The reason is they’ve been killed
The truth is you’ve been too
The truth is you are now without a home
The reason is they’re in your home
The reason is they’ve convinced themselves you left
The truth is you only went to safety
The truth is they never let you back
The reason is they needed to protect their tribe
The truth is you are part of the same tribe
But no one speaks about that
The reason is it’s easier to be a threat
How else can they justify the killing
~ Nathalie Handal
Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world, and educated in the United States and United Kingdom. Her recent books include the flash collection ‘The Republics’, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing; the bestselling bilingual collection ‘La estrella invisible’ / ‘The Invisible Star’; the critically acclaimed ‘Poet in Andalucía’; and ‘Love and Strange Horses’, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, and winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, among other honors. Based in New York City and Paris, she is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.