The passion of Victor Fuentes. Photo by Mike Levin.

When Victor Fuentes sits down with his guitar to play an original composition June 17 for Ottawa’s Refugee Week event, the melody will caress your heart, flamenco-infused folk from his El Salvadorian heritage. It will linger in the air of the Library and Archives of Canada’s auditorium, and it won’t give a hint of the anger, imprisonment and torture that is its inspiration.

“Melody is one way to (help) digest the ugliness,” says Fuentes, who fled El Salvador’s civil war for Canada as a political dissident in 1990. The anger has never dissipated, nor would he want it to because it might take with it the passion that speaks through his music, painting, poetry and theatre. And passion is the only thing worth living for.

The songs he’ll perform at the Archives aren’t named; none of his creative product is. Fuentes doesn’t want to use titles to dictate people’s perceptions. He experienced too much of that, and the frustration it causes, while growing up.

Painting started at age seven, screaming semi-abstract because he couldn’t grasp realism. At 11 or 12, it sprayed in the dust when he challenged a rich boy who was bullying his brother to a fight. There was lots of blood, and no winner, but Fuentes found a passion for speaking out. “From that came the fight for justice and human rights. My mom was very proud.”

It was, ironically, also a time when Fuentes realized “art shouldn’t be a fight” but admits that the poetry he wrote to his future wife has just about been his only creation that wasn’t about life and death. He earned a university degree in accounting to please his father and then went back to study sociology. When the school instituted an arts program, he made the switch.

Courtesy of Harmony Hopes.

“For two years I learned a new emotional response. It was the idea that if you evoke and challenge things (with art), then you are doing a good job.” In politically unstable El Salvador, a good job can have bad results.

After graduation, Fuentes was working with a Canadian film maker on a documentary about the country’s elections. They were stopped by soldiers, one of whom looked through Fuentes’ personal sketch book. In it the soldier saw a challenge to authority, and Victor ended up in jail. The pain and violence that followed are scarily familiar and utterly incomprehensible to virtually all Canadians. Which is why Fuentes will take a major artistic role in Refugee Week.

It runs from June 16 to 20 (World Refugee Day) and include art and performance by 65 new Canadians as well as presentations by Non-Government Organizations tasked with the unremitting work of helping refugees around the world. But mostly it’s for those who’ve had first-hand experience.

“For  education purposes, to deal with prejudice and violence,” Fuentes says. “But many will come with a lot of pain. They are the ones who have been through it, and they feel isolated. This will help them see they are not alone.”

It’s this message of hope that Victor Fuentes most wants people to understand because even darkness can produce the most beautiful melodies.