (even – perhaps especially – those who campaign for greater societal equality) who would rather look away when stories edge too close to the real and the personal. As a professional writer and a teacher of young writers, I have an opportunity to draw attention to how important these stories are, both for vulnerable individuals to tell, but also for those of us who are in the position to offer support and act for change in the wider community to listen and to acknowledge.