Adi Magazine

For Adi’s 20th issue, we are exploring experiences of exile and diaspora–of departures from situations that have been made intolerable by political extremes and societal constraints. In the midst of putting together this issue, the results of the 2024 United States presidential election resonated across our communities like menacing thunder. Jokes we had heard in 2017 about finding refuge in some other country were trotted out again, this time with more desperation, and, perhaps, more determination. Of course, many people all over the world have been confronted with similar reflections in reaction to their own crises. We wondered what we might learn from those experiences of departure and the shatter zones that extend out in their wake.

Even as our authors have been propelled “into the blank,” into an as-yet unknowable future, they are also interrogating the blank as a neutral space for possibility—a fill-in-the-blank—so that they can write their own futures. Each piece works in concert, each naming the nuances of their own departure and the feelings it provokes: sometimes relief, sometimes guilt, but always a sense of haunting. 

“I am what my mother (land) has endured,” writes poet Sarah Lubala in her essay “First Country.” In it, she meditates on a legacy of violence, one felt in her homeland—the Democratic Republic of Congo—and on her body, and that of her unborn child as she prepares to give birth in South Africa. 

Achiro P. Olwoch also contemplates the dubious legacy of violence and discrimination in Uganda. In “Born into Exile,” Olwoch shares that, facing persecution as a lesbian, she left her country because she could, but reminds us that living in exile means carrying around “a fractured identity,” that longs to return to a home that is no longer available.

That fractured identity permeates Ruxandra Guidi’s essay “Fatherland,” as she explores her complicated relationship with her father and her home country of Venezuela, which she left during the popular uprising El Caracazo. The uprising eventually swept in a new government that she and her father agreed about at first, but that eventually formed the fault line of their relationship.

In Idrissa Simmonds-Nastili’s essay “Touching the Elephant,” she entreats us to listen to new stories about Haiti, the land of her foremothers, and reflects how she and other members of the diaspora can overcome a sense of disconnection by working together. 

And in conversation with contributor Farah Abdessamad, Afghan muralist Omaid Sharifi talks about exile and the second lives of massacred artworks. With writer, editor, and The Palestine Festival of Literature co-producer Yasmin El-Rifae, we discuss her own departure from Egypt more than a decade ago after the Tahrir Square uprising, and the ghosts that haunt her homeland.

In Marie Vibbert’s “Live to Eat,” that spectral presence lives more in the unconscious urges of a man with an eating disorder, who decides to take drastic measures in a desperate attempt to feel both more and less alive. His is not a physical departure, but a departure of the self, which leads to dissociation. 

Jess Masi’s short story, “Dawn and Her Brother’s Ghost,” explores a different type of disconnection, not from a homeland but from a sense of self, as the protagonist is haunted by her brother’s ghost who disappeared from the rez as a child. “You were your brother’s living informant who could pass information between the physical and spirit worlds.” 

Finally, Leslie McIntosh’s “to birth laws of relational dark” is an invocation to meditate on the feeling of stepping out into the unknown. It examines the wonder and trepidation involved with the “dark,” which does not represent something negative, but signifies an absence that may catalyze creation. This poem inspired our issue’s title, too,  as we meditated on the generative possibilities of departure:

There are ships
going to and from
across the blank.
Locate your self
on each. Your dark
is a harbor—