I’m Ifrah, Ifrah Mansour. I am considered a multimedia performance artist. That’s just a fancy way of saying I like to tell stories often on stage, in as many art forms as possible. I’m specifically focused on the black Muslim experience, which is my experience. I just love that this photographer chose to do a longevity project about one particular refugee and her growth. Just because of my personal interest in exploring the refugee migration from a kid’s vantage point.
When we finally came to America, I was 10. Like our process took two years, but I left Somalia when I was six. 

As much as the photos are not so much revealing about her context and her complexity, I feel drawn to the photo. Like I, I wanna, I wanna know what her favorite toy is when she is young and she’s at the refugee camp. I wanna know if she chose this haircut. I’m just really curious about what she’s thinking. How much does she understand the world that she’s handed? Like I tell people that I didn’t choose to leave Somalia. My parents made that choice for me because as a kid you don’t understand the world you’re in and how unsafe it is. 

I’m curious if this girl had a moment of like wanting to go back home. Like my pull to Somalia was my grandmother lived there and I constantly kept saying, let’s go back to grandma. She has my chicken pets. Like let’s, let’s just go back to grandma. So I’m just really curious about the everyday annoyance that this girl felt in the refugee camp or what was her journey like.
My family were blessed to live in this, in South Somalia. And unfortunately that was sort of the battleground of Somalia’s civil war. A civil war would have as unsafe zone and the rest of the country is experiencing some level of peace much like Syria. Because the refugee camp was really close to where my family lived my family went back to our home twice. Unfortunately, the last straw, my grandmother lost her farm and we were just like, “Okay, now we just have to like follow through within like hope that we get resettled elsewhere.”
That endless limbo waiting and which I think adult refugees could attest a bit more. The idea of just knowing that you’re in a limbo. You’re not part of anyone’s state. You are somewhat in a very nice looking cage. These are concepts that I’m exploring as an adult, but as a young kid, you’re like, “I don’t have to go to school today. The teacher’s not even there.” Having so much free time as a child ’cause the adults are really busy with these heavy emotional “what ifs.” That you are really left alone and I just remember just playing all these games, just being free from adults.

I’m Ifrah, Ifrah Mansour. I am considered a multimedia performance artist. My family didn’t have time to fill up a luggage, nor did we think we were leaving forever. We thought we were going to go to the nearest safe city. In fact, we were going to visit our relative. We were like, “This war thing, it’s going to die down in 24 hours. Let us just leave the capital.” My family left all their passports, all of our family photos, because we literally thought we were going to come back the next day. It was going to die down.

The hair coming out of it, it just made me think about all the people that have been lost in the journey. Oftentimes, with refugees, what you see is what they brought, and what they didn’t bring. And I think there’s this materialistic approach of exploring refugees, but a lot of refugees don’t have that privilege. What you brought is, if you were lucky, your loved ones. Internally, you brought your wounds, and that’s what I would like to explore within my work. We all brought our wounds. If we don’t intentionally deal with it at some point, when we finally think that we’re safe enough, let’s, let’s unpack those wounds. Let’s name them, so we don’t continue on the unchecked, and unrecognized generational trauma.