POETRY LIANNE WILSON p. 12-13 ‘Dasperghenegi’ EMMY CLARKE p. 24 ‘SAME’ MARY PAULSON p. 26-27 ‘Arc’ BENJAMIN HUSBANDS p. 46 ‘Study in Semiotics #1’ NATALIE HAYWOOD p. 67 ‘On Yer Jollies’ SODÏQ OYÈKÀNMÍ p. 68-69 ‘my body is a garden’ ADAM PANICHI p. 97 ‘Contrappunto’ RAWAN SOKAR p. 104-107 ‘In the Lament of Identity’
FICTION EVE RADVILLE p. 15-21 ‘I am not your friend’ JUDY MA p. 28-33 ‘Temporarily Misplaced’ ILDIKO PECHMANN p. 70-73 ‘Hiraeth’ ANNA NIXON p. 109-113 ‘Orange on the inside’
FEATURES ANA BALACI p. 7-11 ‘I dream of Sarmale’ PX p. 48-53 ‘A journey of adoption and identity’ LAETITIA LESIEURE DESBRIEREBATISTA p. 74-79 ‘But where are you really from?’ SERGEY GUSEV p. 90-95 ‘On the other side of the barricade’ DIEGO FABRICATORE p. 99-102 ‘War belongs to others’
ART ANA JESUS ‘Diaspora’ p. 6 ANDRA SMALENIC ‘Heavy Coat’ p. 8-9 ‘See you soon’ p. 11 JOÃO SARAMAGO ‘Invisible Matter’ p. 12-13 ‘The Betrayal Cycle’ with Auntie Margaret p. 46-47 ARANI HALDER ‘People, Period’ p. 22-23 MUGIRE PEACE DAVID ‘Icon 02’ p. 25 CASSIO ‘Urbana’ p. 27 JOHN AYOBAMIDELE ‘The Journey so far’ p. 66 E.L. RODRÍGUEZ ‘Care for you, care for me, care for all of us’; ‘Cycles of time, growth and joy’ p. 68-69 XINAN YANG ‘I Still Care’ (series) p. 70-73 KATERYNA BORTSOVA ‘A way to my heart - Italy’ p. 96 ‘Way to my heart London’; ‘To Catch the Leipzig’ p. 98-101 ALEJANDRO MACIAS ‘The Space Between’ p. 103 NATALIA TCHERNIAK ‘Repainted Self’, ‘Drowned Self’ p. 104-7 TARA LYNCH ‘I Heart Dublin?’ p. 108
EDITORIAL PASCUAL + VINCENT ‘The Saxons of Transylvania’ p. 34-45 SIPHEPHILE SIBANYONI ‘The Last Defenders’ p. 54-65 MATHUSHAA SAGTHIDAS ‘Not just Brown, not just Indian’ p. 80-89
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‘Diaspora’ ANA JESUS
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i dream of sarmale * ANA BALACI The first time I set foot outside the borders of Romania, I was emigrating, alone, to a country I had never seen outside the screen of my television or the pages of books. I was freshly twenty, my whole life packed into one big suitcase as well as several reused grocery bags in the back of my father’s Dacia, and I was ready to start my new life, one I had imagined myself living for the past four years, the life of a student in the UK. I was filled with the kind of idealism that is reserved only for the blissfully unaware. In many ways, having been born in Romania, in 1995, only five and a half years after the Romanian revolution, meant being born into a generation and country in transit — from dictatorship to democracy, from socialism to capitalism, from outdated technology to the shiny, new, globalised world of the internet. It is perhaps not unthinkable, then, that so many of us, born during that time, find ourselves now in a perpetual transitional state as immigrants living in the West. Most of us were brought up longing for Western freedoms and commodities — not least degrees and careers that our country simply could not offer us. In our minds, we saw ourselves walking the streets of Western capitals such as London, Berlin, Amsterdam or Paris more readily than we did the streets of Bucharest, Brașov, Sibiu or Cluj. In many ways, we had left Romania long before our physical departure was to take place.
* Sarmale is a traditional Romanian dish consisting of stuffed cabbage or sometimes vine leaf rolls. Variations of this dish exist across several regions both in Europe and West Asia. They are believed to have originated in Turkey, however they are a multicultural dish. It is this multicultural element, this shared familiarity, that, to me, makes them the perfect dish.
Temporarily Misplaced JUDY MA
Still in the queue were eleven other jobs, and Beth’s thesis was ninth in line. In shorts, she waited, pinching her bare legs as the printer regurgitated the works of complete strangers. She wondered how the other students were so confident, letting anyone passing by judge their writing; unlike her - timid, cowering beside the printer - scared that others might regard her work as worthless. All around her was the swoosh of paper sliding into the output tray. Beth caught some lone words, but they could just as well have been snow on a disturbed TV screen. The longer she stared, the more she felt the thoughts in her head slow down. Something fuzzy stirred in the pit of her stomach, tickling her from the inside. It was the feeling of being on a ride through the country, when she pressed her forehead against the cool window and felt her eyeballs squeezed when the train sped past a dense row of trees. It was as though something deep inside her had been drawn out of her body and discarded between the trees far behind. Before she knew it, that part of herself had become irretrievable. If she kept staring at the paper and printer, the hypnotic sound and movement might cause her to lose a fundamental part of herself. Within a day or two, she might notice a change in her usual way of thinking. If she raised her hand, she’d see it turn flimsy, white, without any nerves, sinew or bones; and when she heard the beep, she’d willingly feed her non-hand into the printer. Then the cycle would continue with her other hand, her arm, moving down to her leg, until every part of her was decrepit and flat.
