“Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.”
— James Baldwin, The Creative Process
Coming soon.
Inspired by the history of Little Syria & the first writers who left the homeland for their literary freedom, ‘Tribeless’ holds a collective space of writing, art, and testimony.
In this space where history and the present intertwine, our liberated ink mixes together. I too have had to leave home and the tribe for the freedom to create, to live, to dare. And when I moved to Brooklyn, I could feel the presence of the ones who came before me, opening to receive my own migration.
Our shared hunger merges, our collective longing for home meets the other in a ceremony of intense creation. Our words are without borders; we cross into each other’s time without visas, without permission.
We keep one eye on the homeland, and one eye here — on our scattered tribe and their untold stories. We are wounded and wounding, emancipated and caged in what we won’t see, what we won’t change.
This project honors the original founders and writers of the New York journal, “The Pen Bond” — who understood that the diasporic community needed their attention, their truths, their unfiltered examination. It is with this same intention that this journal was created.
Pedagogy
“... the big question today is whether we will approach decolonization in the characteristic robotic and soulless way of Europatriarchal Knowledge or if the language we use will itself reflect the outcome we seek...
Imagine the mind as garden. Our traditional idea of decolonizing it would be like vigorously chopping down a poison ivy that is threatening to infest the garden with its toxic branches. But decolonizing the garden of the mind is more about planting new, rare, forgotten and hybrid trees, herbs, and flowers that eventually do away with the ivy. It is decorating the trees with bowls where birds can rest and sing songs of freedom. It is creating a wild meadow in the center of the enclave and finding time to just lie in the green place....
A decolonial feminism is explicitly antipatriarchal in nature, meaning the language with which we speak of decolonization must be itself one of reinvention. It is a language in which trauma is healed not only through intellect and struggle but also through arts and poetry, through ancestral knowledge and through the spiritual nomadism that emanates from African journeys. ”