The piece opens with voice notes exchanged with my cousin in Tehran, my childhood best friend unseen for 27 years, as internet servers fall under shutdown and cyberattack, and moves outward: into the Persian concept of ghorbat, the open-ended strangeness of exile; into the false binary Western media has imposed between supporting foreign intervention and tolerating the Islamic Republic’s repression; and into a genealogy of American and Israeli interference that has historically destroyed the very conditions for democratic flourishing.
memory
There are many different types of guides at historical sites, and I wanted to be at least one of them.
I wrote this about a year ago when I was planning to leave L.A., and now I’m back so here we are.
After I graduated from college in 1987, I took a job at East Hill Farm and School, an alternative school located on a mountain top farm in southern Vermont.
The past really is a foreign country, as historian Jonathan Ablard finds when piecing together the turbulent history of his ancestors in the West and Midwest.
At the close of Teatro Campesino’s 1972 film Los Vendidos/The Sellouts, originally a play written by Luis Valdez, a menagerie […]
I pulled into the garage, took off my helmet, and stepped into the kitchen. Then I was greeted by the enormous smiles and warmth of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mrs. Nomalizo Leah Tutu.
In June 1942, Kenji and just over one hundred other children were taken from their parents and relocated to Manzanar.