Q&A with Ifrah Mansour: Art Heals
David Joles | Star Tribune
It was pouring rain on the day I had the interview for this post scheduled. As a new homeowner, I’d just discovered that pouring rain means water in my basement thanks to leaking gutter joints. (I promise I’ll try not to write things like “leaking gutter joints” on this blog ever again… although, I’m sure there’s a creative process metaphor there.) Fixable, but since it wasn’t fixed yet, I was running outside every 10 minutes to carry buckets of rainwater out of my yard. I was frazzled, to say the least, and feeling generally anti-water.
Cue Ifrah Mansour, who called in to our Zoom interview from a riverbank under a bridge, rain falling around her. She wanted to do the interview outside where she could be near the water and the ducks. This is just one glimpse at how beautiful of a person and artist Ifrah is. She has a way of pulling you into the present and making you listen to it, appreciate it, and find joy in it.
Ifrah Mansour is a Somali refugee multimedia artist in the Twin Cities. Recently named a 2021-2022 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Ifrah’s artistic activities include playwriting, acting, puppets, installations, and so much more. Her play How to Have Fun in a Civil War, which explores the Somali Civil War from a child’s perspective, premiered at the Guthrie Theater in 2018 and has had dozens of performances since then. Her multimedia piece “Can I Touch It?”, about the experiences of Muslim women and girls whose hijabs are touched without permission, was exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and her installation “My Aqal, Banned and Blessed” premiered at the Queens Museum in New York. “I am a Refugee,” a powerful spoken word visual poem, was part of the PBS Short Film Festival. Ifrah has been featured in the BBC, VICE, OkayAfrica, Middle East Eye, Minnesota Public Radio, and more.
While the rain poured down—into my buckets and Ifrah’s river—we talked about Ifrah’s many incredible creative endeavors, including how she got her artistic start: dropping out of college after she saw a Black artist on stage and thinking to herself, “I want to do that—but I don’t know what that is.” She then went to an open mic night and brainstormed with the audience about what kind of artist she could be. “I can’t believe I did that,” she told me, laughing. As it turned out, Ifrah has a gift for an ever-expanding variety of mediums—which is essential for an artist with an important story to tell.
Q&A with Ifrah Mansour, multimedia artist
Lindsay Marcy Photography
Q: How do you identify as an artist? Do you wake up some days and think “I’m a playwright today” or “I’m a painter today,” or do those feel like part of one artistic identity?
A: Every day’s a different artistry day. I have numerous babies, which is how I see all of my various artistic skills. Some days I think, “Today I want to nurture my amateur filmmaking baby.” Or, “Today I want to work on my puppetry baby.” Poetry is kind of my snob baby, but I love writing. I just love mushing things together. I call myself an opportunist medium artist because I know there are so many ways to tell a story and so many ways to pull an audience in.
Q: What inspires your ideas?
A: My inspiration comes from my most traumatic story. I used to feel like I couldn’t even approach that story because of how painful it was, and how rich and alive it was. But in order for me to approach that story and tell it in the most honest way, I had to use multiple mediums. And that story is the story in How to Have Fun in a Civil War, which details how children live through a civil war, how children make sense of traumatic times, how children make sense of hate—and how fitting it is right now that children are making sense of the hate that Asian Americans are facing. Children are making sense of the gun violence African Americans are facing. Children are making sense of what’s happening in Gaza. Violence is a horrible, vicious devil, and it requires multiple artistic mediums to speak of it, to make sense of it, and to inspire people to do something about it.
Q: When you have a creative idea, do you know right away which medium the idea is for?
A: There’s this weird comedy contest that happens in my mind. I’ll think of a line of text, or a visual will come, and then all of my art genre babies line up. The film baby is like, “Well, I can totally do this,” and then the puppetry baby’s like, “You know, I’m gonna’ need time, but I think I can handle this poem.” Being a multimedia artist is a curse as much as a blessing. A lot of artists are discovering new mediums because of the coronavirus. I’ve been getting into painting. I’ve been making scrolls that use text and you have to wait to see the next text so it’s revealed art. I have a moon that is scroll art. I just made a lantern memorial in honor of George Floyd. And then an eye and a teardrop in honor of what was happening to us all of 2020—the necessary uprisings, all of that.
Q: Your poem “I am a Refugee” is so beautiful. What was the process of writing it like?
A: I mentioned my different artistic babies earlier. I always felt like I stayed away from the poetry baby because it felt like, “Oh, there are so many beautiful Somali poets and that’s other people’s skills, not your skills—do everything else that’s not poetry!” So “I am a Refugee” definitely percolated and took a long time to come out. It was after 2016, when the Trump administration started off with the travel ban. We saw that horrible separation of families, and the denial of folks seeking asylum, folks seeking safety. America’s constantly at war. Wars produce refugees and we don’t think of that. We just see somebody that’s different from us trying to get into our country and we think, “You can’t be here,” instead of thinking, “How is this person in this predicament in the first place?” The text of the poem is repetitive because the goal is to make every American think about how we are implicated in this. And also, where is our empathy level? If you allow neglect, if you allow injustice anywhere, then injustice happens to us. Right now, here in Minnesota, the most neglected people are children, veterans who went to these wars, Indigenous folks, people of color, elders. You don’t have to look far away at complete strangers. Look at your own community. Neglect breeds more neglect, and lack of empathy breeds more disconnect.
