Ten years ago Ali Kharsa was a happy kid growing up in Aleppo. Today he’s a 23-year-old Canadian rapper known as MC AK.
In between he spent two of his teenage years detained on an isolated island of 10,000 people. Then he and his dad became the first to leave Australian offshore detention for a new life in a western country.
“I get inspired by people who have stories,” he says about his favourite rappers. He nominates 50 Cent as one. “For me as a rapper, I think I have a story and my story is really important.”
In 2012, when Kharsa was 14, his family fled brewing violence in Syria. They made it to Malaysia but felt unsafe and insecure, so he and his father, Ahmed, decided to seek asylum in Australia. Once they were resettled, they would bring Kharsa’s mother and five siblings, including a new baby, to join them.
But things didn’t go that way.
The pair had dismissed stories that Australia had closed its borders and when they were told they were going to Nauru they assumed it was Australian territory, like Christmas Island. After all, it was Australia they had come to.
Kharsa remembers the blazing heat when he arrived on Nauru and his shock at the poverty and dilapidation. It reminded him of poor villages they’d passed through in Indonesia. As the bus pulled up to the detention camp set aside for families, he saw people leaning on fences.
“It looked really scary,” he says. “I didn’t really process that. I couldn’t take it.
“I told my father I was almost gonna cry. I told him, ‘Where are we? Are they just gonna dump us here and forget about us?’”
He remembers his father trying to conceal his own shock and telling his teenage son to relax, that everything would be OK.
The hardest moment was when he received his ID card. “There was a number on it. I was like, ‘What is this?’ And they were like, ‘This is your name. From now on this is the ID you have to use.’ ”
Over the next few years Kharsa felt like a prisoner. There weren’t enough showers or water or phones or schooling. He witnessed women eat washing powder and a man sew his lips together. He watched people losing their minds.
All the while, though, music was his “healing”. Whenever he felt stressed, he’d go to his tent and write lyrics to beats he played from a small speaker, sometimes collaborating with others to write verses in English, Persian, Arabic and French. They’d perform for the other refugees.
Despite losing years to the strange and sometimes brutal world of Nauru’s detention camp, Kharsa is one of the lucky ones. He believes he and his father got refugee status and left the camp in 2014 because of the strength of their refugee claim as Syrians.
In late 2015, after more than two years on Nauru, they were the first refugees to be resettled. With the UN’s help, his mother and siblings had made it to Canada. Unusually, Kharsa and his father were allowed to join their family. Within weeks, Kharsa was in high school in Saskatoon.
He says he was bursting with energy, rushing into things: “I didn’t want to waste my time. I was really happy.”
Now he lives in Montreal and is studying international relations and performing and recording as MC AK. His latest song, Motherland, has racked up tens of thousands of views on YouTube.
There’s a Canadian inflection in his English, and last September he got his Canadian citizenship.
“I came here in the first year and I didn’t know anything about how to roll here ... And now I’m all over the place, I’m active,” he says. “I was a refugee before and had no documents at all. Then in four years, I became a citizen.”
But he still thinks about the people left on Nauru, half a decade after he was able to start a new life. There was an Iraqi boy he spent all his time with, and the two still speak regularly. That boy is now a 22-year-old bodybuilder who is still on Nauru.
“A lot of those people were my friends,” Kharsa says. “I wanted to see them out of detention.”
Lyrics written while Ali Kharsa was on Nauru
I was in the tent, they relaxing
I sound suspicious I got an accent
Piss me off and see some action
Investigating interviewing why they asking
I was half out now I’m half in
They were banding I’m demanding
Diving in and drowning
Stamp expired passports regardless
Kick me to the offshore department
I ran for my life in a boat like the magic carpet
When you get locked crossing oceans
Getting caught by the law enforcement
There’s no place for mixed emotions
Never know your destiny in the nation
Streaming music through CDs
Hope I will expose them in 3D
Politicians often you see on TV
Looking for a place, settlement
Refugee or immigrant now they got the power over innocents
Blocking borders on asylum
All the fucking facts keep on hiding
Grab some money food
Go provide them
Get the rest to commit violence
Get the rest to remain silent
Travelled across the sea to steer your boundless plains
Only to be stopped by a hand in which blood was stained
• Crisis support services can be reached 24 hours a day: Lifeline 13 11 14; Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800; MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78; Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636
