The Pain of Leaving
It’s like forgetting the words to your favorite song You can’t believe it You were...
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Category: Essay
From Stateless to Citizen
What is it like to be without a country? To be born a stateless refugee? To have no citizenship, no passport, no place to belong?
Mamoun Abu Naser knows. He was born a Palestinian refugee in Syria, and has lived as a stateless person for his entire life.
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This Place, That Place and the Other
For migrants, answering the question about where we come from is never simple: we are the products of the different places in which we have lived and the people who have surrounded us.
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In Search of Home: Hiraeth Celebrates Two Years
A look back at how Hiraeth started and what’s in store for this year.
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In A Blink Of An Eye
Have you ever thought about a window when you thought of home? I don’t mean the metaphorical...
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The Blood of the Soul
I spent my morning at the Italian consulate today, submitting my application to become Italian....
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A Sail For Peace
“…It was our way to abolish government-made borders and show the world as one beautiful nation whose ruler was the sea, where nature’s laws are strict, yet simple, and the inhabitants are all equally unique.”
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The Good Old Language Struggle
Yesterday I was thinking of the downs of living “abroad”. I must say I very rarely put myself this...
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Walking into a Memory
One of the beautiful things about moving often is that you experience the “little...
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The Lily and the Rose: Living Between East and West
“The West for me means ambition, the East contentment. My heart is ever in one, my soul in the...
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Home as Metaphor
I woke up this morning from a dream in which I’d just bought a new house. It was a big...
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The Roots of Dispersion
I often wonder how it feels to be tied to a place, to know that your history happened there, that...
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PODCAST
- Ep. 42 - Using The Fine China 24/06/2020Dori Griffin is a designer and design historian interested in popular print culture and the narrative construction of social and cultural identity. Her first book, Mapping Wonderlands: Illustrated Cartography of Arizona, 1912-1962, explores tourist maps and the stories they tell about the state’s history, landscape and culture. Dori has also studied culture through looking at […]
- Ep. 41 - Cancer In The Time Of Corona 17/06/2020Ana Martins has been a local in Amsterdam for several years, but originally comes from Portugal. Amsterdam, she says, is the first place that has ever felt like home. She has been an actress and yoga teacher, and now writes a blog called Amsterdive exploring her own relationship with Amsterdam and the Netherlands while focusing […]
- Hiraeth Ep. 40 - Exploring The Streets Of Cairo 04/06/2020Erica Eastley has lived an adventurous life in several different countries in Central Asia, the Middle East and beyond. We’ve never met in person; in fact, I think I first came across Erica when I stumbled on her fascinating blog, The Golden Road to Samarqand, where she was explaining how she cut the bindings off […]
- Hiraeth Ep. 39- A Way Of Reordering Your World 20/05/2020Rowena Dring is British, and spent time in Berlin and France before settling here in Amsterdam. She is an artist who challenges traditional boundaries by incorporating the traditional ‘women’s work’ of sewing and needlework with large-scale painting. She first started this type of art after her father died, and observes that ‘when you feel like […]
- Hiraeth Ep. 38 - 24 - Hour Curfew In Saudi Arabia 13/05/2020‘Emily’ is an American, but grew up moving around a lot, and spent her teenage years living in Mexico. Now with four kids of her own, she has made the move to Saudi Arabia to give them a taste of international life. We have changed her name so she can speak freely about her adventures […]
