Week 6 Response


Dear Isabel Wilkerson,

In The Warmth of Other Suns, the theme that stuck out to me most was the connection you make the act of leaving and the act of creating newness. This is how migration becomes both resistance and, at the same time, the creation of a new beginning. Often resistance is described as an act of simple negation, and we are told that we should stop resisting and instead create something new. The great insight I gained from The Warmth of Other Suns is that those two are not in fact opposites: resistance is newness. Thank you so much for this insight!

Similarly the act of leaving is not a mere negation either; that to brings the unknown newness, as even the opening quote of your book shows:
“I was leaving the South
To fling myself into the unknown.”

I think migration is tied to a force that has such potential precisely because it is bring the Unkown; that is what makes its force "incalculable" as you note on page 31.

These insights have given me much to think about, especially in our current political moment and I wonder what forms of migration do we have access to now that we might mobilise as resistance and newness at once; to leave and make an exit seems to be the need of the hour, because, as we collectively yearn for another world, we must first learn to leave this one. To fly away.

Best,
Sadhana

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