Julian Aguon

MY AUNT LOU told me once that it is easier for our people to believe in magic than it is for others.

As soon as she said it, I knew it was true.

I knew because that day she’d taken my sister and me, plus two of our cousins, to a beach on the northern coast of the island where the sand is shaped like stars.

We got lost in those stars.

We bent over their tiny bodies for hours, inspecting them as closely as we could without a magnifying glass, wishing we had one, even if only one, even if it meant we had to share.

These small shells are my attempt to equip you. May they remind you of the ocean within you—your destiny. When the world gets noisy—and it will—remember them. Get quiet.

If you would, please place your shells over your ears.

If you can learn to be quiet, if you can become good listeners to your own ocean

onion and garlic

remind us

so much of

freedom.

riddling their lands with Jewish settlements until no one will be able to imagine a whole Palestine[,] [o]r know [it] ever existed.”

Later, in the Gaza Strip, Alice sits in the rubble of recently bulldozed Palestinian homes. She learns of a woman (alive but unconscious) whose husband was killed during a twenty-two-day bombardment of Gaza, as were all five of her daughters. She wonders who will tell this woman this—when, or if, she wakes up. She wonders what language could possibly be up for the job. How do you tell a woman that her whole world has died?

Finally, in the eastern Congo, Alice meets with women who had been victims of rape on the scale of war crimes. One woman, who had been a sex slave for over a year until she escaped, talks about being raped with every imaginable instrument, from the handle of a machete to the barrel of a gun. Others share similar stories. But one story shakes Alice Walker to her core. She writes: