DEAR READER

by Yehui Zhao & Andrew Felsher

When geophytes encounter danger, they shelter underground where they tunnel and plot, forming a community of roots that re-generate. This issue is a geophyte faced with a violent world. To re-generate and re-orient is essential. Beginning with Fi Jae Lee’s cover art, the body is a place that inhabits and responds to violence, trauma, displacement, and non-recorded history. It is a collision between me, you, this, that, here and there. It becomes gendered and un-gendered, departing from a gendered history and into a liberated body that defies countless manifestations of violence–from nation-state to social, and interpersonal and personal. 

128 Lit is a place of art and literature that confronts and disrupts normative, euro-centric aesthetics and narratives. We must question where violence exists and how it is empowered and deployed. We must ask what makes a body? Who ascribes? Who imposes? Who confines? How can we translate into, out of, and between bodies, countries, and languages?  

This issue invites dialogues among a growing international community of artists and writers. We invite you to look, look through, and look back at their work. To examine, unlearn, and reframe how history is built and shared. From poetry that exposes war and its grating languages to an essay that brings into the foreground a system that enables the same violence that it asks to be named, and to each of the eclectic pieces, these pages seek to embody and evoke something like what Shaghayeq Ahmadian said about a powerful girl central to her work: “She transforms her pain and trauma into the gold of her soul.”  

We hope this issue can be the roots that re-generate love and liberation.