Amal Walks Across America, First Steps in Boston by Carrie J. Preston
My family and I walked for a few blocks in East Boston with Little Amal, a twelve-foot-tall puppet of a ten-year old Syrian refugee child, just as she was beginning a 6,000-mile journey from Boston, MA to San Diego, CA. “I want to get closer, but I’m a little scared of her,” said my seven-year-old son, who wanted Amal to see the puppet of a “friendly turtle” he had made (and named Shelly) at a Puppet Making Workshop hosted by Students Rebuild in Central Square Park. Shelly is a lantern puppet, created from the paper globes, small light bulbs on sticks, construction paper and glue (not to mention watermelon slices) provided by Students Rebuild. My son held Shelly up proudly and held my hand tightly as we followed Amal, near the front of the crowd. When Amal reached out to give me a high-five, my son pulled away and did not want to touch her. “What did she feel like?” he asked. Wooden. Hard. Cold. The movements of the hands, each controlled by a puppeteer, can look quite human but feel like the object she is. Amal’s uncanny life-like quality is produced by the small movements of her eyelids, the ways her head and entire torso turn to look and address herself to onlookers/participants, how these movements create human-like expressions of wonder, trepidation, excitement, and fear as she moves through the world.
The exploration of movement and differential access to mobility across the planet is at the center of Little Amal, a massive participatory public art project produced by the appropriately-named The Walk Productions, founded by David Lan and Tracey Seaward under the artistic directorship of Amir Nizar Zuabi. In the summer of 2021, Amal walked 5,000 miles from Gaziantep Turkey to Manchester England in search of her mother. She was designed by Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa to represent an unaccompanied migrant child on a journey that was also a Covid-safe theater festival, moving forward while theaters were still shuttered by the pandemic, staged along the roads that displaced people from Syria and elsewhere were journeying to reach Europe. Across eight countries, she inspired 150 diverse scheduled events (such as the puppet workshop we joined) plus far more impromptu encounters. In his TED talk introducing The Walk, Amir Nizar Zuabi, invited participation from the communities through which she would pass as well as the public on social media: “I invite every one of you to welcome Amal in your own way.” Zuabi, the company of twelve puppeteers, and production team could not know in advance the ways they would be met or how different groups would respond to her journey. Vulnerability infuses the gestures and steps of Little Amal, in spite of her size, but she was primarily greeted with gestures of welcome and artistry. Not always. In Larissa, Greece people threw food and rocks at Little Amal and her entourage until police intervened. A picnic with children at the Greek World Heritage site of Meteora was banned by the local counsel claiming that it was offensive for a “Muslim doll from Syria” to perform in a space sacred to Greek Orthodox believers. This response indicates a surprisingly literal assumption of Amal’s identity, although her religion was never specified by the artistic team.
Even as her journey was sometimes temporarily blocked, Little Amal and The Walk team enjoyed mobility across Europe that would be unthinkable to displaced people, refugees, and migrants. The mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, refused to grant a permit for Little Amal to perform on the city beach, but unlike the many refugees trying to get from Calais to England, Amal was packed into a crate to travel by train under the Strait of Dover. Oxford columnist Peter Hitchens described The Walk as a “political carnival” writing, “It strikes me that most Syrian refugees are not little girls but strapping young men. I wonder how a huge puppet of such a person would be greeted.” He is right that most of the refugees crossing from Calais to Dover are men; the journey is simply too dangerous for a young girl, and she would likely be detained and institutionalized at many points along the treacherous route. But, as Little Amal’s promotional materials indicate, half of all refugees are children. The Walk chose the most sympathetic, vulnerable, nonthreatening of refugees to depict, a common strategy of artists/activists who, for example, protested American slavery with depictions of enslaved white-appearing girls (see John Bell’s “The Octoroon” sculpture (1868) and Henry Mosler’s painting, “The Quadroon Girl” (1878)).
I taught “The Walk” to my students in an interdisciplinary honors course on forced displacement in the spring semesters of 2022 and 2023, as an example of arts and protest as well as an intervention into the challenges of forced displacement. We had been studying the suffering of asylum seekers and refugees, the struggles of host communities, the dysfunctions of political and humanitarian systems, and the challenges of delivering health care in refugee contexts. The question that that generated the most discussion and seemed most salient to the students both semesters was, “Is this performance project about refugees the best way to spend nearly $4 million?” Students had different views. Some were troubled that this funding was not being used for health care, food, shelter, education, and resettlement of refugees. Others pointed out that The Walk was not funded by taking away food and shelter from refugees, and its function of education and inspiration might even lead, through the Amal Fund, to additional donations and support. And yet, it was important to ask questions about costs, values, and funding, as we noted that the main funders are the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Bezos Family Foundation. Students quickly researched the Duke tobacco fortune, Michael Bloomberg and L.P., and Amazon. Just as it became clear that accepting donations from most wealthy foundations could be considered compromising, I shared that I was an excited member of the many organizations helping to bring Amal to Boston in the fall of 2023.
In the late spring and summer, there were massive zoom calls with members of hundreds of organizations including the ones I represented, Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement and Arts Initiative. I felt star-struck as I listened to Amir Nizar Zuabi deliver his charge: “Amal is a nine-year old girl who will pass through your city. She is alone. She is afraid. She’s vulnerable. How would you like to welcome her? What will you learn from her and what will you teach her?” I filled out the online forms and marketing information to indicate our interest in partnering with The Walk through Boston University while were still on the first call. As the mother of a child the same age as Little Amal, I thought I might involve students from his class in a welcoming performance and lesson, and I shared this idea in the forms. Soon, members of the marketing team were in touch, and I got to speak with Executive Producer, Sarah Loader, and her partners at Cause Lab. They said that someone from the artistic team would be in touch to discuss the artistic event I had proposed. That never happened. Members of the partner organizations shared their confusion about what was happening, who was taking the lead, and how we each could participate… and there was great enthusiasm and excitement. I don’t know how the artistic team decided which organization would actually plan the events, but in early August a schedule was released with a story of Amal’s arrival in Boston, her journeys though the city, meeting friends in Harvard Yard, looking for a place to sleep, handing out backpacks as Boston Public School students start their year, delivering the first pitch for the Red Sox… that event in Fenway was the closest she came to Boston University, and I felt torn about that.
