Introduction

This project broadly considers and attempts to concretize the floating archive of what we are referring to as “poetry of migration”. As a genre, this body of poetry is characterized by writers whose work was tangibly impacted by their migrant experiences. In an attempt to address the full scope of migrant journey, our project approaches this body of work on multiple scales. From the broadest reducing of books into points on a map to much more detailed close readings of individual poems, we have tried to vary our engagement with these texts in recognition of their breadth and variability. Especially unstable in these works are the concept of ‘home’, and it’s relationship to both origin and destination in journeys of migration. The tension between voluntary and forced migrations is also evident in some of the works included in our mapping, specifically our examination of Palestinian and Korean diasporas. Overall, this project is rife with tension and contradiction: between the global and the local, journey and destination, new and old home, push and pull. However, our project’s recognition and embodiment of these dichotomies is also exactly what we hope to reveal with our work—that stories of migration are often characterized by these conflicting dualities. In them, it is always both and often neither.

Global Map

Global Map

The website hosts our Global Map, where we are mapping our growing bibliography of poetry. Every text we have engaged with is included in this Global Map. At this very broad level of interpretation, we designate each book, poem, or performance included with a single interpretative point: an ‘origin’, ‘destination’, or other significant location identified in the text. 

Determining this point is a grueling exercise in interpretation. The tripartite narrative of a journey marked by beginning, middle, and end is already an oversimplification and bureaucratic fantasy—often actively resisted by the texts themselves. To choose only one point is even harder. Considering these texts alongside the endless cycle of migrants caught in the purgatory of various migratory routes (such as La Bestia), each point along the route seems to represent the cumulative impact of an entire journey and beyond. Does choosing an intermediary point declare a migration forever unfinished, caught between here and there? Is the destination, then, a marker of hope or of cruelty? These choices of location carry moral and political weight, and in our interpretations, we have tried to find the location that most embodies the text it is meant to represent, the one that seems to capture its ‘spirit’ best. 

Writers can be displaced, again and again, and carry multiple homes in their writing or none at all. Descendants of refugees often write about places they cannot visit, intermingling writing about migration with descriptions of a landscape they have not seen, artefacts of a generational trauma passed down. This work of reducing journeys, lifetimes, and histories into singular points can often feel derogatory and profane. However, our ultimate goal is not to distill and universalize the extraordinary work we have been reading; but rather to link these works—as varied as they are striking—on a global scale, through a common theme of migration, in hopes of revealing and creating generative connections in a fragile space already lacking in stability and belonging.

Project Maps

In a more in-depth analysis, we also have ‘project maps’ that take specific regions and engage with them at the level of the poet, the book, and even the poem. These project maps, both in complement and in rebuttal to our Global Map, gives a smaller selection the attention all of our collected poetry deserves. These project maps do not follow a single template, and vary in approach, method, scale, and presentation. They are, again, a set of interpretive decisions we have made to best express what we find important in these specific regions. These individual project maps are listed below, each with a short description.

Mapping Palestinian Migration in the 21st Century

“Borders & Promises: Mapping Palestinian Migration Poetry” explores the impact of migration and changing borders on Palestinian poets. The map will initially examine poetic traditions established by Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim in the wake of the 1948 exodus of Palestinian refugees from the newly established state of Israel. In keeping with this, the map will overview the political and historical developments leading to forced migration from Palestinian territories. After touching on their influence and contemporary writing published after 2000, the map will explore the migration stories and the work of thirteen poets of the Palestinian diaspora as they depict themes of statelessness, exile, and diaspora in their own writing. 

Mapping the Korean Diaspora

“Distant Centers, Atomized Selves: Mapping the Korean Diaspora” visualizes tensions between the migrant sense of origin and destination through the play of a mapped Korean diaspora that fans out across the globe, and excerpts from East Asian migration poetry that are further scattered between its points of displacement.