Floribert
The Democratic Republic of the Congo
Photo by Primo Luanda Bauma

Floribert is a young man from The Democratic Republic of the Congo currently living in the Dzaleka Refugee Camp. He came in the camp in 2017 after fleeing DRC due to security concerns. Frank is a student and does voluntary work. He is an introvert by nature whose delight for his life is art, and he has been doing art since he was a kid. Everything he does relates to art, even school. According to Frank, art is different things—singing, poetry, designing, dancing, painting—these are the kinds of art he has been around since he was young.

Floribert has been in different arts, and to him it is the simplest art; for him he just observes what a person is doing and later on will practice, imitate, and innovate all of them. When he was five years old, he started with dancing and drawing which is a family thing and then proceeded to the other arts. He started poetry while in school but later left it because it felt boring and joined music and found himself writing and singing songs. “Every food has flavors so I decided not to mix music and poetry,” he said. From there he realized that he could do his poetry using beats, and he came back to poetry.

He loves art because to him it’s life. He feels happy and sees goodness of life. Since he was a kid he watched art, how people use their brain to entertain people. He saw how people are creative, compared them and how they are unique. For him art is creative.

He wrote his poem “My Circle” from an emotional experience. As a circle, which referred to his surroundings, the world surrounds him. He was trying to show how impossibility and talking ironically are rendered to be possible. He talked of nonsense ironically, but it is happening. He talked of when he woke up late, it is something that happened to him. Outside the world, what is there, seems to be out of what you expect or see.

He would like to tell everyone reading the book and website that, “we learn from reading no matter how intelligent or wise. Someone told me that we start from somewhere and if you start from somewhere no matter the journey you still learn something from others. As writers we go through a lot, the only way we find happiness is putting our experience, our friends’ experiences, we put it down into writing.”

He said that whenever people don’t pay attention to what they have done, it discourages them. It does not pay. It is hard for them to keep doing what they want. They work to reach, improve, and inspire but if they are not supported, it makes them quit.

My Circle

Five monsters conquered by one prey was nonsense

Imagine 5 cats against a mouse
The mouse survives where the cats are
Maybe they become friends, that's nonsense

Imagine, 5 soldiers killed by an unarmed citizen
This one doesn't even know any weapon use
Maybe this happened by mistake, as u never know
But that's nonsense

I wake up around 5 a.m
Then I get utterly ready for going out
About to go to school but then it mysteriously gets dark
To my surprise it was late 5 p.m
For whatever reason to be figured out, that's nonsense

Am an expert, well skilled shepherd
Shepherd of shepherds, and when I spot from far away a predator poking out
From my sheep, I run 100 hundred years far
That was nonsense

Imagine leaving in a dearest residence
But carrying no facts from the house
In the end, you wonder why it matters to be that place
That was nonsense

It's too simple to remember how, when, and what I mistook
But it's the hardest job to remember what I really knew
All the fights and struggles I went through
To become what I am now I mistook
That was nonsense

A poet killed for his inspiration
Because the nation paid attention
The killers expected them not in a distortion
Anticipated to be in a better motivation

Into love this circle I'm living in
Now, nonsense is me
Truth, lies confused inside me
It looks like a joke but it's killing me
Nonsense

I have put myself to trial to make this end to me
But my expectations and facts never meet
They quarrel every single second before the meeting

I hate that it doesn't help in my field
It should be a dream, nonsense
Let me live in these like this
I expect change but nonsense was now is salute this

In my circle,
Five monsters conquered by its own prey
Normal for abnormal
Cheap for costly
Right for fault
Long for short
Dusk for dawn
Savior for none
Vice versa for all

Nonsense, that's sense
That's my circle