An interdisciplinary issue reflecting on historical memory, family separation, racism, migration, and trauma through essays connecting past histories of violence and displacement with contemporary political and ethical questions.
An interdisciplinary issue reflecting on historical memory, family separation, racism, migration, and trauma through essays connecting past histories of violence and displacement with contemporary political and ethical questions.
Deserts, hurricanes, and classrooms These testimonies illustrate for me the personal stories of the twentieth century’s most terrifying examples of systemic collapse and failure. While no age is without shabby compromises, we look at the last century because of the scale of the human cost for failures of diplomacy and government. Personally, these stories brought to mind a student, Jonathan, who recently took my college writing class. He’s …
On the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life This new forum engages authors and artists—from very different places and writing in very different genres—in an ongoing conversation on “the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life” (title stolen from Nietzsche). The idea initially arose in response to the American administration’s southern border policy of taking children away from their parents: might this not be a …
Tyrone Chambers II, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera Grant, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dan Shore, Marci Shore 21 September 2020 Edited and abridged by Marci Shore KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI: I’m here in Krasnogruda. It means at the border between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, in the northeastern corner of Poland. In my Borderland Centre, which, with my friends, I established 30 years ago, thinking of being more engaged in art, for solidarity with people, …
It is an old black and white, grainy photo of a small child, maybe a year old, perhaps even less. It is hard to tell because the face is very serious. His dark eyes are not looking into the camera, but downwards, towards hands neatly folded on the breast. The child doesn’t smile, his lips are pressed together. The expression on his face is worried, grown-up somehow. He …
A documentary poem reacting to a film about the separation of children from their parents in Nazi camps The poem in Romanian follows the English text. The child Fred is told by his mother: “You must not look back.”And he did not look back – and he survived – and his mother did not.Orpheus was not as strong you were, Fred – he looked back, the poor thing.On …
After I had seen the film once, and then once more, I was overcome with a sadness, a deep sadness that settled over me like a mist. The next morning, I was drawn to a sentence in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. In Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway has returned from the bookstore run by the lovely Sylvia Beach, who is very nice to him, letting him borrow books …
Growing up, my sister and I often retained the same posture in our photos. She stood on the left side and nuzzled me up to her chest with her right hand. We used to spend every summer together at our grandparents’ apartment in Hefei, a wet, fragile city in southeastern China. I thought of her as I watched Sylvia and Frances – throughout their testimony, they couldn’t help …
