Category: Belonging

On finding the stories that actually want to be written

7/28/2026

FOR YEARS, I’ve been writing essays about my life in Zanzibar, an Indian Ocean archipelago just off the coast of mainland Tanzania.

I spent nearly a decade there—when my friends at home were having babies and growing families and climbing work ladders and attempting to have it all—I was having palm tree days and fresh cut pineapples on the beach.

I wrote dispatches about my life on these islands for an online magazine called “Contrary: The Journal of Popular Discontent,” and for a while, I felt like I had somewhat of a handle on the story as it was unfolding—the story of a woman who left Chicago in her early thirties for a slower life on the Swahili coast.

I still have a selfie I took when I first returned to the islands after a fling with a man I’d met there while traveling—it’s me in a headscarf, sitting in front of rows of old, green post office boxes with stencil lettering—on a weekend trip to Bagamoyo with the guy who became my boyfriend.

I'm wearing a pair of vintage keys around around my neck. How poetic!

This was a time of taarab and tamarind, walks in the ruins of ancient kings, self-guided tours through shipwrecks, motorcycle rides through sleepy Swahili towns, mosquito-bitten, gecko-winked nights with a new love.

I thought I’d gather all the essays I eventually wrote for Contrary and put them into a book—a collection of essays focused on self-exile, faith, belonging, and home. I even had a working title for the book—and hired several editors over the years to work with me on it.

Understandably, they had a lot of questions for me—what was my “why now” and what was the story inside these essays that I really wanted to tell?

Over the years, I got defensive about these questions—postured with an academic stance—I wanted religion to be the thread that ran through this collection. I wanted my first book to address heady questions of faith and belief with the poetic muscle of Didion, the anthropological heart of Behar.

I kept chiseling away at these essays over the years. Added details, took others away, reordered and refined the words as they first appeared, overlaid new paragraphs with perspectives layered by the current me telling me about my past.

This all got very confusing.

I realized how hard I was fighting the story I really wanted to tell—about the men I loved there and the way these relationships shaped my connection to this place.

I didn’t want to tell a boring love story—or even worse—perpetuate the tropes of the foreigner who falls in love with a local and cue the problems that ensue. I wanted to tell a different story about Zanzibar, one about all the ways in which this place—so steeped in Islam—brought me closer to my own faith as a Jewish woman.

Yes, that’s a huge part of the story and it’s woven into every essay that’s survived all these edits and iterations. But I haven’t yet allowed myself to trek the full narrative arc of two men—Ali and Mustapha—who each played a major role in my Zanzibar story.

And I realize now that my book will never feel complete unless I at least allow myself to lay down my heart along this path, and say what needs to be said, with a wildly subjective curiosity.

Do I want my book of essays to focus just on the failure of these absurd entanglements with men who could never really love me because they would never know me? No, I don’t. I want so much for my essay collection to speak to larger questions:

Why do you leave home?
What do you learn over there?
How do you find your way back?

But these two men—their peculiarities in this particular place—have much to do with question two, and by the end of this year, I have given myself permission to write into the details I’d been working hard over the years to ignore.

To tell the truth about why I left home I need to confess it was for a man with a missing tooth and limp.

To tell the truth about what I learned over there, I need to confess it was my involvement with two different mad men that made me learn how to navigate this world without fear.

To tell the truth about how I found my way back, I need to confess that I couldn't leave until I was no longer running from my future, but toward it.

Writing about your own life is fucking hard.

The memories change as we change. We’re making it up as we go along. But some threads need gathering to weave a tale, and without the essential braids, there are inevitably holes in the story we’re trying to wrap around ourselves.

Here’s to editing and writing our way through the uncertainty until we finally find the stories waiting to be told.

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On remembering the filmmaker's dinner party

6/25/2026

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A DINNER PARTY at the filmmaker’s flat in Stone Town still comes up for me when I think about what it felt like to live as a foreigner—among other foreigners—attempting to belong. The invitation felt like a key that would unlock closed doors to rooms and worlds still out of reach to me.

