Introduction

Translation, for these poets and artists, is not just linguistic; it is a political act. In their poetic voices, they translate values brought on by political rhetoric into structures they understand and shift the very frameworks that govern our lives.

Over the last few months, my work has emerged from the complex, shifting landscapes of migratory poetics and linguistic borders as sites of narrative restructuring. All of which are working alongside my Southwestern experience as a Navajo (Diné), where identity, culture, and connection are in constant flux, shaped by both ancestral roots and the ongoing impacts of colonial histories.

Through this anthology, I aimed to seek a reframing and reimagining of these intersections. Viewing the borders that run between ancestry practices and colonialism, not just as a physical space but as a crucial site for cultural transformation and the reclamation of collective stories. It is not only an exploration of personal identity but an inquiry into how migratory experiences blur linguistic borders by redefining and rebuilding narratives that continuously convince us in our day-to-day lives of an experience we didn’t ask for.

At the core of this anthology is a curiosity about the gap between languages. I call these borders. Here, I want to reimagine this translational space as migration, where the tensions between two linguistic worlds illuminate the fractured. With migration being the verb and borders as the thing it’s happening to, I want the reader of this collection of poems, essays, and artwork to anchor and guide you.

Because I was so deeply inspired by how much of Navajo literature focuses on resistance, survivance, and reclamation, I also seek to explore the less comfortable aspects of our history as Navajo people within this literary community; how, as a nomadic people, the Navajo were not only shaped by colonization but at times enacted forms of conquest and raiding, acting as the border. By engaging with this darker side of our past, ni’hikeyah tʼáá jííkʼe, all free nations, todas las naciones libres: migratory in verse aims to open a literary space to redefine that border, honor others’ resilience, and acknowledge the ways power and survival have intersected all along.

I hoped in engaging with these poets and artists, through memory, past and future, by thinking about forces that have not only altered the land but have reconfigured the ways we understand those who have experienced migration. Migration, as in recollection and the language we use around it, both physical and ancestral, alongside ourselves, our histories, and our futures.

My task as a facilitator and community leader of All Free Nations, I wanted to emphasize the border and reintroduce it. I also want to emphasize how a poet’s voice is also a language in and of itself. So I sought out poets and artists who would navigate these intersections alongside me, striving to articulate the pain embedded in the diaspora transliteration creates. This imagining is an act of reclamation, drawing on the power of poetry language to heal, confront, and to reimagine what is possible.

In other words, these works approach translation as a form of ekphrasis, a practice first introduced to me by fellow poet Cecilia Savala in her work with Thousand Languages Project. To translate is not simply to convey meaning; it is to redesign it, to reshape it so that it resonates across languages, across cultures, and across time. In the same way that we rethink art through its translation, I believe we must rethink democracy, one that is truly equitable. In this reimagining, these poets and artists honor their voices, placing empathy at its core while nurturing the well-being of their communities.

Translation, for these poets and artists, is not just linguistic; it is a political act. In their poetic voices, they translate values brought on by political rhetoric into structures they understand and shift the very frameworks that govern our lives. “ni’hikeyah tʼáá jííkʼe, all free nations, todas las naciones libres: migratory in verse” performs a kind of ekphrasis by these community members as a migratory poetic practice of a defining moment in modern history. Using a single speech delivered by George W. Bush in 2003, in which he issued a stark ultimatum to Saddam Hussein: leave Iraq or face the consequences of military action. This anchors our argument against the rhetoric used to justify war, offering a powerful and urgent opportunity to interrogate how language shapes our world, particularly in moments of power, violence, and geopolitical conflict.

Here, I want to give an example. From the initial speech, we can see this as a call-to-action:

Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you.

