Baladi News
After years of civil war and millions of people fleeing Syria, in a small Berlin neighbourhood lies a deep desire that one day they will return home, and it's coming from a clutch of Syrian women who have found solace in singing away their pain.
As the ladies sing, one woman stays resolute throughout. Only the avid listener can hear the wistful longing for the old days, the unwillingness to compare life in Syria to life in Berlin.
"At night sometimes I feel like my heart is tearing apart, I don't know why," she says.
But she does understand that it's about Syria, the memories of the streets of Damascus, the smells that wafted through the air of her old town, her old neighbours.
For a while after the start of the civil war in Syria, Raja Banout didn't wander far. She first moved to Dubai, then to Turkey, in the hope that the strife would end soon and she could return.
But that was not to be.
Raja is the founder of the Haneen, a choir of Syrian women, who fled their home and now live in Berlin. In English, 'Haneen' means nostalgia.
"In Syria, we always wanted to go to doctors who graduated in Germany and wanted everything that was imported, in Berlin, we want everything Syrian," says Raja.
Haneen, started as a forum in the Turkish city of Gaziantep in 2015. It described itself as:
"The Forum, is a group of forcibly displaced Syrian women, who have decided to face the pain and suffering of war with intellectual and cultural empowerment. The project aims to provide its participants with support as well as preserve the traditional Syrian song heritage..... The project helps to connect its members with their homeland, while in exile, with the hope that this bond will create a safe space."
As part of her choir, nearly a hundred women have come and gone, but a solid fifteen hang around. Among them there is a woman whose husband disappeared in Syria, no one knows where he is, and another whose son was tortured to death by the Assad regime.
Raja didn't have to do this, she didn't mean to set up a forum for women of war. With no homeland herself, she was simply eager to become a champion for others.
In doing so, she became an accidental icon of empowerment for Syrian women.
"In Syria, they say that when women reach the age of 50, she should just sit at home and not do anything," she says at 63. "I wanted to change that, why not do anything? I am also a person, I want to do things, why just sit at home. So I would always say to people let's get together, eat good food, laugh, sing and even start businesses," she hopes.
Source: TRT World.