Written piece
Migration/Threads Between Shores
Wilfred Given
Malawi
About this piece
This text piece uses the metaphor of thread to ask: what do we carry when we leave? A recipe, a prayer, a shortened name. Migration as quilting, not breaking.
Migration / Threads Between Shores
My grandmother said home is not a place. It's a thread you carry inside your chest.
She left hers tied to a tree by the river. My mother tied hers to a key she never used. Me? I tie mine to a voice I hear in markets that sound almost like hers but not quite.
Migration is not one long goodbye. It is a thousand small stitches: a recipe learned by taste, a prayer said facing the wrong direction, a name shortened so strangers can say it.
We are not broken. We are quilted.