Part Two: Responses in Art History and Art Criticism
The poetry and essays in this section center art and exhibitions that model new modes of recognizing migration as it relates to the self, relationships with others, the prospect of new social, political and economic forms, geographic and cultural mobility. The art writing in this section is essential to broadening the discourse of the artists’ endeavor to represent the experience of social and political identification as a combination of factors related for example along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, citizenship and religion.
Ifrah Mahamud Magan’s poem, Refugees, describes the existential complexity of the refugee as she contemplates homeland, memory, and language. Kalia Brooks examines the artwork of Jennifer Ling Datchuk as an exploration of race and gender that contemplates themes related to identity, otherness and belonging, which are rooted in her mixed Chinese and White American heritage. Hannah Ryan uses a series of conversations with New Orleans-based artist Chandra McCormick to explore how motherhood affected her displacement during Hurricane Katrina. Deborah Willis investigates the role of travel in Carrie Mae Weems’s practice of connecting historical references from the Middle Passage to forced and voluntary migration today. Arlene Dávila’s critical review of the exhibition Latinx Abstract debates the political possibilities and constraints of abstraction for artists and communities of color, in particular Latinx artists. Cheryl Finley’s essay on photographer Joy Gregory’s series Cinderella Tours Europe (1997–2001) considers notions of home and belonging, race, gender and nation. Yelaine Rodriguez argues that the symbol of the Black Madonna is connected to various demographics and geographical locations in her attempt to uncover the origin of this depiction.
The transience of the migratory experience is often made tangible through the aesthetic contribution of artists. The writers in this section capture not only the formal quality, but also the materials, ideas and sensibilities that push boundaries, affirming that art comes from and extends into the world at large. These writers emphasize the notion that difference, as expressed in poetry and art practice, creates a productive opportunity for disparate resources, communities, regions, techniques, and origins to discursively express the plurality of the human experience that will serve as the model for the future.
15. Refugees
© 2022 Ifrah Mahamud Magan, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0296.15
refugees. without lands. no longer a place to call home. ocean waters calling, but shores afraid to receive us.
refugees because borders define citizenship. humans don’t just settle in this world, unless, they destroy your home.
refugees. blues skies and full moons we gaze upon, wondering when we can finally feel the breeze. breeze and ease, waiting for some peace of mind. waiting to accept and be accepted by others we never met.
waiting. we do a lot of waiting and thinking until thoughts turn into dreams. dreams we dream to stay alive. to stay hopeful and faithful. faithful we are to our deen. to our Lord Who Sees Us even when we can no longer see. ourselves. our own heart aches. soul drifts away to a land where only angels live. we remain alive. listening to the stories of a land we don’t remember, but yet our memory encapsulates every pavement we missed to touch.
our memory tries to hold on to memories never made. of a past without pathways—to futures unknown and presents wrapped like gifts never opened. but every time i search, i find this land so strange yet close to me. i hear the words of my father as he prayed in early hours before dawn.
i hear the tears of my mother as she wonders how we’ll make home of a land so foreign, so far away from the place she calls home.
home was her birthplace and places she found familiar faces. she belonged, felt belonged to. home was the pieces made together with my father.
she now wonders what happens to the pieces shattered. by pain and diasporic tales of being a Black Muslim mother. to Black Muslim children in a land where their identities serve as threats to national security.
a land where she found peace, yet is difficult to embrace as home. because home is a place where she’s embraced without question. where she can speak in her eloquent speech, trilingual but her intelligence reduced by the mere fact that she doesn’t speak the language of this land.
english is expected to be spoken, but english is never expected to be traded for languages called “foreign”, but what if the foreign is familiar and the familiar is foreign. what if we never negotiate with deals not made by us. what if we let go of things not meant for us.
what if. what if we define our truth to counter every lie against us.
what if we come together as family, in a land unfamiliar to us, but in hopes of making it our home. our home is every place we built bricks made out of strength and survival and patience.
our home is every place we encountered beautiful souls, people so different from us, but who we felt like we’ve known.
our home is always with us, deep down in our souls, because we are the bricks needed, and God is the reason why we still stand tall.