Faiza Mohamed

Faiza Mohamed was born in Somalia in 1983. She talks about engaging with the Somali language and culture as part of her university course and why she thinks this is important.

Listen to Faiza (mp3, 404kb)

Transcript

'It's not really history, the course is culture, literature, and religion, and stuff like that. And right now I'm doing Somali as a language. So that’s a good thing for me: learning how to read and write my own mother tongue. 

'And, a lot, we do Somali literature, so it's really good, we get learn about the poetry and you know… None of us understand what it means or, you know, or what it says, but right now just doing it, and I just realised how these people, they don’t have to be literate, you know, in the sense of writing and reading and all this.

'They can just compose poetry in their head in two seconds, do you know what I'm saying? It's such an amazing thing. You just sit there. And I think we, a lot of us take that for granted you know. It’s been very empowering to me, yeah.

'It's just like, when I was doing this literature class, it’s just like you’d watch and he’d show us a video, and it’s just this guy walking his cattles and just singing to the cattle - you know, it just comes automatically to him, he didn’t compose this, like say I'm going to write this down and sing it  - no, he is just sitting there and just singing what comes into his mind at that moment in time, and it ends up being beautiful poetry. It’s just, you know, amazing.'

Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit