Using harmony to tune in healing, turn down trauma

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This article was published 13/02/2024 (629 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Darcy Ataman knows a thing or two about giving and receiving.

The Winnipeg founder and chief executive officer of Make Music Matter, who recently received an award for his work in war-torn countries of Africa as well as the Middle East and Ukraine, says it’s the gifts he has received from survivors of conflict and trauma he holds dearest.

“It’s a combo of gratitude and poignancy, in a sense that you do this work and the only reason you’re able to do it effectively is that these vulnerable people are essentially letting them into their homes on their worst day,” Ataman says of the 14,000 people around the world who have teamed up with Make Music Matter’s Healing in Harmony music-therapy program.

“Everybody who has gone through the program has suffered unimaginable trauma and the fact that they are vulnerable in front of you, so you can go on the healing journey together, it’s just a gift.”

World Vision Canada, the global relief and development agency, has worked with Make Music Matter for the past three years in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It gave its Ruth Roberts Award, which recognizes people who have helped improve the lives of children and youth, to Ataman on Jan. 27 for developing Healing in Harmony.

Make Music Matter sets up recording studios, sometimes mobile ones in a van that travels to remote villages, and invites women and children, many of whom have been traumatized by sexual violence, to write and record songs about their lives.

The songs are played on radio stations where the people live, posted on streaming services and become the centrepieces of concerts and local celebrations, where stigma and shame begin to fade, revealing proud artists.

“Talking about it directly will actually retraumatize and retrigger and make somebody worse,” Ataman says. “It’s been scientifically proven that the use of metaphor through the lyric-writing can extract that trauma to the surface that makes it less daunting.”

Make Music Matter, which began in Rwanda in 2009, has partnered since 2015 with the Panzi Hospital, the Congolese facility in Bukavu that treats its patients’ physical and emotional wounds and is run by Dr. Denis Mukwege, the gynecologist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Ataman says the worldwide search for rare metals and minerals has made eastern Congo a battleground.

”The sexual violence that we help to heal through our program is primarily because rape is still pervasively used as a weapon of war in the mining sector,” he says. “All those minerals in our cellphones, flat-screen TVs and laptops, those are mined, under duress, in eastern Congo near the Panzi Hospital.”

Part of Make Music Matter’s work in Ukraine is on display at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights’ exhibition Ukrainian Artists United, which includes a film of 11 artists in Lviv, Ukraine.

Ataman and the organization began introducing its methods in Canada’s Indigenous community a year ago, partnering with the Kehewin Native Dance Theatre, a troupe from northeastern Alberta, to help address the effects of intergenerational trauma among young people, often caused by the residential school system.

He admits it’s been a slow process.

“It’s been fascinating to learn the distance between our cultures is a lot wider than I even thought,” Ataman says. “The trust that has to be built and the changes to integrate (Indigenous) culture into the model, has been quite a bit, but very rewarding.”

The early results have sparked an artists’ collective, Nikamo, which means “sing” in Cree; just as in Africa, the group has collected its recordings on an EP called Moments, released last October.

While wars rage on around the world, and trauma continues among people in Canada as well, the member of the Order of Manitoba sees some light amid the gloom.

“As a society, we are talking about mental health more, not as an add-on but something that is fundamentally important to existence,” Ataman says. “In that way I’m glad that the need is rising, because it’s showing a more sophisticated look at these issues.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall