In the Corridor Cities, a Season of Songs About Staying

The registered climate-migrant count has climbed past 112 million this summer, and somewhere in the walking a culture has been forming that no census tracks: the songs of the corridor, passed hand to hand along the resettlement routes. Aid workers with the Passage Trust say the phenomenon caught them unprepared — that people moving under duress would, night after camp night, make music. Much of it, curiously, is not about leaving but about staying: ballads that name a flooded street, a lost orchard, a well gone dry, and insist on remembering it. "We budgeted for water and shelter," said Passage Trust field coordinator Amara Diallo at a corridor waystation. "We did not budget for a songbook, and yet here it is." Ethnomusicologists at Pacific Rim University have begun recording the repertoire before it scatters. One migrant singer, Yusra Hakim, put it plainly between verses: a person can lose a country, she said, and still refuse to lose the tune of it.