“Coral Hanin”… a balm for the pain of exile
When you hear the word nostalgia in exile, nostalgia for your homeland, your parents, and everything you remember from the beautiful pictures you left in your country come to your mind. And in defining the meaning of the word Hanin in the Arabic language, it is the voice of a mother to her child, the voice of the one in whose heart there is a tendency of pain, the sound of the wind and the gentle breeze, the sound of the lute when tapping on it, the sound of the bow when beating, the voice of a woman when she loses her husband, the voice of the longing and this is what Haneen Coral translates in exile.
To know Hanin’s story, we can go back to the “Haneen Cultural Forum” page, in which it is stated:
The Hanin Cultural Forum was established by a voluntary initiative of Mrs. Raja Bannout on February 22, 2015, in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, in cooperation with a group of Syrian women. The forum was a place where Syrian women gather to carry out many social activities, periodic educational meetings, and workshops, and provide psychological and social support through the formation of a women’s lyrical group to revive and introduce the Syrian heritage and preserve the heritage identity, and to serve as an invitation to celebrate life even in times of wars and crises.
After the success of the Coral Hanin Group in Gaziantep, a second group was established in Berlin in 2016.
Then the groups were formed in 2018, in cooperation with many Syrian women in the countries of the Syrian diaspora, to form the “Haneen Coral Network”, which currently consists of 11 groups distributed over 6 countries: Germany, Turkey, Finland, Canada, America, and Sweden
The groups include about 170 women, each group is run by a woman responsible for it and works in cooperation with local authorities and organizations. The joint activities are organized by the network management and provide the necessary support in all possible ways while maintaining the privacy and flexibility of the work of each group.
In 2018, the forum was officially registered under the Civil Society Organizations Law in Berlin, Germany, under the name "NESWA", so that the "Haneen Coral Network" became one of its main projects.
Through the “Haneen Coral Network” project, we aspire to support Syrian women in the countries of the diaspora by providing them with a safe space for meeting and acquaintance, facilitating their integration into alternative societies, preserving the Syrian lyrical heritage, enhancing cultural exchange, and raising the level of their collective work to become social actors and influencers to contribute to the peacemaking in Syria if they are allowed to do so. We believe in the importance of singing and the arts as one of the most influential approaches, especially in times of war and human tragedies.
In an exclusive interview with Hanin’s Choir Foundation, Raja Bannout spoke about the beginnings of the choir: “The beginning was in 2015, in Turkey in the city of Gaziantep, there I met the forcibly displaced Syrian women, the majority of these women suffered from the conditions of war and witnessed the tragedies of arrest, killing, and destruction. I liked that we meet to relieve the isolation imposed on us by the conditions of war and alienation together. I returned to Germany at the end of the year 2016 to follow up with a second group of Syrian women the project that we started in Gaziantep, to seek to form other groups in the places where the Syrian women and immigrant women are located.
Hanin’s choir remains a space of hope and a balm for the wounds of Syrian women in exile, and from this choir, the scent of jasmine will smell and birds of peace will fly through it all over the world.
You can view Haneen's experience in detail through the website: