My parents are political refugees from Ethiopia. Uprooted by a civil war in 1991, they found refuge across the Red Sea, in a refugee camp in the highlands of Yemen–where I was born. 

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I’ve come to define myself and be defined by this term: Refugee. But what does that mean? Is a refugee someone who searches for a home? But when does this search end, exactly?

 

For me, a refugee is essentially someone who lives in-between worlds. In-between cultural references, linguistic branches, racial divides, etc. As a refugee, home becomes a constellation of physical landscapes, material possessions, and personal memories that are made and remade across distance and time.  

 

I’ve lived in the in-between for so long that I’ve become something of a bridge—between countries, between faiths, between grief and joy, between worlds people often refuse to see. My hope is that this work lets others cross over too. That it slows the stone mid-skip across the water, so we no longer glide past refugee stories without stopping to feel them.

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This site is where I house those stories. I explore the in-between in different mediums and ask questions like:

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How do you continue to survive in a world hell-bent on your destruction?

How do you continue to live when every day that you’re alive feels like a kind of death?

What does it mean to have faith?

What does it mean to be you? To be us?

 

This is hard to capture in one place, so I wrote a novel. Writing a book like this is like volunteering to be emotionally waterboarded by your own memories. But God told me to do it, so I did it. Feel me!?

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Also, where I come from, my community doesn’t really have the opportunity to engage with literature. And when they do, they don’t recognize themselves in the characters of mainstream literary fiction. I don’t either. I want my community... to walk into a bookstore and say, ‘Damn. That’s me.’ Or, 'this reads like something my mom would say!'

 

I think that a book written by us, for us (refugees in the multitudes we contain), could make readership more inclusive. 

 

Also, I'm often frustrated with how refugee and immigrant stories are reproduced in the form of Western fiction, organized on a structural principle of time-based, direction-oriented, and logically coherent narratives instead of seeking to approximate the shape of our experiences. Western fiction is really a european kind of colonization of literature that reshapes the world out of interest in its own image. 

 

Ultimately, I want this work and my writing to be a beacon of light in that larger constellation of what it means to have a home–a shelter–for others who also live in that “In-Between”.

 

When they tell us that we don’t have an address or a place in this world, I want my work to help us locate ourselves on the page, at least. Because we are deserving. And our stories are worthy of literature with a capital L.  Feel me!?

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