In this evocative and emotional work, the poet, novelist, and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin pays homage to her great-grandmother, Helena Broder. As a young woman, Helena escaped Vienna to seek refuge in Chile, leaving shortly after the Night of Broken Glass in 1938 when the Nazi regime unleashed a campaign of violence, terror and destruction against the Jewish population. This book takes readers on Marjorie's journey through time and space, and across thresholds between life, death and dreams, to discover Helena's lost voice. This is not a linear journey, but one that braids together the past, the present, and the future, allowing Marjorie to give Helena, an exiled woman, a third home in the liminal space of memory and literature; a safe haven where she can be complete rather than fragmented, a place where her "exhausted suitcase" can finally rest. This touching collection of poems, in Marjorie Agosin's native Spanish together with Alison Ridley's delicate English translation, is accompanied by evocative images from the Chilean photographer Samuel Shats, as well as poignant memorabilia of Helena herself.

Bear and his friend Ben feel like they are living two lives: one, where native traditions--like long hair--are a crucial part of their identities, and the other, where indigenous expressions are mocked and treated with ignorance. When the boys encounter bullying because of the braids they wear, these two worlds collide. Seeking guidance from his beloved grandma, Bear confides his doubts and questions himself and his heritage. Bear's grandma knows about the strength it takes to overcome hardships, and with her help, Bear and Ben develop a plan to strengthen their connection to their roots while also bridging the gap between their schoolmates and their families. Seamlessly blending discussions of modern indigeneity and universal experiences of bullying and resilience, Bear's Braid is an essential and of-the-moment book that belongs on every bookshelf, and fits in easily with the classics of social justice children's literature.

Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story—that of a writer seeking to understand who she is—moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book. Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.

In this classic memoir that explores the Nazi presence in the south of Chile after the war, Marjorie Agosín writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, who grew up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants in Chile in the World War II era. Woven into the narrative are the stories of Frida's father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great-grandmother from Odessa, who loved the Spanish language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Agosín's A Cross and a Star is a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and words. This edition includes a collection of important new photographs, a new afterword by the author, and a foreword by Ruth Behar.

The braid and the sari are the quintessential hairstyle and garment that women in India don every day. They are both texture and text. The braid—often kept long and styled with flowers (especially in South India) or lengthened with extensions (as in North India)—is a prized possession with both aesthetic and spiritual meanings. The sari is a length of untailored cloth material that has been the traditional everyday garb of Indian women for millennia. Using the braid and sari as the framework and defining tropes that unify the collection, the poems of Memory Braids and Sari Texts: Weaving Migration Journeys carry the memory of independent India, which turned seventy-five in 2022. These verses draw from poet Pushpa Naidu Parekh’s distinct and entangled memories of migrant and diaspora experiences of journeying from India to the United States, the space of one homeland to another, spanning the inexplicable accruing of physical, emotional, and spiritual self and their many iterations. The braid and the sari both embody the draping of oneself and the unraveling of many selves. Richly layered and textured, this poetry collection explores one woman’s vivid and sometimes muted memories of her life in India, her move to the US, and her diaspora experiences there.

What is memory today? How can it be approached? Why does the contemporary world seem to be more and more haunted by different types of memories still asking for elaboration? Which artistic experiences have explored and defined memory in meaningful ways? How do technologies and the media have changed it? These are just some of the questions developed in this collection of essays analysing memory and memory shapes, which explores the different ways in which past time and its elaboration have been, and still are, elaborated, discussed, written or filmed, and contested, but also shared. By gathering together scholars from different fields of investigation, this book explores the cultural, social and artistic tensions in representing the past and the present, in understanding our legacies, and in approaching historical time and experience. Through the analysis of different representations of memory, and the investigation of literature, anthropology, myth and storytelling, a space of theories and discourses about the symbolic and cultural spaces of memory representation is developed.

When Bintou, a little girl living in West Africa, finally gets her wish for braids, she discovers that what she dreamed for has been hers all along.