Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak

Yanara Friedland

I think of the border as an original space of encounter: a multi-vocal and asynchronous flow of impossible journeys.

The writing, part essay, part poem, emerged from conversations with asylum seekers, refugees, immigration lawyers, expert witnesses and translators exploring the role of personal narrative or so called “home narratives” in the context of asylum hearings.

Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak returns to the original documents, memories, voices, failure.

“You must learn to exist as foreign

as ritual

as malady

You must learn the nothing

that saves itself”

YANARA FRIEDLAND is a German-American writer, translator, and teacher. She holds a PhD from the University of Denver, and recently completed a long walk across multiple border regions in Europe. Her novel Uncountry: A Mythology is the 2015 winner of the Noemi Fiction Prize. She is a member of the poets’ theater group GASP: Girls Assembling Something Perpetual, and lives in the desert of southern Arizona.