To introduce the issue that lies ahead, I thought I’d say something about the great themes of domesticity. About how relationships, family, home life, intimate life, just might be the ultimate literary topics—how such themes are rife with opportunities for deep investigation and a most exciting kind of subjectivity. How they are crucial to understanding our shared humanity and yet they’ve so often been set aside as less significant (more feminine?) than subjects from outside the home and the self. Milia Ayache and Amina Hassan, Maud Casey, Christine Sneed, Tomaž Šalamun, and so many others, all have something to say about the “family dinner,” so to speak—about the father, the mother, the daughter, the home. 

But to tie their writing to themes of domesticity seems a bit reductive and not quite right, not for them nor for the issue as a whole. Besides, some of the other pieces here really are more about the outside, unfamiliar world, about decidedly un-domestic topics like war and art and earthquakes. And some are (at least obliquely) about travel and tourism and the thorny ground that separates the two. Parsing the difference between traveler and tourist, then, seemed like it might be a useful way to encapsulate or introduce the issue, as this difference might also shed light on the differences between art and commerce, appreciation and appropriation, venturing in and venturing out—and maybe on the literary project in general. While a tourist seeks to fulfill expectations and assumptions about a place, the traveler seeks to break from the comfort zone in search of the unknown. One easy, one challenging; one commercial, one not—with the implication that the reading and writing of literature clearly falls on the traveler’s side of the divide. Or does it? Poems and stories by Analicia Sotelo, Steven Duong, and Nandini Dhar confront, though do not explicate, these subjects, suggesting ways in which colonialization and exploitation and pleasure all fall into the mix when one visits a new place, all with more nuance than can possibly be spelled out here. Perhaps, then, the idea of travel most broadly, without judgment—the idea of simply going someplace new—is what unites these pieces. In a sense they are all about travel, whether into or away from home, whether undertaken to explore the inner life or the outer. 

And this might lead nicely to the international feature on Lebanon, which radiates at the center of this issue, and how in this case the editorial impulse itself has gone traveling. The section in fact was born out of guest editor Marilyn Hacker’s desire to go someplace new, to know it more deeply, to feel the heat and rain and to hear voices in cafés. It began with her fascination and curiosity about the Lebanese writers whose works she’d read and translated and culminates here in something altogether uncategorizable. Domesticity and travel make their way into this section, for sure, but these poems, stories, essays, and a play—the work of fourteen Lebanese writers and their translators—are only loosely about Lebanon, the place traveled to. And even to call these writers Lebanese doesn’t quite work. Some are citizens and some are not; some reside in Lebanon now and some have fled; some are refugees born in Lebanon or just living there for now. And here, with the refugee, is where all the themes I’ve attempted so far seem to fall apart. Here is where the familiar and domestic are disrupted, and even to think of a refugee in terms of travel, much less tourism, feels wrong, as there is no home to go back to. It may be time, then, to cast out completely any thoughts of thematic or literary coherence.

It is possible that the only common ground is that every piece of writing here attempts to use language in sly and innovative ways, attempts to convey what’s most urgent to the individual writer, even perhaps what’s most difficult. I could talk about how New England Review exists to support such literature, to transmit it, give it a platform and a place from which to project its voice, and that no theme or frame can fairly encapsulate the richness, the strangeness, the multitude of what every issue has to offer. All true, but all a bit too much like a mission statement when really all I want is to introduce what is here right now, specifically and yet broadly; to set the table for all of the individual pieces, to bring them together. Instead I feel like a frantic host trying to orchestrate a dinner party for more than forty people who speak different languages, and to prepare a single meal that will respectfully accommodate the gluten-averse, the vegan, the ketogenic, and those whose needs are kosher or halal. What an impossible situation! And yet they’re already at the door. 

How can I welcome these strangers and bring them together to the reader, to each other? I could try borrowing a toast from Dhar’s story—“To three days without the neoliberal pleasures of the world”—and leave it at that. Or I could open the door with an intriguing line from Carmen Giménez: “having fallen out of love / with humanity, / I outgrew my leather pants, irony, / nuclear rage.” Or from Sarah Fawn Montgomery: “The Doomsday Clock moves to 100 seconds to midnight.” Or maybe most appropriately from Ben Miller: “and then, well, quite wisely, I shut the heck up.” Those are all good, they’re suggestive, but they leave so many others out. 

So for now how about just this: turn the page, flip around, and get lost. You can be a traveler, a tourist, a refugee. Or you can stay home and venture inward. Maybe some of each or all at once. Every one of those possibilities lies ahead. 

—CK

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