Rapper refugees making themselves heard in Oz

You don’t often see a hip-hop group rapping streetwise lyrics while seated on desk chairs. But in a cramped office in Flinders Lane, members of the band Westridaz are rehearsing. Manila folders containing handwritten lyrics are spread on a coffee table. A backing track plays on a small stereo.

 

All four of the band’s members fled the civil war in Liberia, eventually finding refuge in Australia. Koolness and Ad are brothers who spent four years living in Guinea. F2, a young woman with an effortlessly soulful voice, came here from Nigeria.

 

Morris B, who’s wearing a canary yellow cap and yellow high-top sneakers, swivels gently in his chair as he raps a verse from their song Something For the Ridaz: “Yes am a refugee wit lot of keys/I wonder when will my enemies let me be/am jus a boy wit a dream of fantasy/don’t listen to dem rumours cos am black is a crime?”

 

It’s a laconic performance, befitting the surroundings, but the song is funky and compelling. Watching on, with arms folded across his chest like a proud but stern dad, is Ramesh Fernandez, founder and chief of the non-profit organisation RISE. An advocacy and support group for refugees, former detainees and survivors of war, RISE bills itself as the first such group in Australiato be run entirely by refugees.

 

A thin, intense, energetic man, Fernandez was locked up from 2001 to 2004 in five different detention centres after fleeing the Sri Lankan civil war by boat.

 

He started RISE last year, in the RMIT library. For six months, he held meetings there, while living on Centrelink benefits. (“I want to thank RMIT for not cancelling my computer password,” says the former electrical engineering student with a grin.) Then he found this office at Ross House, in Flinders Lane.

 

Fernandez and his management committee are, he says, volunteers. Money is tight, but RISE is already running a drop-in centre and offering discounted or free driving lessons, legal and welfare assistance and educational workshops for former detainees. It also runs a music program to help young people break into the industry. RMIT has donated studio space and Westridaz are recording an album.

 

RISE committee members include Nawal Ali, a Somali-born student of international studies; Sudanese-born Nicole Kuol, who is studying accounting; and Danielle Umbalo, a Congolese community leader who speaks four languages.

 

Their philosophy, says Fernandez, is that refugees should be shaping their own destiny. Too often, they are portrayed as marginalised victims. Yet they have a great deal to offer and their voices should be heard in policy debates. RISE’s volunteers, he says, can use their own experiences to help others negotiate life in a bewildering new land. Cultural sensitivity is also crucial. “To understand where people come from and not make them feel underestimated.”

 

Fernandez was inspired to start RISE while pacing the corridors of Baxter detention centre. He says the worst thing about being locked up is the sense of powerlessness and uncertainty. “We didn’t know what was going to happen to us - this is the most scary feeling. You don’t know where you will be tomorrow. Every day you are born and you die again … The catastrophe of detention is so huge, it’s hard to put into words.”

 

While in Baxter, Fernandez was befriended by a Melbourne family. The family, who are of Malaysian Tamil descent, drove from Doncasterto Port Augusta each month to visit him. He speaks fondly and unselfconsciously of his Australian mum, dad and three sisters, with whom he lived for two years after being released. This family’s extraordinary love, he says, gives him strength.

 

But most refugees do not have an Australian family. They may face enormous difficulties finding housing and jobs. And detention, says Fernandez, often makes people mentally ill. Freedom, when it comes, can be disorientating. “If you cage an animal and you let it suddenly be free, it doesn’t know what to do.”

 

Fernandez keeps in touch with the detainees on Christmas Island and advocates on their behalf. The federal government has begun deporting detained Tamil asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka, as it argues the threat there is easing. But Fernandez disputes that life there is safe for Tamils. “There are still around 100,000 refugees living in camps in Sri Lanka,” he says.

 

He endorses a report released this week that accused Victorian police of racially targeting young Africans and overusing their new stop-and-search powers. He says a lot of African youths complain that they are constantly being questioned and singled out for searches because of their skin colour. “There’s a lot of anger over these new rules.”

 

RISE has, he says, been given two years’ funding from the Victorian Multicultural Commission, which “pays our rent”. The Ian Potter Foundation is funding the driving lessons and the City of Melbourne has contributed to the music project. Still, it feels very much like a shoestring operation.

 

After working all week on unpaid RISE business, Fernandez spends his weekends designing and making clothes at The Social Studio, a sewing space in Collingwood where young refugees are trained (and paid) to find work in the fashion industry. Sewing, he says, “relaxes my mind”.

 

He freely describes himself as a “political animal”, but as he helps Westridaz prepare for a Harmony Day concert, Fernandez sounds more like an anxious band manager. He tells F2 to take the chewing gum out of her mouth. She, in turn, jokes that he knows their lyrics better than they do.

 

As Koolness and Morris B launch into a mellow track called Sorry Mama, in which they ruefully express their appreciation for their mothers, I find I’m almost in tears. “Sorry Mama, if I ever heard you cry,” sings Morris B. What, I wonder, have these mothers been through?

 

More songs flow. Then there’s a discussion about how this polished and deeply stylish bunch will get to their gig, which is in Ringwood. There’s only one car between them, and no money for a cab. “We can meet at Richmond station and all go together by train,” suggests Fernandez. – (The Age, Australia)