When Donkeys Give Birth to Calves: Totems, wars, horizons, diasporas

[In this collection] Ahmed asks us to know ourselves between the fixity of what we want, and the placelessness of where we are: to wander in a diaspora full of meaning, looking at ourselves in all our inarticulateness: To know the donkey s opinion One must-- Would you not say? Consult with the donkey s bray To read these poems, then, is a long consultation with the donkey s bray. And as they reverberate back to us, we are reminded of the thing that we cannot see, and reminded that the horizon of the imagination is not our ultimate goal, but what we live with: the necessary conversation that we must have with ourselves: The dawn Is conceived in the dream of the night before What did you dream, brother, the night before? What did you dream, sister, the night before? Noam Schindler, Ph.D., City University of New York