Express Your Rights

Former child soldier turned musician and activist Emmanuel Jal speaks and performs to a crowd of 400 at the Michigan League.

This past weekend saw the annual Human Rights Through Education (HRTE) conference, which proved to be their most ambitious to date. The title of the two day conference, “Express Your Rights: The Role of Art in Human Rights Activism,” reflected its overarching message: that art has the power to expose, unite, and inspire change in the realm of human rights. The diverse slate of speakers discussed art’s important role in their respective areas of expertise, from film to architecture to hip hop – with a heavy emphasis on the hip hop (thanks to the joint sponsorship of the Midwest Hip Hop Summit, occurring the same weekend).

Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier from southern Sudan turned musician and activist, was the conference headliner. Jal’s hybrid performance-lecture-conference on Friday night drew nearly 400 students to the ballroom of the Michigan League.

He called his lifestyle – flying across three continents in the previous 24 hours, vowing to eat only one meal a day until he raises enough money to build a school in his hometown – a “sacrifice” to raise awareness for child soldiers who “have no voice” of their own. He discussed how he uses music to tell his story because of its power to overcome apathy, prejudice, and hate.

“Music is a language everybody understands,” Jal said. “When you are a musician nobody can hate you.”
Jal told of his childhood slowly and dispassionately, frequently injecting humor into an otherwise devastating story of survival.

“Jal comes from a background where he has had to face some of the most brutal realities of human rights violations, said Devin Parsons, a member of HRTE. “In his music he actually tells his story...to initiate change in Sudan and all over the world.”

By contrast, his opening spoken word and closing musical performance of the song “Emma,” about the woman who rescued him when he was eleven, were energetic and deeply moving.

Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, the former creative team behind Adbusters magazine, discussed their use of graphic design as a statement against corporations and consumer culture. Their newest project, a collaborative book entitled I Live Here, uses art and design to reveal untold stories of crises in Checnya, Burma, Mexico and Malawi.

“Art doesn’t have a commercial agenda, which allows the message to be less censored,” Simons said. “It’s the purest form of expression, which can have a significant impact.”

Shobridge agreed. “Art is about entering the mind and the heart like no other media can,” he said. “It’s a vehicle to get into people’s brains.”

Carol Jacobsen, a professor at the School of Art & Design and the Director of the Michigan Women’s Clemency Project, uses documentary filmmaking and photography to expose gendered injustices in the Michigan prison system. As the Director of the Michigan Women’s Clemency Project, she works to free women prisoners convicted of murder who did not receive fair trials – and she uses art do so.

“Art is an amazing tool for social change and justice, whether its film, performance, photography or whatever,” Jacobsen said. “It’s about visibility: making things that are invisible visible.”

Many of the speakers discussed art is a way to overcome the difficulty of addressing “depressing” issues that come along with the fight for human rights.

“You can’t always measure the impact,” Jacobsen said. “You simply have to care enough about the work to keep going…The prison system is so depressing. It’s such an impossible wall to penetrate, but I’m determined to crack those walls a bit.”

Each of the conference’s speakers drew about 50 students, with the exception of M-1, a hip hop artist and political activist (one half of the underground hip hop group Dead Prez). His politically charged discussion drew a crowd that filled the Pendleton Room to capacity and left a number of audience members visibly surprised. M-1, a self-described “freedom fighter” uses hip hop as “a tool to touch people and educate them politically.”

M-1 passionately recounted his recent aide trip to Gaza, wrought with bureaucratic obstacles he blamed on the Israeli and Egyptian governments, revealing a strong pro-Palestine stance.

He found that, in Palestine, there was a vibrant hip hop community, which, though repressed and censored by the government, provides a vital outlet for resistance.

M-1 told students that he doesn’t vote because the system is so broken “we can’t vote our way out of it.”
“I didn’t vote for [Obama]…My vote happens every day.” M-1 said. “Taking action in your community, that’s a vote. Educating the youth, that’s a vote.”

Jal reflected a similar sentiment.

“Sometimes it’s not the money you give, it’s the voice that you could add to a situation that is happening,” he said. “If we depend on the government to make things happen, it will never happen. We have to make it happen ourselves. We can make this world a better place.”

The conference was organized by Human Rights Through Education (HRTE), a student organization started in 2004, in collaboration with several other campus and national organizations, including MESA and the MSA Peace and Justice Commision.

HRTE’s mission is to “expand the base of who is affected and interested in human rights issues.” Their annual conference utilizes University resources to bring together present and future human rights activists.
HRTE members chose art as the theme for this year’s conference in the hopes of drawing a diverse group of speakers and, as a result, a fresh and diverse audience.

“It was important to us to come up with a theme that would draw a larger cross section of the campus community,” said Fiona Ruddy, a HRTE member.

See Photo Story for more photos.