Blog / Colloquies

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).

Another War

March 2, 2022 - By W.D. Ehrhart

Last night it rained, and then turned cold.
Today the trees are coated in ice,
every bare branch, every tiny needle
on the evergreens. Now the sun’s come out,
the sparkle on the trees is dazzling,
enough to lift the heaviest heart,
enough to make you think this world’s
not so hopeless as it seemed last night.

Last night, Russian missiles hit Ukraine,
and Russian tanks crossed the border
headed for Kyiv. Who’s at fault?
Who did what to whom? No doubt
the fingers will be pointing sixteen
different ways to Sunday. Anymore,
it’s hard to care whose fault it is.
It just keeps happening.

How War Begins

February 24, 2022 - By Izet Sarajlić and Jim Hicks

Tonight, driving home from the Mass Review office, I listened to a report on All Things Considered. An expert from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies opined on the distinctions between “invasion” and “incursion” and how best to describe what’s happening today in Ukraine. It’s difficult, of course, to keep one’s blood from boiling, or to keep one’s brain from thinking of arguments about angels dancing on pins and needles. Yet in my case, as is today no doubt true of many outside the world’s comfort zones, I also couldn’t help thinking, haven’t we been here before...

In Memoriam, Gianni Celati (1937-2022)

February 19, 2022 - By Patrick Barron

I came to know Gianni Celati through his writings (if knowing a person in this way is possible), beginning in the late 1990s when I found his book Narratori delle pianure (“Storytellers of the Plains,” translated as Voices from the Plains) in a shop in Ferrara, a town in northern Emilia Romagna not far from the Po River, where I was living at the time and working as an English teacher. On the cover is a photograph of Celati by Luigi Ghirri, a lone figure facing away from the camera and standing on a muddy road that curves to the left across a vague expanse of snowy land, slightly crooked and bent over something immediately at hand. I imagine that Celati is taking notes, trying to describe his surroundings—the seemingly nondescript expanse of wintry...