Little Amal in Glasgow

Little Amal is in Glasgow as one of the many witnesses to COP26. As national leaders, environmental activists, fossil fuel lobbyists and various other groups wrangle over a future with or without the devastating effects of climate change, Little Amal brings a different perspective. Standing beside Samoan climate activist Brianna Fruean, holding her hand, she towers above her and gazes out on the audience.

As I see her eyes, a surge of emotion floods over me. This girl-puppet-thing makes me think of so many other little girls who will grow up in a world whose dysfunctional system they will inherit, whose dysfunctional system we have created. Now she stands on the world-stage, faced with this system, dysfunctional politically, economically, technically and epistemologically.

Little Amal is not little, she is 3.5 meters tall, so she towers over the humans around her. She represents (or she is) a 10 year-old Syrian refugee child, and she is on a journey from the Turkish/Syrian border to Manchester England. Her journey began on July 27, 2021 in the city of Gaziantep, Turkey, 70 km north of the Syrian border, and 100 km from Aleppo.  She has walked across Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and England. Now she is in Glasgow.

She stands behind Brianna Fruean, gazing over the assembled participants with a look that is, in my mind, partly impassive, partly angry, pitying, hopeful, desperate, frightened, disappointed. I see in her face and in her eyes the entire range of reactions to this frustratingly inertia-bound forum, this collection of powerful nations whose decades-long inaction on human-induced climate change is in part, perhaps in a large part, responsible for the worldwide walks of refugees. She bows her head while Fruean ask world leaders to “work and fight so that all little girls inherit the world that they deserve, to lay the foundation for change to grow.” Is his hope, or is it despair I see in Little Amal’s face? I don’t know, because, as the leaders talk and talk and talk, as they engage in what Greta Thunberg has called bla-bla-bla, she remains silent

She was created by the acclaimed Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa. Her handlers, those who make her move, have said: “I think she’s frightened, alone. She’s trying to put as much distance between her and the violence. Quite a frightened, traumatized little kid that has suddenly found herself all alone in the world … it’s frightening whether it happens to you in the supermarket, you can only imagine how frightening it is when it happens on this scale. There’s nobody here to help you, you can’t turn to the left and find mom’s hand. She is really in a survival flight mode when we meet her first.”

If there is going to be an alternative to the world Little Amal has inherited, I believe the door to the path leading there will be forced open in large part by the emotions aroused by this puppet. The interactions of humans and an inanimate human-thing remind us that we are here to take care of the inanimate world, at the same time that we take care of the animate world, at the same time that we take care of refugee children, like Little Amal.