At least, the sensation was familiar to her. She still remembered it from years ago: diving head-first into water, leaving behind everything she knew. The cold quickly seeped through her skin and spread to her lungs. She felt the little icebergs in her body crackling and melting; then, what seemed like hours later, the frozen bits connected to form a new heart and other organs, so even though her appearance was the same, she had changed on the inside in a fundamental way. What troubled her was that when she looked in the mirror, it wasn’t clear what had changed. Beth blinked. The long week had drained away her energy. The all-nighters made her question her sanity and wavered her grasp on reality. All she had left was to watch the printer spit out the result of her work. What was it all for, really—a stack of paper covered with baffling markings. Yet it had been her night and day; the totality of her best and worst days in the last four months recorded in this paper. Her word choice and sentence structure reflected the novels she read. There was a clear contrast in style somewhere between the sixth and eighth page, which she had written during the three days she had read all of one author’s books before moving on to continue her surrealist phase.
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Pascual + Vincent are two Spanish photographers collaborating as a duo since 2013. The human condition is their field of personal and artistic action, and their work proposes a polyhedral and transversal vision in the way of seeing and understanding that relationship between the human being and the space that surrounds it. ‘The Saxons of Transylvania’ is the second part of a trilogy that began in 2014 in Romania with a first project: ‘The tree of life is eternally green’. Both works have been published by the English publisher Overlapse, and have received numerous national and international awards. www.pascualvincent.com @pascual_and_vincent
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THE SAXONS OF TRANSYLVANIA
PASCUAL + VINCENT
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“BRIDE TO BE”
“The most painful thing is seeing your peers being on western clothing and leaving the village for greener pastures in the city. Then they get so depressed there, struggling to cope. The man I had to marry turned out to become an alcoholic. He couldn’t cope with city life.” Himba Land Kunene District Namibia (March 2018)
NOT JUST BROWN NOT JUST INDIAN MATHUSHAA SAGTHIDAS
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‘NOT JUST BROWN, NOT JUST INDIAN’, focuses on the lived experiences and beauty of South Asian women as well as celebrations, traditions and history of South Asian countries from a female perspective. “As an Eelam Tamil woman, like most other South Asians, I just made the assumption I was Indian, as if that’s the only country to exist in South Asia, as I feel our cultures and traditions are often classed as one (hence the name). It was as if I was made to feel that my ‘appearance’ didn’t seem to fit the expectation of what some outside or even within the South Asian community believed a Tamil woman should be. Working with SA women from their respective countries, I wanted to show parts of their stories and culture from an authentic perspective - to give them a space and chance to celebrate who they are and everything they have been raised around; and really amplify these stories.” The images for each country focus on different aspects of its culture.
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adult ones pricking their skin. Then we were plucked from the tree together. They soared into the air and I was placed in a crate on an aeroplane. In the basket next to us on the supermarket shelf carrots lie in crowded rows. They share our skin colour but not our hue, because theirs is not soft like ours but sharp. When they’re freshly bathed the carrots glisten like the smiling people on the posters. Like them the carrots roll and fold with each touch, as if trying to get an even tan. On our other side are sweet potatoes. That’s what they’re called, but they don’t look anything like the potatoes at the other end of the aisle. Their skin is the sallow brown of dry soil, crumbling at the edges and curving in and out. They smell of earth clad boots on dusty paths, and are a mirage of my post home. I used to wonder why they were put with us, with their skin a completely different shade, but then I saw one cut clean in half. Inside its flesh was orange, the beautiful burnt orange of an overripe apricot. Then the pattern made sense.
‘I Heart Dublin?’ TARA LYNCH
Most of the people who cast shadows on us as they pass have skin the colour of the lighter parts of peaches. When their children speak to strangers or they tap their pockets repeatedly at the till it turns to the shade of the darker part. Some of them have skin the colour of walnuts or polished coconut shells, though there are not as many of them. They weave around shelves and rattle trolleys from the sunrise to the sunset, and even after that. I am looking at the shadows the early sun casts in the car park, as
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one woman catches my eye. Her skin, like mine, is shining with the morning sun. Her eyes, a hazel brown like the sun and the earth combined, rush to skim the shelves and fall fixed on mine. She thrusts one hand out towards me, the other one on the strap of a cream shoulder bag. As she lifts me from my position on the top of the stack her thumb grazes across my skin. It feels soft and warm and fills me with a comforting thrill. I am whisked through the air with a bird’s eye view of the supermarket. The carrots, apples, sweetcorn, tomatoes and potatoes fly past beneath me. Then we get to the till, and it is as black as the pavement’s tar. One strip of jet black rotating. Everything seems to rotate here, though perhaps that is just my perspective. The woman’s hand spins me against her palm, long slim fingers in quick movements. It is lights, conveyor belt, floor, shelves in one swift motion. Again and again until I am flung forward with an ‘Is that all?’
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