Sanctuary
by THE EDITORS
in Spring 2024
Julia Mallory, “Homegirls & Handgrenades”, 2021, Watercolor collage on paper, 24 in. x 18 in.
Before there was this place there really was sanctuary. There was per ankh. There was mbongi. There was mukowa. We had our ways, and while they were not perfect, they were intentional, communal. They were not this.
Sanctuary: to provide a safe space, a refuge. Sanctuary is the thing denied so many of us since the advent of modernity. The very idea of liberal subjecthood meant that only some would stand in for protection, it meant the sanctity of some lives, and it meant the preservation of only some homelands. Liberal ideology is only a guarantee for some. And the sum of us all has never been its horizon for success. Rather, we are summed up, hemmed in, made to be the refuse.
Settler colonialism was a disruption of sanctuary. Its ongoing valences which continue to justify war and dispossession is the destruction of sanctuary. We write in the midst of what Bedour Alagraa calls an interminable catastrophe.[1] We are writing in a mode and mood of desperation. We are writing in a mode and mood of grief. Yet we are not empty-handed. We write through powerful traditions of refusal to be refuse. This resistance then is about sanctuary, about providing a place for ourselves, a place for our words, a place that is a house of life.
As our holy of holies is attacked every day, we know that true sanctuary can be realized. It is in the memory, in the love we cultivate, in the visions of freedom that liberalism has never quite understood. This desire to live again manifests daily in the struggles to not let lives be lost in silence, to not let our institutions comply with the liberal norms which sacrifices those lives, in our abilities to say and really mean free the land. Free Palestine and Congo and Sudan and Haiti and everywhere else. A Gathering Together invites you to read and return to the poems and essays that constitute our Spring 2024 issue, keeping in mind the resolve of all those who resist, in the names of all who, though refused sanctuary, continue to know that it will one day exist again.
References
[1] Bedour Alagraa, “The Interminable Catastrophe,” March 1 2021, https://offshootjournal.org/the-interminable-catastrophe/