TORCH: Haiti, Crossing Borders of the Mind
The ocean is deep, unfathomably so. And one can stay on the surface or keep on plumbing the depths.
TORCH
14 posts
TORCH was a monthly series devoted to showcasing personal essays, interviews, and art about immigrant and refugee experiences. Featuring the work of diverse writers from around the globe, TORCH aims to shatter stereotypes and encourage greater understanding and empathy in a world where immigrant and refugee communities are often misunderstood and marginalized. Read the archives here.
TORCH: The Reunion
He was and still is a stranger, uninhabitable and distant like a whisper in a language I don't quite understand.
TORCH: The American Girl at the Temple
[T]o be a tourist in a foreign country is very different than being a tourist in a foreign country where you are expected to feel you have returned home.
TORCH: Twitch
America: land where anything can and does happen. Doors blow open by magic when you step on a rubber mat.
TORCH: Movement, Its Depictions, and Two-Way Tickets
The experience of migration lies not in binaries—pleasure-pain and triumph-catastrophe—but rather, like life itself, it resides in the space in between.
TORCH: Over the Borderline
I'm writing about the border through the eyes of children because the border is a problem of the imagination.
TORCH: Goga
She was brave, coming to the station that day. It was still a time when people seen associating with the “traitors” could have had trouble from the KGB.
TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
TORCH: My Father’s Mansion
I love the United States, too. Like a house I was raised in, though, I know it up close and can spot its many fissures.
TORCH: My American Playground
I left the car by the roadside and ran up the slope, in tears now, reaching the picnic tables and swings and, as bright and vivid as in my dreams, my purple-shaped climbing frame, exactly as I remembered it.
TORCH: Blood Trauma
But still: A pattern. The trauma had been diluted by time. But, it was still present, still discernible, in my blood.
TORCH: Lessons From My Grandma on Language and Silence
The sounds I made were pleasant to my ears, but that’s all they were to me. I was too young to understand what culture and heritage meant, too young to understand the reasons behind memorizing ancient poems.