Enhance Your Experience

Music, Reading & Resources

Opera Parallèle presents

Sophia’s Forest

Music by Lembit Beecher

Libretto by Hannah Moscovitch

Please enjoy these resources to enhance your experience of Sophia’s Forest. The opera explores the lasting effects on families of the immigrant experience, and the ways in which children use their imaginations to cope with trauma and find healing. This selection of materials from a diverse range of creators, all explore this theme in their own way.

Poetry

'Who Am I, Without Exile?' By Mahmoud Darwish

Who Am I, Without Exile?

BY MAHMOUD DARWISH

TRANSLATED BY FADY JOUDAH

A stranger on the riverbank, like the river … water

binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway

to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing

makes me enter the gospels. Not

a thing … nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb

and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing

makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing

carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing

and not promise. What will I do? What

will I do without exile, and a long night

that stares at the water?

Water

binds me

to your name …

Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams

to my reality: not dust and not fire. What

will I do without roses from Samarkand? What

will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar

stones? Our weight has become light like our houses

in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange

creatures in the clouds … and we are now loosened

from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what

will we do without exile, and a long night

that stares at the water?

Water

binds me

to your name …

There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you

but me, the stranger massaging his stranger’s thigh: O

stranger! what will we do with what is left to us

of calm … and of a snooze between two myths?

And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house.

Was this road always like this, from the start,

or did our dreams find a mare on the hill

among the Mongol horses and exchange us for it?

And what will we do?

What

will we do

without

exile?

Mahmoud Darwish, “Who Am I, Without Exile?” from The Butterfly’s Burden. Copyright © 2008 by Mahmoud Darwish, English translation by Fady Joudah. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. www.coppercanyonpress.org

'The Immigrant's Song' by Tishani Doshi

The Immigrant’s Song

BY TISHANI DOSHI

Let us not speak of those days

when coffee beans filled the morning

with hope, when our mothers’ headscarves

hung like white flags on washing lines.

Let us not speak of the long arms of sky

that used to cradle us at dusk.

And the baobabs—let us not trace

the shape of their leaves in our dreams,

or yearn for the noise of those nameless birds

that sang and died in the church’s eaves.

Let us not speak of men,

stolen from their beds at night.

Let us not say the word

disappeared.

Let us not remember the first smell of rain.

Instead, let us speak of our lives now—

the gates and bridges and stores.

And when we break bread

in cafés and at kitchen tables

with our new brothers,

let us not burden them with stories

of war or abandonment.

Let us not name our old friends

who are unravelling like fairy tales

in the forests of the dead.

Naming them will not bring them back.

Let us stay here, and wait for the future

to arrive, for grandchildren to speak

in forked tongues about the country

we once came from.

Tell us about it, they might ask.

And you might consider telling them

of the sky and the coffee beans,

the small white houses and dusty streets.

You might set your memory afloat

like a paper boat down a river.

You might pray that the paper

whispers your story to the water,

that the water sings it to the trees,

that the trees howl and howl

it to the leaves. If you keep still

and do not speak, you might hear

your whole life fill the world

until the wind is the only word.

Music

'Wie lange Noch?' by Kurt Weill

Written after Weill had settled in Paris having escaped the rising Nazi power. He finally ended up in the US and, in 1944, composed the new version of the song to be played behind enemy lines.

'Piano Concerto No.3 in E Major' by Bela Bartok

Composed in the final months of his life following his migration to the US from Hungary after WWII

'Bombs Turn into Roses' by Maya Youssef

'The war started in my homeland in 2011. From that point on making music was no longer a choice, it was a crucial means to express and come to terms with intense feelings of loss and sadness from seeing my people suffer and my homeland destroyed.'

– Maya Youssef

'Nostalgia' - by Ma Sicong from 'Inner Mongolia Suite'

Panel conversation

OP partnered with Grace Cathedral to present this panel conversation exploring the lasting effects of the immigrant experience on families and the ways children use their imaginations to cope with trauma and find healing. Featuring composer Lembit Beecher, Neuroscientist and Director Indre Viskontas, and refugee advocate and leader in the Afghan diaspora Malaak Malikyar Sills via the Islamic Networks Group – ING, in conversation with Dean Malcolm Clemens Young.

Resource organizations

Composer created instruments & Sound Art

SF CAIRS

The SF Refugee, Assylee, & Immigrant Forum

Click for more information.

Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay

Wide ranging support services for Refugees & Immigrants in the East Bay

Click for more information.

The LGBT Asylum Project

The LGBT Asylum Project is the only San Francisco nonprofit organization exclusively dedicated to providing accessible legal representation for LGBT asylum seekers who are fleeing persecution due to their sexual orientation, gender identity and/or HIV status.

Click for more information.

Catholic Charities SF

Center for Immigration Legal & Support Services

Click for more information.

Books For ADults

Books for All Ages

Non-Fiction Books

The Joy Luck Club

by Amy Tan

Click for more information.

Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Click for more information.

Malala's Magic Pencil

by Malala Yousafzai

Click to hear the book read aloud.

American Street

by Ibi Zoboi

Click for more information.

The Sympathizer

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Click for more information.

Once I Was You

by María Hinojosa

Click for more information.