This TED Talk features poet Emmet Thal MacMood, recorded live at TED Med 2016.

I was 10 years old when I learned what the word genocide meant.

It was 2003, and my people were being brutally attacked because of their race.

Hundreds of thousands murdered, millions displaced, a nation torn apart at the hands of its own government.

My mother and father immediately began speaking out against the crisis.

I didn't really understand it,

except for the fact that it was destroying my parents.

One day, I walked in on my mother crying,

and I asked her why we were burying so many people.

I don't remember the words that she chose to describe genocide

to her 10-year-old daughter,

but I remember the feeling.

We felt completely alone,

as if no one could hear us,

as if we were essentially invisible.

This is when I wrote my first poem about Darfur.

I wrote poetry to convince people to hear and see us,

and that's how I learned the thing that changed me.

It's easy to be seen.

I mean, look at me. I'm a young African woman

with a scarf around my head, an American accent on my tongue, and a story that makes even the

most brutal of Monday morning seem inviting. But it's hard to convince people that they deserve

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