Solidarities

In this sincere, vulnerable poem, Wasafiri's current International Writer in Residence Safia Elhillo describes a visit to Medellin, Colombia. She notes with wonder and softness how different memories come back to her – the feel of a mattress, the sound of a familiar Arabic – amid reflections on the different languages she carries.

In this incisive interview, Zena Agha speaks to one of the world's greatest cartoonists and journalists, Joe Sacco. They talk about his 2003 book, Palestine, in the context of the ongoing genocide, his most recent release, The Once and Future Riot (2025), which investigates the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal riots in India, and other work from across his decades-long career. Speaking openly about his positionality and experiences as a journalist and outsider to regions he covers, Sacco opens up about the brutality he has witnessed firsthand, the loss of hope, US foreign policy, settler logic, journalistic ethics, and more, in a conversation at once deeply personal and sharply political. This is an extract from Wasafiri 127: Solidarities.

The Pulitzer Prize finalist writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras speaks to the prolific Mexican author Valeria Luiselli about the 'gorgeous nesting dolls' of Luiselli's many works of fiction and nonfiction, particularly her latest book, Beginning Middle End (Fourth Estate, 2026). Their conversation bubbles and flows like lava from a volcano as they discuss the liminal space between languages, road trips, borderlands, mythologies, memory, and how we organise and structure narratives and time.

In these three strikingly different poems, Safa Khatib plays with imagery to build pace and create a dark and troubling atmosphere. 'End of the Line' is anchored in the real world – with overheard conversations and overhead announcements on the train – but unease filters in through the cracks. Meanwhile, 'Trespass' and 'Al-Fatihah' address the reader directly while ghostly figures and ideas give the impression of something slipping beyond our grasp.

In this poem by Sudanese writer, doctor, and activist Mujja Alloba, a woman in exile seeks to forge both an individual and collective sense of power and revolution. It is presented here in the original Arabic as well as translations in Turkish and English by A.F, Erkan Gürsel, and Akış Ka. In a special introduction, Gürsel highlights the responsibility of translators not just to texts but also to the wider political conversations they engage in. 

Brazilian writer, translator, and literary scholar Natalia Borges Polesso discusses how the composition of gender-dissident, racialised, and/or sick characters in fiction come together to imagine possible ends of the world – and therefore possible new worlds – by breaking normative expectations. Polesso reflects on the narrative choices in her own books, as well as the wider political changes that have occurred in recent years in Brazil, particularly the Bolsonaro regime's crackdown on queer and other marginalised communities and ideas as 'deviant' and 'dangerous'.

On whose face do the shadows of a divided history fall? This short story by Asghar Wajahat – translated from Hindi by Aditya Vikram – observes a refugee camp set up in the aftermath of the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat, India, haunted by the spirits of lost loved ones. Writing in an unabashedly Muslim voice, the story is narrated similarly to a dastaan, an oral form of Urdu storytelling from North India, and examines the psychic wounds of marginalisation based on faith, class, and gender pervading a rotting democracy. With an illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe. 

Ramallah-based poet and playwright Dalia Taha offers three poems that bear close witness to the occupation and genocide in Palestine — 'The sound of trees and children riding bikes through the windows. / The towers they blasted.' Originally written in Arabic, these poems meditate on the intimacy of objects, faces, and daily scenes amid an atmosphere of loss, grief, and destruction. The text's spare, beautiful English translations are by Sara Elkamel.