Gateways

“Disorientation becomes a gateway to something else.”

“It has been almost two years since we were waiting for you to take action. We expected you to not be just a viewer,” Shegofa Shahbaz wrote to the UN. But because she wasn't sure the UN would read a letter written by a twenty-year-old college student sent on behalf of all the Afghan girls whose lives have been shattered, Shahbaz sent it to ROOM, hoping we might publish it, hoping it might find its way to the UN. Of course we will publish it, we told her. We will publish it in English and Dari so that other Afghan girls might find strength and hope through these words that they might be heard—that they will be recognized.

In their “portrait of an analyst as a young man,” Murad Khan shows us how, from an early age, they also had to learn how to recognize and thread a needle through precarious forces. “We are all caught in a three-dimensional matrix, under forces that push us in different directions depending on the context we're in at any given moment,” writes Khan in “Re/calibrating” their quilted memoir of surviving family, country, medical school, and professional community. From Jerusalem, Naftally Israeli describes the seemingly insurmountable forces that have pushed his homeland into “apparent madness.” From the prophet Isaiah to the analyst Donald Meltzer, Israeli's essay, “From Exclusion to Erasure,” delves into the heart of darkness, a crazy quilt that has become Israel. “A complex and integrated view of the truth cannot be maintained by excluding entire swaths of the population from ethical (not just ideological) recognition,” he writes. “For recognition to be truly ethical […] it should be translated into action.” For Israeli, ethical action in his country must translate into new legal definitions relevant to unrecognized minority groups, new forms of political representation, and redistribution of resources.

From Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Israel to the United S