The Places Power Keeps

Written from inside a tent in Gaza during the winter of 2025, this lyrical testimony captures how something once gentle—rain—has become another force of terror. Moving between memory and survival, the writer recounts caring for her children as water floods their shelter, revealing how war transforms even the most ordinary elements of life into threats. A meditation on motherhood, loss, endurance, and what it means to keep breathing while waiting for the surface.

This personal account traces one man’s life across war, displacement, and forced migration—from a childhood in a Darfur displacement camp to years of precarious survival in Libya. Through interrupted education, informal labor, detention, and repeated failed attempts to cross the Mediterranean, the writer documents how conflict and global asylum systems shape refugee lives long after the moment of flight.

Set along the India–Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir, this reported essay traces how Partition continues to shape everyday life decades after the violence of 1947. By focusing on ordinary moments rather than spectacle, it shows how borders endure through repetition, silence, and the slow erosion of belonging.

This essay traces one Romni’s inheritance of survival through her grandmother, a survivor of the Porrajmos—the Nazi genocide of Roma and Sinti people—an atrocity that remains largely absent from public memory. It examines how the lack of memorialization mirrors the ongoing marginalization of Rom communities across Europe today.