And then I saw her approach Central Square Park as the puppet-making workshop was ending on her first full day in Boston, and her presence was huge. My children commented on how strange it was that they named her Little Amal. Three puppeteers move Amal, as she was designed and built by Handspring Puppet Company, famous for their puppet of the horse, Joey, in the National Theatre of London’s War Horse. One puppeteer walks on stilts and peers out through the cage of her chest cavity, while manipulating her eyelids and mouth via a small computer. The day I walked with Amal, I noticed that the face and mouth of this puppeteer, Bartolomeo Bartolini (Italy / UK), registered the expressions – wonder, uncertainty, joy, fear – that Amal would express. One puppeteer, Emma Longthorne (UK), controlled Amal’s right hand, and another, Garge Mohammed Dmahneh (Palestine), manipulated the left arm on long sticks. They seem to dance around her body responding to the impulse created by the stiltwalker inside, but also making their own performance choices. They gave me a high five, waved a flag that was handed to them, and regularly reached out to touch, even hug, children in the crowd. They wore wired earbuds so that they could communicate with the other puppeteers and what I will call the “ground team.” I never saw the puppeteers speaking into mics, but they were responding to the instructions of the at-least three other artists on the ground team, which included Artistic Director, Amir Nizar Zuabi and Enrico Dau Yang Wey (Taiwan/Spain), the Puppetry Director. Zuabi looked about the crowd for opportunities, such as a child peering out of a second floor window right at Amal’s eye level or a child on a porch with a broken leg and crutches, who could not join the parade. He and Enrico Dau Yang Wey instructed the puppeteers to bring Amal to these children in brief encounters that were quite moving. Zakaria Baggour (France), a third member of the ground team worked to ensure that Little Amal could stage these encounters without knocking over other members of the audience or tripping and falling as she navigated steps and barriers in the road that would be quite invisible to the puppeteer on stilts. Often the ground crew urged the puppeteers to move on with verbal commands and arm gestures, as when they felt she had interacted long enough with the stick puppets of a bird and whale accompanied by waving blue cloth or when costumed animals danced with her while an accordion played an eerie, quiet song. Partially because this event was co-organized by Extinction Rebellion Boston, their subgroup devoted to young activists, XR Youth, and Scientist Rebellion, this particular walk with Amal demonstrated the shared concerns of activists working on forced displacement and climate and ecological emergencies. Amal moved with these animal puppets in a dance of wonder and concern, but the ground team kept her moving on to the next encounter and the next opportunity along the walk.
The event was a festival of arts and a workshop, as children made their puppets and spoke with artists and activists about how to depict their chosen animals and why they should care about endangered species, like the Blanding’s Turtle and Hammerhead Shark my kids created. Great slices of watermelon were served to drip down faces and speckle the art projects. The event was also a participatory performance, protest, and parade that stopped traffic and drew onlookers and marchers who had not planned to participate that evening. It was also a fundraiser, as organizers handed out postcards with the title, “Amal Walks Across America: One Little Girl, One Big Hope, September 7 – November 5,” and a QR code to “Donate” on each side. The information on the back of the postcard in English and Spanish includes, “To help make a difference, The Amal Fund with Choose Love supports displaced children across the world. It is always free to walk with Amal but, if you can, please make a donation today by scanning the QR code or visiting the link chooselove.org/theamalfund.” Amongst the crowd, there was a feeling of excitement and celebration, in keeping with Amir Nizar Zuabi’s claim, “It is important to say that The Walk is not a walk of misery. It is a walk of pride… a celebration of shared humanity and hope.” There were also tears amongst participants, many of whom were speaking Spanish and other languages; some may have been thinking of their own journeys or displaced loved ones, perhaps contrasting the receptions they received and continue to experience as they move through East Boston to this music-filled puppet parade.
Little Amal and The Walk teach us that mobility is at the core of what makes us human: from our ability to move across our homes and cities and far beyond to the small movements of eyelids and mouth that made Amal’s most humanlike expressions. To have our mobility prevented or impeded is a human rights violation, whether that is because our cities are inaccessible for differently mobile people or because a border is designated crossable only by those who have or can pay for the right documentation. Amal’s mobility, and that of her international team of artists and producers, is exceptional; few around the world and certainly critically few displaced people enjoy the ability to cross borders on foot or in vehicles, much less to enter Fenway Park and throw the first pitch. I might question that particular aesthetic gesture (a professional liability of the performance critic), but that pitched baseball (alongside other moments in her journey) might reach some audiences differently, and invite them to think about their own mobility privileges and the plight of refugees and migrants who ask for the ability to move in search of safety and a better life.
As night fell on Amal’s first full day in the US and the small lights in our globe puppets began to illuminate the street, she moved on, searching for a place to rest. Later that evening, walking through Boston’s Downtown Crossing and manipulated by three new puppeteers, she met several musicians from BU’s College of Fine Arts, including my student and clarinetist, Andrew Battaglia, from the honors course on forced displacement the previous spring. The musicians were positioned at different corners to play solo instrumental music for her and the crowd. She paused to listen or dance a little, and she occasionally leaned against a street sign or bus stop to rest in the comfort of the music. These student musicians, like many other artists and protesters who join in The Walk, were playing their support for the human right to walk, dance, and rest safely in place.