Blog / Colloquies

Between Worlds

May 2, 2022 - By Marya Zilberberg

It wasn’t my choice to leave Odesa. My father decided, my mother agreed, and so it happened. In 1976. We were lucky to get out, lucky to avoid the fates of refuseniks and political prisoners in the Gulag, lucky that my father—who lost his job immediately upon applying for an exit visa—did not get arrested for parasitism, lucky that I would be able to live my life in the relative freedom of America. But part of the bargain was leaving forever and letting others contend with the insatiable cannibalism of the Soviet machine.

How do you put into words what it’s like to know you can never go back?

Think of it this way. You know how it is when your friend has been trying to get a hold of you, and you say to yourself, Well, I’ll get back to them...

War Childhood

March 19, 2022 - By Erri De Luca

(Logo of the War Childhood Museum, Sarajevo. Design: Anur Hadžiomerspahić. Used by permission)
 

You hear that girls pretend to be mothers and boys soldiers. What I see are children playing intensely and seriously at life; like puppies they exercise and train with every move they make.

Wars drag them from one place to the next with no toys in their refugee baggage. Whereas adults collapse, weeping, they look around, keeping their eyes close to the ground—watching to see if other children are coming, or a dog, or maybe a bird. Suddenly they fall asleep, in slumber shaped like a fortress.

Of course, in the moment, children do cry out in fear—from the explosions and from the infectious fear of...

Nisam pametna

March 8, 2022 - By Ulvija Tanović

March 8, 2022, 12:23 a.m.

I’ve been counting time, reckoning. . . It’s been 26 years, 1 week, and 2 days. . . It’s been 4 years, 2 months, and 28 days. . . It had been 3 years, 10 months, and 22 days. . . The siege of Sarajevo lasted for 1425 days. I wasn’t there. I watched it all on TV. I was there when the siege was officially lifted. February 26, 1996. My birthday. My sweet sixteenth. I’d come back as I had vowed I would. But I didn’t know that time gets bent out of shape, that you can never go back, that you have to keep going back, you never get to stop counting time, reckoning. . .

Seemingly, time has passed, but I’m watching it all on TV again. It’s happening somewhere else,...

Don't Let Racism Divide Us

March 7, 2022 - By Michel S. Moushabeck

Like many of you, I’ve been glued to the news this past week following Putin’s senseless, illegal, and immoral war on neighboring Ukraine. Our eyes are filled with images showing the horrors of Russia’s invasion. We stand in solidarity with the people of the Ukraine and our hearts and thoughts are with all those affected by this tragic war.  

As a Palestinian whose family was displaced and exiled, it is easy for me to identify with the suffering of the people of Ukraine and feel their anger towards the invading Russian army. The fear, the indiscriminate bombardment, the destruction, the scenes of women and children taking refuge in subways and underground shelters, and the ensuing massive refugee crisis are all too familiar to me. 

War sets...

If there is ink.

March 5, 2022 - By Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is a poet, translator, and activist. Her most recent books are What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin, 2019) and In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin US / Bloodaxe Books UK, 2020).