This book has been in the making for more than ten years. After all these years, I am not sure if I know what this is fully about. Or perhaps I do, and then I understand it even less, as nothing would be more disappointing than a clear, definitive “reading” of the work. If I were forced to answer, I’d say “It’s an exploration of the psyche of migration.” At least this statement is true to the book’s original intent, as it is to my immigrant experience.

Migration is a leap into the void. It is an experience that isn’t particularly misunderstood, but rather unrecognized, like languages we’ve vaguely heard at some point in our lives, but to which we aren’t able to attach a body. Or temperatures and distances that, measured in unaccustomed units, can be assimilated, yet only half-rhymed. It is an experience hidden in the invisible weight of opposites – the collision of the old and the new world, the social and the personal, empathy and intellection, the immemorial and factual remembrance of things.

As if packed and stored within a piece of luggage, these images, or fragments of living, represent layers of memory – the memorial, the immemorial, and the everyday. This cargo, seemingly disordered and lacking consistent narrative, is nothing more than a repository of an intimate, yet collective existence.