‘Art gives people a voice’

Jennifer Langer isn't sure why she was given a civic award by the borough of Barnet in February, although she understands it has something to do with services to the borough'.

She might be interested to know that, according to Barnet Council, she was given the award "for her campaign to promote the cause of inter-racial harmony between exiled people."

Ms Langer, who lives in Temple Fortune, established Exiled Writers Ink in 2000, while working as a refugee education co-ordinator at Kingsway College, Camden, and other north London colleges.

She said: "I was honoured and surprised to receive the award. There was a ceremony at Hendon Town Hall, but I already had theatre tickets and I'm afraid they took priority."

Of Exiled Writers Ink, she said: "It wasn't actually planned. It evolved from interest in my first anthology of literature by exiled writers. That gathered interest and I started to be contacted by organisations about workshops and talks.

"My aim was to take the experiences of refugees to the wider community, for them to gain an insight, not only into their pain and suffering, but also their culture, literature, history and politics. The refugee community was considered a problem, with the emphasis on practical issues like housing, rather than culture."

Since it was formed, Exiled Writers Ink has run 20 major projects across the UK, working with writers from all over the world, from Afghanistan and Bosnia to Sierra Leone.

In Barnet the organisation has run workshops at Barnet College, Grahame Park Way, Colindale; the Meritage Centre, Church End, Hendon; the Bull Theatre, High Street, Barnet; Barnet Multicultural Community Centre, Algernon Road, West Hendon; and the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute, High Road, East Finchley among other places.

Ms Langer sees the work of Exiled Writers Ink as twofold. She said: "The group is both for people who would not consider themselves writers and those who do. People come to write out their traumatic experiences and meet other writers at the poetry cafe or in workshops.

"At one level it's therapeutic, but on another level we are interested in promoting people as writers. Many were imprisoned because of their work in their home countries, or their work was censored.

"They are a hidden part of society in terms of literature."

One of the projects Ms Langer is most proud of in Barnet was a joint production with the Horn of Africa Women's Association in November 2005 called Breaking the Silence: Somali Women Speak Out.

She said: "The workshops working with Somali women were very successful. Many Somali women are on their own.

"In Somalia they would have a family support network but here they are plunged into a bureaucratic system of form-filling. They might be seen in their traditional dress but their voices aren't heard. So this was a way of taking their voices to the wider community. They were empowered through taking their experiences to the general public."

In workshops in Colindale the Somali women wrote stories and monologues about their lives.

These led to a theatrical production in which some of the women performed their own work; those who did not speak English had their work translated and performed by actors.

The production was then performed at the Soho Theatre and Writers' Centre, central London, and the Hampstead Theatre Studio Space in Swiss Cottage, before touring to St Albans, Cambridge, Birmingham and Oxford, as well as the artsdepot, Tally Ho Corner, North Finchley.

But Ms Langer thinks that the arts have a long way to go in Barnet.

She said: "Barnet used to be a cultural desert, and in some ways it still is - if you compare it to somewhere like Camden, for example. Arts activity in the borough is still very concentrated on the artsdepot. But it's not necessary to have large performance spaces. People can work in cafes and use empty shops for showing films and hosting discussions.

"A lot of arts activity in the borough is also focused around faith groups, but doesn't seem to be out there for the general public."

Some of Exiled Writers Ink's work in Barnet has been funded in recognition of the fact that the level of arts activity in outer London boroughs is low.

In 2000/02 the Association of London Goverment gave the organisation funding for a series of workshops called Voices in a Strange City on the condition that they took place in outer London boroughs, Barnet was one of the boroughs chosen to work in, along with Haringey and Ealing.

Ms Langer said: "I'd like to see more drop-in centres which could include all sorts of activites, cross-cultural activities bringing communities together, like our project, Across the Divide, bringing Jewish Israeli and Muslim Palestinian writers to gain insight into one another - not necessarily to share the same views, but to become more aware of the range and complexity of discourse and thought and consciousness."

Remembering a set of workshops that took place with refugee students at Barnet College to mark Refugee Week in June last year, Ms Langer describes one of the ways in which she got the students involved: "I brought a box along with various things in it, for example a stone from Auschwitz which I picked up when I was there, and a photograph of two little girls who would have been my cousins, who perished in the Holocaust. The students talked in small groups about what they would put in their own box of memories."

Ms Langer said it may be the power of these memories that make her so eager to work with refugee writers.

She added: "At a deeper level maybe I started Exiled Writers Ink because I'm the daughter of refugees.

"My parents were both the only survivors of their families - they both escaped from Germany in 1939.

"When parents are refugees they don't necessarily talk about it. You get fragments which you then have to piece together."

A new anthology of literature by contemporary Jewish exiled writers, edited by Ms Langer, called If Salt Has Memory, is released later this year, published by Five Leaves. Exiled Writers Ink also publishes a literary magazine, Exiled Ink, biannually.

For more information go to www.exiledwriters.co.uk, call 020 8458 1910 or email jennifer@exiledwriters.fsnet.

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