Editor’s Note
So many of the thoughts in this issue are framed as questions, or imperatives: How far the self away from home? How far do we stand from memories of our inheritance, and how long before those tongues we consider our own are lost to the bustle of cities transformed, and identities colonized. Consider this as you read: that language is both the subject and object of alienation, perpetrator and victim of our loosening from alcoves once unquestioned.
Consider language as a double-edged sword in the opening lines of Maria Duran's “not an emigration poem”, where a grandmother, in her most loving words, imparts to her granddaughter all the ways of fleeing from self-recognition. Allow yourself to be trapped in the closing few lines of Hillary Nguyen's “To Eat a Mango after War”, where homes consume their inhabitants even while nourishing their assimilation, and taste the foreignness of English in “My Mother's Tongue” as Lór O’Neill sounds out old meanings from new straitjackets that render them unrecognizable.
Consider that an imposed dialect prevents us from looking to the past and seeing ourselves reflected in the lives of our predecessors, but do not dismiss the possibility of finding our way back to them using our powers of imagination. Perhaps we may alienate a single word into several pieces, as with Marina Kraiskaya in “Rasputitsa”, and search for clarity in the spaces that emerge—or perhaps we may abandon the notion of linguistic boundaries completely, as Elena Traina in “Brinking”, and lay claim to all the languages we have loved and resented by reframing them as one conglomerate.
The past few months have not been friendly to those seeking a road home from displacement. We have witnessed a staggering loss of human lives in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan; and destruction of the cultural pillars that testified to their place in history. We hope to reflect on the resilience of those affected while also, and always, keeping an eye toward next steps: as the steward of your own linguistic heritage, what can you do to prevent the extinction of others’?
Thank you for visiting, and please take care at this time.
Sincerely,
Aria Miao / Editor in Chief