However, as a poet, I want to imagine the borders that inhibit me from understanding the capacity of Bush’s intention. I’m enamored with "can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast” and “I have a message for them.” I am called to these lines through memory, how do I hold that memory and where does the border “cut” that memory off? I think of my grandfather’s fingers dipping into a government commodity can of pears. I am also fascinated by the now-ness of the text: “If we must begin” and the juxtaposition of “ it will be directed” have alerted me that what is to occur may have already happened. This language, this rhetoric of time and how it sits in me, I am like a song in a cornfield. Finally, I am curious about the future and whose imagination I am currently living in. How do I want to carry this imagination? As danger? As hope? As forensics? Maybe it is with anxiety? Or perhaps, it is a color or smell. From this migration, I have created the first few lines of a poem:

somewhere in the husks I will sing again

fingers cradle cans of -pares a serpent

in baked Alma Ata tally red yellow green

Thus, we create a translation. One that honors my poetic voice while conveying the true intent of Bush’s call-to-action. It is a cry for a memory of America we have never received. I romanticized the “-pares” linguistically and in its image, the same way Bush romanticized “lawless men” as antagonists while allowing the horrors of our imagination to ring with his rhetoric to create images of these men. The centering of the “I” is apparent in my translation, whereas in Bush’s speech, it is otherwise used as a collective “we,” “us,” and “they.” What would this new version sound like on television on the night of March 17, 2003? Would it invoke a different kind of America? Who would respond?

Through this migratory poetics practice, these poets also re-memory, re-contextualize, and re-imagine an administration’s language of war and aggression into their own, as in “We is the People” from Sydney Mayes:

we will help you, you who daydreams of ballots 

and sutures to puncture and seal lips of rucksack 

Or Roanna Shebala’s call-and-response piece titled “The Fog of War:”

…our enemies dare to strike us, they and all who have aided them, will face fearful consequences

Your blood, sweat, weeping; mothers, sisters, daughters, and lovers. 

By transforming this executive discourse with their personal journey in mind, as was performed by Ayling Dominguez in "Flag Etiquette,” we are allowing the inclusion of all diasporas.

My mother’s citizenship exam taught her we must pledge loyalty. The or else needs no explicit mention when we live in the violent shadow of a shape rarely found in nature.

This anthology, or as I like to call it, a community project, also highlights voices long silenced by the weight of imperial violence, such as “Speech for When Free Nations Unite (an erasure)” by Aditi Bhattacharjee:

No nation / possibly claim / power / as / the United States / demands.

Here, they ask what democracy would look like if it truly allowed for all voices to be heard, as it is in Taté Walker’s “mission accomplished:”

before the box cutters >> there was body cutting

crashing sharp things into my terrorist skin

it was not a question of a u t h o r i t y // it was a question of w i l l

What would it mean if poetry could reframe the act of war as an opportunity for dialogue, empathy, and understanding, rather than a script for domination and destruction? In performing ekphrasis, these poets and artists aim to expose the violence of the original rhetoric, not through condemnation but through reinterpretation from across America. Even from the Yazidi community of Shingal Mountains, Zêdan Xelef sings:

What I heard is that what makes peace possible with scorpions in this desert is recognizing the environment we share, and inviting that to create a relationship.

Poetry challenges us to look beyond the binaries of us-versus-them and instead embrace the multiplicity of voices and stories that sought to erase migration. English, as we understand it, has come to disallow migration by establishing borders upon borders, and eliciting a response of any kind as anti-American. Thus, by translating Bush’s rhetoric into the language of poetry, we uncover the cracks in their narrative, allowing for a more complex, nuanced, and human vision of what democracy could be.

I invite you to walk with them, gently and urgently, through a landscape of translation, where poetry becomes both guide and witness. Let these voices, drawn from artists and poets across America, lead you into deeper understanding. This is more than reading; it is an act of learning, of listening. As you walk with these voices, become a student of this new America, taking each poem, writing prompt, artwork, audio, and essay as a lesson of love and care.

Together, come trace the experiences our bodies carry and the stories that political language has too often silenced or cast aside as un-American. Come learn with these poets and artists. Come re-memory with them.