LOOKING BEYOND BORDERS WITH ARMS OUTSTRETCHED
By virtue of its own hybridity as a manifesto, invitation, and poem, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera reimagines political borders; it observes their artificiality and porousness. Written in Spanish and English, Borderlands is perceptive and analytical; deconstructive and didactic. Anzal
As you lay dying, in a language I barely knew
As you lay dying, you coughed up worm-strings of words in a language I barely knew. Smooth platefuls of sound, slipping like the silver-butter of moonlight on a pond. Ephemeral. If I cannot conjugate (I cannot) – I die, you die, she would die, too, – how can I feel the rough edges of [&he
Charoset
not ch like chocolate / the kind of ch that gets stuck in the back of the throat & stops you from crying / the kind you throw together once a year / but like the moon it never sets / and stays behind & washes up / i wonder how many miles per hour […]
A Love Letter to the Glaswegian Dialect
“DJ Fucking Badboy here Steamin as Shite Am ’boot ti tell you a story ’Boot ma Friday nite…” This is how DJ Badboy’s ‘Friday Nite’ opens – a track well-familiar to anyone who spent their teens at sweaty Glaswegian house parties. I once made the error of writing about ‘Frid
Doctored Front Lines
In these unprecedented, uncertain times, as we navigate the new normal, I hope this note finds you and your family safe, as you know many people are struggling. Or something to that effect. The ‘new normal’ of email etiquette, so brilliantly satirised by Jessica Salfia’s poem ‘First lines of
Portokalia
“out of nothing I have created a strange new universe” – János Bolyai We were left an orange, sunset-blotted, not the golden apple we forgot. We were left a portokalia, when we stopped seeing, piles of leaves and mounds of mud gathered around the garden under our feet. We were left lost l
language/politics/identities in Eastern Europe’s breakaway territories
After a lengthy interrogation by a Russian soldier, which included questions ranging from the etymology of my middle name to my dad’s job (but not, naturally, my mum’s), I was allowed to cross the border from Georgia into the sunny Republic of Abkhazia. The strange thing about this crossing, how