I remember walking to the party with my boyfriend at the time, sloshing around a jar of freshly squeezed mango juice we’d prepared as an offering. I thought the filmmaker was super cool—she had this air about her of ease and wonder—and I wanted to show her that the two of us could show up as ideal guests, loving each other and anyone else we met.

At the door, the filmmaker kissed us on both cheeks as we took off our shoes and then climbed the stairs to the living room, where we sat on the floor with other guests on colorful floral mats with trays of food laid out before us, a feast.

That night, I met a young photographer from London, a German aid worker based in Sudan, a Dutch missionary with a shock of white hair, a Black South African music promoter, an Egyptian broadcaster working for the local state television station, a Black-American mother of two teenagers, who sat against a wall with headphones on and tablets in their laps, and a young Pakistani Canadian woman working in education with Aga Khan.

“What are the five objects you’d take with you if your house was burning down?” was the question each of us was meant to answer, but I was too distracted by the fact that my local boyfriend was chain smoking out on the verandah and refused to come in, not even for a moment, to talk to the other guests, in English as the franca. His lingua was Swahili and preferred to stick with it, even though he understood everything.

At one point I got up to coax him out of the darkness and back into the brightly lit room where stories were spilling into the night, and he did return, but only to slouch against a wall and fall asleep. When it was getting late and it was time to go, I had to nudge him awake to tell him it was time to get going, back to the flat we shared down the road.

The Dutch missionary gave me a quizzical look, as if to say, “are you OK?” Yes, I’m fine, we’re fine, the man is just a little tipsy from the wine us foreigners drink—his body can’t absorb it, the liquid lingers in his skin—he’ll be fine, we’ll be fine. He’d had many glasses of wine out there on the verandah with his smokes, probably to deal with the social anxiety all of us felt that night but wouldn’t state.

And so we got home and kicked off our flip-flops and discussed the evening briefly, before he announced that he would never attend another dinner party like that again. When I asked him why, he told me it was because he had nothing to say to anyone there, and would prefer to sit in the park he fondly referred to as “Peace of Love,” where the men sat on old tires and smoked spliffs under a huge tree with giant leaves, shielding them from the street.

I was disappointed but I can’t say I was surprised—he embarrassed me and I realized I’d have much preferred to show up alone to the dinner party—it pained me to watch him feel so alone in a room full of interesting people that had nothing in common except the trade winds that blew us all here.

I ran into the Egyptian broadcaster one night at the sea, holding hands with a woman wearing a very tight mini skirt and a white tube top, high heels, a face painted like a glamorous clown. What on earth was this bond? He shook my hand sheepishly and told me he would be going home soon. The revolution back home had made it impossible to stay in the state-sponsored gig on the islands. I wished him well, but he wouldn’t look up at me when we said our goodbyes.

I visited the Dutch missionary at the infirmary when he suffered a terrible bout of malaria that made his brain swell. Thank god his children thought to fly him back to Europe just in time—it turns out he would have absolutely died had he not gone home for treatment. It was odd to see him so weak there on his cot when I went to visit. I still remember how this man used to greet me on the street and shake my hand with such intensity, it nearly broke my bones, with all that gusto.

I’m not friends with any of these people anymore—not even acquaintances—all of us have spun to our various spots on the globe. I stayed in touch with the filmmaker for a while, raising her sweet son who wore a mohawk when I knew him, but even she has been lost to time and memory, though I’m sure she’s out there making her films, or something creative, anyway.

And I’m certainly not in touch anymore with my ex—who I’ve heard through the grapevine has suffered much and likely grown very little since the days we were together—sad, but true (enough).
With some, I could say I would know how to reach if I needed to get in touch, but all of us are different people now, gathering in new cities and states of being, under different skies.

But I still think of how I hopeful I felt at the filmmaker’s dinner party that night—how full of promise—how full of trust—in what the night could offer me as a newcomer to a city I would spend a decade trying to call home.

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On presence and absence, the faces we see in the sea of time

2/21/2026

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Presence, absence, proximity. The paradox of writing alone with a mind crowded with faces. Riding a wave hoping to be seen by adoring crowds on the faraway shore. I close my eyes and imagine the expressions of those I’ve loved and lost to time or death, they defy any known science of the body, their ongoing, continuous insistence on being felt, if not seen.

An island inevitably invites encounter. Whether you are stepping onto its stage or already an actor in the play, the split between land and sea draws a boundary around everyone, and we meet—in coffee shops and hotel lobbies, beach parties and midday living rooms, the office supply shop, the leather shoemakers’ hovel, the daladala depot, boisterous markets clucking with chickens and hawkers selling silverware—we face each other in the heat and wipe our brows as we greet and say goodbye.

Salam alaykum, I practiced with the utmost reverence to the sheha with the protruding belly and a huge mole on his cheek. Mambo vipi, I shouted to the fishermen seated on broken red buckets in a shady spot under a friendly tree. One always called me mwalimu—I worked at the university—and he knew the romance between me and his mate wouldn’t last long, but he continued to say hello to me with genuine respect, long after I had to file a restraining order against his friend.

These guys would wait by the shore in the early morning when the day’s promise hadn’t been weighed down yet by stifling, debilitating heat. The birds chirped, tourists rambled in flip flops and bathing suits, hoping to catch a boat ride to prison island to see the ancient tortoises. My ex and his buddies had a beautiful command of the sea and often took groups out for the day with fresh cut pineapple miraculously appearing on silver trays. The way these guys orchestrated a fantasy that unfolded like a slow-release pill for wary travelers was just remarkable.

Something about prison island bothered me because of its history, perhaps, or its vapid current state. It was set up as a love affair between tourists and tortoises, pay to feed them but not ride them, was the promise. But the prison held the haunted stories of enslavement and disease. I never got over how the tortoises themselves were prisoners of a kind—they’d been brought to Zanzibar as gifts from the Seychelles.

I remember dizzying arguments with my ex on this island when I’d catch rides with him and the innocent tourists he’d take for the day. We’d get there and realize we didn’t have enough food or water for ourselves; the hotel always seemed to be closed or at least closed off to me in my mind. I resented him for taking me out there without a plan, when all he could do was point to the starfish and tell me not to touch it. He offered me smokes and we ate them like bread.

I see his face when I don’t want to see his face, because the encounter closed in a series of violent episodes still too embarrassing and murky to reveal with any clarity. But when these faces from our past lives come into focus, I try to look back as if looking in a mirror—the fear, the fury, the fallibility. And when I do, which is not often, I marvel at the clever ways I found beauty in those days, even when I was suffering and refused to admit it. I'd place a frangipani flower behind my ear and pose for a portrait for a future self.

One last thing I’ll say before I take the dog for a walk this morning—I was often sea sick on these rides. The diesel fumes. The sticky sand on my sunburnt skin. My face puffy with regret. I threw up more than once into the roiling ocean. My stomach would flip if our engine stalled, my mind immediately flooding with fear that we’d be stranded indefinitely. And I have to say, I learned over the years that my ex and all his friends who organized these rides—who called themselves fishermen—knew exactly how to convey a sense of shwari—of total calm.

Even if I never trusted him on land, I always trusted him in the middle of the ocean.

Transit Slips, #20

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On falling in love with strangers and longing to belong

2/17/2026

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My ex called me once from Tonga in the South Pacific. He’d flown all the way there via Fiji from Zanzibar, an epic trip that would land him with a best friend who owned a whale-sighting resort on a deserted patch of coast. To celebrate his 50th, he’d made the sojourn alone but confessed he wished I was with him—which felt utterly absurd to me and totally out of touch with reality, because I was spending my days in a hospital room in Sarasota, watching my mother die.

When we move through unfamiliar worlds, we carry with us the familiar world of ourselves inside us, all the old misunderstandings and fragments of our past that form the stories we end up telling to anyone who asks. But so few people I met during the years I traveled asked me much of anything about my life “back home.” I never had to mention that I knew the Shema by heart, God is one, hear O Israel, my Jewish American lullaby. The prayer could be a nightmare if I uttered it out loud.

Strangers keep all kinds of secrets.

I fall easily in love with strangers; I always have, ever since I was a kid. I might have learned this from my mother, who struck up long-winded conversations with anyone she met in grocery lines or rest stops. It used to unnerve me to see her strike up a chat that bonded her to a stranger’s world quite suddenly, but then I also learned to navigate the world with this gift—or curse—when I began to see everyone I met as a sister or brother or auntie or uncle or mother or father, entrusted to guide me to the next station or post.

In Zanzibar, I began to play at belonging as an extreme sport, looking back at the full-immersion method I took to learning language. As the resident director of a Swahili studies program, I enforced the “Swahili-only” rule with my students, promising them that if they abided, they’d pass the advanced tests with flying colors and really know this world they’d visited with a depth inaccessible to the everyday tourist, who had come to look but not to live.

I caught some of them sneaking in English on the bus rides to and from our field trips. Whispering, complaining, asking. Their loss, I’d tell myself. They were locking themselves out of the greatest feeling ever: to feel like you belong here, on the Swahili Coast. These shores have received strangers for millennia—the language is built to absorb the shocks of disruption and grievance that come with foreigners and their many needs. So few ever knew the feeling that they'd finally arrived.

Looking back, it doesn’t surprise me that some of my sweetest friends were kids whose parents green-lit these encounters mostly to keep me occupied and out of their way! In Kenya, I remember a friendship with Irene, in her mint-green dress, who lived behind my dormitory in a makeshift settlement with her brothers and mother. She must have been about 7 years old. She gave me all the time in the world while her family toiled in the shadows, hiding from police who always threatened to tear down their tin house.

Then there was Mohammed, who attached himself to me as a bodyguard, taking me daily by the hand to the coast to watch him float his handmade toy boat on the tiny waves. He must have been about 10. I visited him many times in the coastal village that existed as it had for centuries, in waves of prayer, fishing, and farming. I'd come bearing sacks of sugar and gift them like gold. Before I left for the last time, he gifted me his toy boat—his prized possession—and I still have it sitting on a shelf in my basement.

Transit Slips #17

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On traveling without a plan, with many voices

2/10/2026

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After graduation, I needed money to visit my sister in Morocco. A temp agency placed me in human resources at a local hospital, where my job was to make photo identification cards for new employees. I sat in a dull gray room at a desk reading novels while waiting for the next person to arrive. I’d situate the person against a wall and tell them to smile. Most of the time, they wouldn’t, but every now and then, a person’s face would break into a huge smile that made us both giggle like little kids.

I am the poet laureate of my past. Verses vie for my attention in water color blotches of recollection. Like that time, and that other time.

I’m at a Halloween party with my sister in Fez, a living room full of peace corps volunteers wearing wigs and glitter. I wander into the crowded kitchen for a drink. I recognize a man I met in another city and we gravitate toward each other like magnets until we’re the nucleus of the orb of this moment. He takes my hand and leads me outside to get some air and we dance like we know something about ballrooms. A camera placed on a window ledge gets stolen.

I didn’t know what to do with my life so I stayed in Morocco for months, living with my sister in the High Atlas, visiting friends in different cities and villages. I kept a little notebook of songs and observations. The only road to her village was a brutal ride that switched and wound up in a cluster of clay homes crammed into the mountains. I remember throwing up more than once off the side of the truck full of men and their goats, who brayed with what I felt could only be compassion for the sick foreigner.

Can we break up with a language? And if I can’t recall it, did I ever really know it? I barely knew Arabic, never spoke French, learned to read and write Hebrew as a kid expected to perform incantations. But I did throw myself into Swahili with some seriousness. I started learning the noun classes in college at the age of 20 and once more at the age of 33. Who was she, speaking through that alphabet of coast and clove?

Poets and writers talk a lot about voice—how to find it and use it, speak with some sense of authority through it. But we’re also many people and parts inside a single life. So when I write a letter, my voice is one verse. And when I leave a message, my voice is another. As if the voice is an ocean with different kinds of weather and waves. I’m funny but I’ve also been told I’m as a “serious as a graveyard,” so yes, I guess how you know me depends on where we met and what I knew about myself just then.

Transit Slips, #10

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Transit slips, an explanation

2/1/2026

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On this full moon in Leo, in the year 2026, on Sunday, February 1, in Skokie, Illinois, I return to my own website with intention to tend to this writing garden here as much as I am anywhere else. There's been so much debate and conversation around who owns our words depending on where we put them, and I've decided that while I try out these other platforms, I also want to let some of my ramblings and fragments land here, as I'm full of things to say and the courage to say them at this juncture, and want to honor this surge of encouragement!

I'm calling these fragments "transit slips," to indicate the transitory nature of these writings and how they're emerging on the page. I read all morning and take notes. I let what I read lead me through the corridors of my mind and imagination. I gather up the notes and shape them into transmissions that feel like poetry with a narrative promise. I don't imagine anyone will find me here unless I point you in this direction and for now, that feels fine. Whoever may finds these words is a friend to me and these attempts at connection. Here's my first transmission in the series; I'll try to write one a day in February.

Why do the dying sometimes fear thieves among them? My mother believed I stole her gold bracelets at the nursing home in Sarasota. The police tracked me down to investigate. I had to prove I was her daughter who had taken the gold bracelets for safekeeping.

The problem was that I’d come all the way from Zanzibar and realized only once I was back on American soil that I lacked any form of current identification—a fugitive of sorts, escaping one life for another. My driver’s license had expired, my passport had expired; I was a daughter without documentation, accused of theft. Eventually, my name was cleared, but perhaps only due to the doubt others cast on the stories of the dying. I still have a Florida number from this time, from when I was trying to dial up a trusted identity to meet the demands of the moment.

Eight years later, I was the daughter who lived with her father as he was dying and helped him die. This was a more cosmic assignment between a lapsed poet and a lifetime jazz pianist, an alliance quite friendly to the philosophical porch musings that accompany such circumstances. That whole summer, we riffed as I tended to my toes with imperfect pedicures, my father sitting in the sunlight with crystalline questions about divine purpose and the inevitability of what unfolded—his unfolding. Like a true improvisational artist, his exit was gentle yet dramatic, like the final note he always struck at the end of each song.

This reminds me of a question I ask myself often: how did I end up staying so long at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi in my early thirties? Well, I was drawn to mysticism and the wistful adventure of the spiritual sort. I also thought this money-saving move would give my sister and me more freedom to dash around the old city in search of silver, temples, and chai.

We ended up twice in the labyrinth of the wedding market. Unlucky in love, we purchased stacks of elaborate green envelopes with arched doorways for flaps. And then, of course, we paid for tickets to enter the pigeon hospital, where Jain devotees dedicated their days to healing sick birds. I took photos of magnificent yellow marigolds in heaps out front, but these images were lost to time.

At night, when we returned to our room in the ashram, it was so cold we climbed inside our sleeping bags and slept in layers of all we’d packed, including our pink wool socks. A portrait of “The Mother” hung above our heads, next to a list of her commandments, among them being “No gossip.” It was too cold not to gossip, and so we kept ourselves warm with one story after another about other people’s flaws until we’d started a fire in our minds.

Ask me anything about failure, folded notes, ancient alphabets, elder care, diplomacy, and porch pedicures. Ask me anything about writing when it doesn’t matter anymore, returning to live in your childhood home, taking sandwich orders from an angry dying person; clarifying one’s henna design desires to a disgruntled artist on her ninth client of the afternoon; apologizing for one’s inadvertent colonial tendencies while traveling—for example, asking for ice. I attempted to tread lightly, but I know I left muddy footprints wherever I once walked. Ask me anything about traveling without an itinerary or enough money for a return flight home. Ask me about coming home.

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travel far now

On finding the stories that actually want to be written

On remembering the filmmaker's dinner party

On presence and absence, the faces we see in the sea of time

On falling in love with strangers and longing to belong

On traveling without a plan, with many voices

Transit slips, an explanation

Field Notes

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