Q: You said in an interview with Middle East Eye that your work is often about how to heal from intergenerational trauma. How can art heal such deep wounds?
A: Intergenerational trauma is the untouchable story—if it’s not told, it dies. I think a lot about stories dying. I work with East African elders, and I’m inspired being around them and hearing the stories that just burst out of them. Sometimes the stories are extremely traumatic, but when they tell these stories, they don’t expect anything from it. As an artist there’s an expectation that’s like: “I just told you a story, you’d better change! Your empathy buckets should be filled to a higher level!” I just love those bursts of generosity, bursts of wisdom with no expectation. And I wonder about what happens when we suppress traumatic stories. Trauma lives through us. It moves and flows through us. And some of us will need a lifetime or multiple generations to unearth those traumas.
Q: So storytelling is a major factor in art that heals?
A: I come from a culture of oral story tradition. The Somali language was first written down in the 1970s—that’s such a baby! It makes you think of oral storytelling as even more important because this is how you literally pass down wisdom. This is how you literally pass your history to the next generation. But I always think, okay, how do we pass down the stories that come with so much trauma? I’ve done the play How to Have Fun in a Civil War close to 50 times, and we’ve always done a post-show discussion, which is nearly as long as the play. Stories just burst out of people because I’m intentional in how I tell my story. The play functions as an icebreaker for those who share the forced refugee migration stories, the untold multigenerational trauma stories, and those who see that our world is interconnected and that even if we don’t share lived experiences, we share this bigger identity of being human—and we’re supposed to be connected.
Q: Can you talk more about your work with the Aqal?
A: Yes! It’s my favorite skill. The Aqal is such an Indigenous, no-brainer environmental way of living. Imagine if you went camping and your camping gear was all from nature and there was a way to preserve it, and metal wasn’t needed. I imagine that and I’m just like, “All right, ancestors!” So, I’ve been trying to learn that myself because I grew up outside of my culture, outside of my country. I feel I’m American-ish because this is home, so I try to share that cultural appreciation while being in America. I use materials that are found here in Minnesota. The first Aqal we made was from harvested reed branches from the Mississippi River. The hut was built by elders the first time, and the second time it was built by Somali youth who are often shunned because they look too American. There’s this expectation that you must love what you come from. But if you aren’t breathed in it, if you aren’t taught—how do you love something you know nothing about? I like to sneak Somali education, Somali history, Somali knowledge into whatever art I’m doing. The Somali Museum has their own Aqal hut, and they brought every little piece from Somalia. It’s just so fresh, when you go inside you can smell the organic sources of the material and you instantly get transported to Somalia. It just fills my heart.
Q: When you’re performing, do you ever feel performance anxiety?
A: Oooh, yeah.
Q: How do you get into the right mental space?
A: I try to put myself with an audience that I like. I like kid audiences. They’re my favorite. And as a performer, I get to leave this body. I’m not this secretly introverted thirty-something-year-old who just wants to talk to ducks all day if she could. I become an annoying seven-year-old who picks her nose and who has a hard time respecting her mama. I lean into the characters that I embody. But now I’m doing more community artwork where I’m myself. With the Aqal stage—where I built the Aqal with these beautiful young Somalis and other East Africans—I felt that even though I wasn’t performing, I was making space, interacting, providing a calming energy to people who may not always receive that. I had to emotionally get myself ready for those days. It makes you wonder what therapists do before your session. Do they do jumping jacks? “Oh, Ifrah’s coming!” I’m going to Google that. Because in some ways, as artists, we become an emotional bowl for people. People come and they just pour their emotions onto you, and you hold their emotions. Sometimes you validate their emotions, sometimes you educate if their emotions need to be redirected.
Q: Do you have any pre-performance rituals to help you prepare for that?
A: I decrease my social interactions those days. There’s a lot of jumping jacks. There’s a lot of self-bribing. I give myself everything I like, which happens to be fruit, almond milk, and carrot juice—I drink more carrot juice than the poor rabbits! So, self-bribing works for artist prep. So does calling a friend who butters you up. Artists are so generous, and we often aren’t valued in ways that you’re supposed to value people, whether with money or recognition. You have to do those things for yourself or ask your loved ones to do them for you. I jokingly said to a friend, “Today I was strapped on my bed the whole day because my back was killing me, and now I have to do a show for little kids. If you come, you must bring me flowers that are taller than my head.” And she did! It’s like, okay, you know what? Let’s ask people to love us back. Let’s tell people what we want from them. It should be okay to ask for what we want.
If you do just one thing today, listen to Ifrah’s beautiful poem, “I am a Refugee.”
In Ifrah’s “If Journalists Are Cheetahs, Artists Are Turtles” for the Walker Art Center, she writes: “Art gives us strength-based metaphors to not only understand our world but to care for one another.”
Want to support or learn more about Somali culture? Check out The Somali Museum of Minnesota, which is home to the first Aqal to be built here in Minnesota.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.