Critical theorist Walter Benjamin once distinguished between two types of storytellers: one is a keeper of the traditions; another is the one who has journeyed afar and tells stories of other places. But there is a third, and that is the exile. The exile, with a gaze that is obscured by distance and time, may not always be precise in terms of

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There’s a quote I like from Theodor Adorno, who said, “for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes place to live." While I’ve never been a refugee, I still feel that quote really strongly, as someone who’s never quite felt fully at home in most of my ordinary life– always a bit of an alien, always an outsider, always a minority, always... See more

Now… they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years have a kind of emptiness when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. But… if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between

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