Actress Mia Kirshner’s book gives voice to the oppressed and displaced.
Mia Kirshner wants you to meet some people, people who have been forced from their homes by war or economic necessity, people living in the darkest corners of the world.
And she wants you to care about them the way she does.
The L Word actor and sometimes Vancouver resident has been to places most of us wouldn’t dare to go: a Chechen refugee camp in Ingushetia, brothels in Thailand filled with girls escaping genocide, war zones where children carry automatic weapons.
Kirshner talked to people and wrote down their stories and her own thoughts and with the help of local collaborators such as J.B. MacKinnon (The 100-Mile Diet) and Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons (both of Adbusters Magazine) created a collection of highly unusual books collectively titled I Live Here.
Comic artist Joe Sacco and writer Ann-Marie MacDonald also lend their skills to the project.
What these volumes contain may shock you. A woman photographs her abortion. A young girl writes a letter to her rapist. A mother takes pictures of places her missing daughter used to be.
I can hear Kirshner wince over the phone when I use the word shocking.
“It’s not shocking, it’s the truth,” she said. “It’s not there for shock value, it’s really a testament to the bravery of the people living these lives.”
The credo stencilled on the inside jacket of the book neatly encapsulates Kirshner’s philosophy: There are too many untold stories.
“I know that it’s really overwhelming to think about every woman in Burma or every woman killed in Juarez,” Kirshner said. “But the book isn’t really about them, it’s about you and what you do. If something moves you, do something about it. If you take one action it has a domino effect that will ripple through the community in ways you can’t even imagine.”
Kirshner has followed her own advice. Most of the stories are hand-printed, some are told in graphic story form, like extended panel cartoons. Photographs, mostly amateur, tell stories of lives destroyed and hint at dark chapters still unfolding.
Each of the four volumes is dedicated to stories from a troubled corner of the world: Malawi, Mexico, Burma and Ingushetia.
Kirshner finds the treatment given the world’s crisis zones by professional news organizations “dry.” Small wonder young people don’t read the news. As a result, North Americans tend to think of refugee communities as distant and foreign, not our problem, she said.
But the stories in I Live Here, she said, aren’t about “them” they are about “us.”
“The challenge was to make the stories emotionally relevant,” Kirshner explained. Depicting people’s lives and struggles visually is more impactful emotionally than reams of text could ever be.
“In order for people to do something they need to be moved, it needs to resonate with them on a personal level,” Kirshner said.
Some people will seek out the books because they already share Kirshner’s concern for the world’s displaced and downtrodden, but that will not be enough to satisfy her. “I really think this book should be in high schools and universities,” she said. “That’s where I started to develop my own social conscience and social awareness.”
That her father was born in a camp for displaced persons after the Second World War may also have contributed to her personal interest in the topic.
Mia the activist/writer and Mia the actor live mostly separate lives. She began travelling and collecting material for the book seven years ago, long before her acting career took off with the success of The L Word.
Her two lives intersect in one important way: “The L Word paid for the book to be published.”
“Some people buy houses, but I was really happy to put my savings into something like this,” she said.
Kirshner makes not a penny from the sale of the book. All of her royalties go to Amnesty International.
“It’s really important for people to buy the book and if they like it or think it’s important to e-mail all their friends and tell them to buy it,” she said.
Source: The Vancouver Sun
