I have been reflecting on healing and hope in recent years, in part because my work as a social worker and counselor immerses me in this conversation on a daily basis.
Category Archives: The Warp & Weft
The idea for THE WARP & WEFT was born in September 2020. It’s a multilingual archive of stories that hopes to capture the zeitgeist of that year. Learn more about the vision for this project by visiting ABOUT > THE WARP & WEFT STORY. This is an organic, ongoing project, where responses to the archive can renew and expand it. Please have a listen.
في الصين وباء انتشر، وصورٌعبر وسائل الإعلام والتواصل الاجتماعي هناك من يصارع الموت وهناك صرعى الموت انتشر ..لم يحرك ساكناً هذا الخبر، وكأن الكورونا ظهرت في كوكب زحل
[Harsher Than War by Ashwaq Abualoof: In China, an epidemic spread and pictures were shared in the news and on social media…]
If Mountains Were Oceans by Akmal Hanan: The world has seven continents and more than 190 countries, but destiny decreed that I was born in a landlocked country called Kashmir.
I observed an almost invariable amount of work about loss, as I read through The Warp & Weft archive. The stories made me realize that we have all experienced different, but equally difficult losses during 2020. My response, Empty Spaces, is a reaction to the stories which I found especially evocative and relatable…
I’m fresh off the boat—the one fashioned from ramparts of a journey laden with trauma, ugly-fulfilling prophecies, can’t-get-it-together tendencies and shoulders that have borne more than any one person should ever be allowed to bear.
Two years before COVID-19 spread around the world I was already facing one of the biggest challenges of my life. My creative life was in transformation.
In old family photographs I sometimes catch a glimpse of her: a stolid, middle-aged woman always in the background or at the margins. All that remains of her life now is in a small cardboard box in my sister’s attic: some papers, postcards, photographs, a bible. This is Gertrud.
Sometimes I feel like a ghost, haunting the ruins of respectable society. My name is Darien Lamen, PhD. But Lamen isn’t my real name–it’s a cover story.
My three-part response to the archive is inspired by Kirin Makker’s ‘Touch,’ Tania Day-Magallon’s ‘El Lenguaje es mi Tierra, mi Identidad,’ and Lauren Jimerson’s ‘My Story.’
El lenguaje es mi tierra, mi casa, mi madre; y estos tres elementos son femeninos cuando se dicen en español. Cuando me despojas de mi lenguaje, es arrancar también mi forma de expresión. Es dejarme desnuda de una parte de mí y mi Feminidad Divina, que justamente está intrínsecamente ligada a mi tierra madre.
[Language is my Land, my Identity by Tania Day-Magallon: Language is my land, my home, my mother; and these three elements are feminine in Spanish…]
I have one photograph of my great grandfather, Roscoe Foster. He is sitting in a rocking chair, on the porch of his home in Columbia, Mississippi, with a black dog. Family says that when the Ku Klux Klan was riding near, he would sit on that porch with a shotgun.
Time. It is stamped upon our birth certificate upon arrival and upon our death certificate at departure. It is also the container for everything in between.
