During a recording session at the Maine College of Art and Design in Portland earlier this month, Alicia Sow was singing quietly to herself, trying to rehearse her lullaby, with her 9-month-old baby on her lap and her three-year-old clamoring for attention.
Sow said she’d never written a song before, but that as a mother of three, the lyrics came easily.
“What I do for them, what they do for me,” Sow said. “No matter what we’re going through, love is always there.”
Sow was one of four participants in this year’s Lullaby Project with the Portland-based ensemble Palaver Strings, which pairs a handful of new parents with professional musicians to write, record, and perform original lullabies.
Researchers have determined that lullabies can bring positive emotional and physical benefits to infants and to their parents, and Palaver Strings has been applying those findings for years with the annual songwriting project.
The project was initiated by Carnegie Hall in New York City over a decade ago, and is now carried forward by dozens of groups around the world.
The Palaver Strings program isn’t specifically for immigrant parents. But Sow said it was a source of comfort following the ICE surge in January, when she was forced to keep her kids home from school for several weeks.
“I felt bad, because I know they like to go to school, to have fun,” she said. “Being at home, like a prisoner, is not good.”
Sow, who is from Angola, said some of her friends were detained during the surge, and even her son Mohammed, who is only three, was aware that something was happening, asking her if the “bad guys” were still outside.
“He knew it, what’s going on. He knew it because he keep on saying, ‘Mommy are the bad guys outside? Don’t go.’”
At home, Sow said she did her best to keep the kids entertained by singing, dancing, and making some of their favorite foods, like sweet rice or a chocolate cake.
“I just want to make them feel good and comfortable, to forget a little bit what’s going on outside,” she said.
An article published last summer by a group of psychiatrists at the University of California, Riverside finds that many children in immigrant families struggle with the fear that a loved one or caregiver could be detained at any time. That chronic stress, they say, can lead to increased risk of PTSD, anxiety, and depression.
Here in Maine, Lullaby Project participant Clarisse Karasira said music is one way to ease that emotional strain.
“It offers comfort, especially for children,” Karasira said. “Music is a language of love, it’s a universal language of peace, so I think it’s really helping.”
Karasira built a professional music career in Rwanda before moving to Maine five years ago. She now lives in Cape Elizabeth with her husband and their two children.
She composed this lullaby for her 8-month-old, Kwema, with verses in English and in Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda.
“The song is called Ihorere. Ihorere is Kinyarwanda word which means, like, calm down, baby, hush baby,” she said.
And Karasira said it’s been well received so far, at least by baby Kwema.
“When he hears it, he stops whatever he’s doing,” she said. “He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s my song. That’s my mom singing my song.’”
This year’s Lullaby Project culminated in a performance at Mayo Street Arts in Portland, before a small audience of family and friends.
Alicia Sow said she hasn’t performed onstage since grade school. But with her three kids at her side, she was all smiles, even after Mohammed grabbed her microphone in the middle of her performance and dropped it on the floor.
With the grace of a parent used to managing a certain level of chaos, she calmly stepped over to another mic, and kept on singing.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
