RSC student Hadia Azizi recently performed a series of poems exploring the refugee experience, including three of her own works, in collaboration with the Odyssey Ensemble on BBC radio and in a concert at King’s Place in London.
Hadia, who is a scholar and human rights advocate from Afghanistan, appeared with the Odyssey Ensemble on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune with Katie Derham, where they performed three specially composed pieces combining poetry and music. These included one piece, ‘Things I Carried’, featuring Hadia’s own poem. Speaking about the work, Hadia described it as an “intimate reflection of the invisible weight refugees carry in exile, or live and experience in exile.”
“I have written this piece to show the way we lose lots of things, we leave lots of things, in our country when we move or flee,” Hadia said. “We also carry lots of things in the host country; we are not just statistics in the news, we are not just numbers … I want to show that we are normal human beings.”
Hadia is studying for the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, where her dissertation will explore how gender-based oppression drives displacement, highlighting the voices, strength and agency of Afghan women living under systemic violence. She is the recipient of the Yalda Hakim Graduate Scholarship at Oriel College, which was established in 2021 to support one Afghan women per year to complete a Master’s degree.
Her first degree was in Journalism at Kabul University, during which she wrote extensively about the struggles of Afghan women. She also has Master’s degrees in International Law from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in China and in Human Rights Law from Nottingham Trent University.
She has worked with refugee communities across education, resettlement and health projects in the UK. Her poetry – rooted in themes of exile, womanhood, and resistance – has been performed in Oxford, at national events, and on broadcast platforms.
On the BBC, Hadia described her poetry as “a means of advocacy. It is a tool for reclaiming my agency; not only mine but all other Afghan women who are not able to speak out today. In every single word and sentence I write in my pieces, I carry all the women; I carry those women who cannot speak or who are imprisoned or who are not with us now.”
Odyssey Ensemble is the UK’s first professional musical collective dedicated to sharing real-life stories of asylum-seekers and refugees in their own words. With a musical ensemble at its core, its performances are often interdisciplinary, featuring refugee poets, dancers, filmmakers and other artists.
Find out more about Odyssey Ensemble.