Khalid Sings and I Wonder Where Home Is in the First Place
Does America like me? Do I like her? What is America actually like?
...moreDoes America like me? Do I like her? What is America actually like?
...moreI finish counting and start over, trying, always, to solve the equation of myself.
...moreAmerica: land where anything can and does happen. Doors blow open by magic when you step on a rubber mat.
...moreTo the extent that America—that great big word that makes us all so anxious—exists at all, it exists as a vast and noisy sheet of bubble wrap.
...moreThe experience of migration lies not in binaries—pleasure-pain and triumph-catastrophe—but rather, like life itself, it resides in the space in between.
...moreCan one love one’s country into a better version of itself? And can that love better the self?
...moreOne thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
...moreI’m not here to wallow in what feels like our new dystopia, no. Me? I am here, to rest up before the next bout. I am here to watch The Price Is Right and make friends.
...moreKool A.D. discusses his debut novel, OK, the war on drugs, systemic destruction of left-leaning movements by the government, and the inability to escape American capitalism.
...moreGeeta Kothari discusses her debut collection, American xenophobia, and the immigrant narrative.
...moreAmerica is a broken window pane—shards of glass, each reflecting a different light.
...moreMohsin Hamid discusses his new novel, Exit West, hope in fiction as a form of resistance, the necessity of learning to accept social change, and how much America and Pakistan have come to resemble each other.
...moreRaised in Texas, I was taught to hold my hand over my heart when the flag was raised, to thank everyone in uniform, and to organize my life in this order; God, Country, Family. Even now, tears spring to my eyes in some sort of Pavlovian response when I hear Lee Greenwood warble, “I’m proud to […]
...moreIt paralyzes me to think about the sacrifices my family made before I was in my mother’s womb. When they came here they knew they would lose a part of their language, their memories, their sanctity of self.
...morePoet Corinne Lee on writing her epic book-length poem Plenty and finding new ways to live in a rapidly changing world.
...moreGive amnesty. / Which birthright / is perpetual / and whose is made? / One sentence / should be kept: / I had a body / to believe.
...moreEveryone around us is speaking Russian, and I feel like we are in Russia, the old one, before the wall came down. For a moment, I even feel like I belong.
...moreDry-mouthed, standing shoulder to shoulder, / They watch the carousel spit out black bags / And mumble “not mine” over and over.
...moreTORCH is a series devoted to showcasing personal essays, interviews, and art about immigrant and refugee experiences.
...moreSo, what would populist ideology even look like in Star Wars?
...moreDo you keep a dream journal? I started as a teenager, and continue on-and-off. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a memory. Does this happen to you? Or am I confessing to something strange and pathological? Where is the line between pathology and creativity?
...moreI want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from.
...more“You can’t hold on to the past,” Elif once told me. “You don’t know how. You don’t know what to keep, what to throw away. So you keep it all. And you can’t do that. No one can.”
...moreEvery time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark the outline of my body with blinking stars and black thread.
...moreThis election is critical. We are code-red. We might elect our first woman president, or we might elect a man who is at best dangerous and unqualified and at worst the end of democracy as we know it today.
...moreWhat if I said: while people still believe they are white in America, that delusion, and the dream upon which it is founded, needs to be seriously examined.
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