{"id":2061,"date":"2019-09-01T00:01:39","date_gmt":"2019-09-01T04:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/align\/?p=2061"},"modified":"2025-07-25T10:44:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T14:44:28","slug":"2061","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/align\/2019\/2061\/","title":{"rendered":"A Song for my Mother: No Turning Back"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n A Song for my Mother: No Turning Back\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

by Sarah Syed<\/a><\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

How do we come to know our parents\u2019 migration stories? What is revealed and not when they talk to us about their lives before they had children? What could motivate someone to leave their home country to an unknown one?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember sitting at home pondering such questions about migration. It was at that moment I decided to pick up the phone and call my mother. My mother was born in the Philippines and migrated to Canada when she was twenty years old. Since childhood, it had been a dream of hers to provide support and a better life for her family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had begun to ask my mother several questions about her journey to Canada. This led to a two-hour discussion. This discussion instigated my realization that a majority of the public are unaware of the processes that migrants can face in moving to a new country. This lack of awareness may be a factor that has contributed to the anti-migrant rhetoric spread within the media. Such portrayals involve the \u201cothering\u201d of migrants and perceived vulnerability in the face of uncertainty. To challenge these perceptions I was inspired to use music and songwriting as tools to explore my mother\u2019s migration. I was committed to this approach because minority people can go unheard unless we make a point of fore fronting our perspectives. By way of this creative approach, music and storytelling can recast people and bridge emotional distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Singing Stories<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

No Turning Back<\/em> is a composition that explores the lived experiences of my mother\u2019s migration story. This video combines audio and visual components to uncover a self-reflected auto-ethnographic approach. I chose an auto-ethnographic method to establish rich insight into my mother\u2019s experiences of migration. This approach is beneficial because it allows for \u201csocial action\u201d as referred to by Canadian sociologist Nancy Taber (Taber, 2012). Social action encompasses the art of research through a critical approach by way of linking one\u2019s self to the social (Taber, 2012).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With this idea of social action in mind, I engaged in social practice by way of interviewing my mother, encouraging her to share personal insights of her migration journey. I engaged in an unstructured interview with my mother to emulate the flow of an everyday conversation. By asking her open-ended questions, I was able to obtain in-depth responses. In this way, we were able to work in a comfortable and collaborative atmosphere. As a result, the insight I obtained allowed for me to produce lyrics that emphasized strong human emotions. The audio-visual discourse method was used in order to involve this dialogically interactive process. In this regard, artistic mediums serve as more than just a visual representation but rather, a social practice that involves engagement between the creator, the subject, and the viewer. Through this social process, I was able to work collaboratively with my mother to write her story into lyrics, providing viewers and listeners with a deeper understanding of my mother\u2019s migration story through an interactive process. Through analyzing my mother\u2019s stories of migration I was able to share her journey by recreating<\/em> imagery of experience rather than simply retelling <\/em>layers of the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I listened to my mother talk about her past, I became aware of recurring themes. The lyrics and video for No Turning Back<\/em> reveal themes of embodying vulnerability as a strength and the \u2018othering\u2019 of migrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n