"A refugee is nostalgic both for the past, which is more or less on the other side of “the border”—the border of citizenship or race or religion or gender or wealth or time or distance and so on—and for the future on the horizons of which the contours of belonging and becoming are visible, though often only tentatively, intermittently, contingently, and so remain vulnerable to the ebb and flow of politics. This is what being a refugee or immigrant engenders, this inhabiting of precarity, this barefoot walk on the blazing embers of having to belong at once here and there, which is to say never really—not without a healthy sense of irony—having a firm grasp of either here or there. In short, the immigrant or refugee writer, by virtue of her radically contingent existence—and Lord what ghosts of worlds traversed court her, what demons of deferred dreams haunt her—or by virtue of the solitude that is her ever-negotiated presence and persistence, she is condemned to remember and dream in the same breath."
--Nyuol Lueth Tong, Editor-in-Chief, The Bare Life Review