FN – Call for Submissions to The Markaz Review. Theme: Nationality

Nationality is a red-hot issue. The masked men and women of ICE in the US cast their net wide, from Hispanic Americans and undocumented Venezuelan migrants to Irish tourists who overstay their visas, and send them to decrepit detention centers in America’s MAGA-loving south. In Europe, too, nationality is a defining issue. The small boats filled with Kurds, Sudanese, Afghans, and others arrive along the UK coast during a summer of far-right riots in front of asylum seekers hotels. Where people come from and their nationalities have become a defining issue of a world in crisis where people on the move refuse to stop fleeing conflict, civil war, drought, and poverty.

When it comes to securing equal rights for all the people in a land, nationalism is an abject failure as Mahmoud Darwish writes in his poem “Passport”:

All the hearts of the people are my identity

So take away my passport!

More than half the Palestinians in the world remain stateless, and the Palestinians citizens of Israel do not enjoy the same rights as their Jewish counterparts. Their nationalism means inbuilt discrimination and lower life expectancies.

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the five aspects of nationalism include national character, loyalty and devotion to a nation; national status and membership to a particular nation; political independence or existence as a separate nation; and people with a common origin, tradition, and language and capable of forming or actually constituting a nation-state or an ethnic group, an element in a larger unit. However, the synonyms for nationality widen and enrich the word’s possibilities: ethnicity, race, family, clan, and kindred, to name a few. In the age of social media threatening, nationality no longer strictly refers to a country, it could mean religion, identity, or pure and simple guilt by association as seen by rightwing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer’s successful campaign to stop badly wounded and starving Gazan children from receiving medical treatment in the US.

Nationality is the theme of The Markaz Review’s monthly 55, for November. The issue will explore in creative nonfiction, short stories, interviews, and poetry the vagaries of nationalism, citizenship lost and found, what it means to have more than one national identity or passport, and to have none. So, who, what, where is your tribe?

Query the editors: editor@themarkaz.org

Please use DUOSUMA for submissions.