Between Silence and Return: an invitation
My sisters and brothers,
On November 8th, the ebook edition of Between Silence and Return will be released on Apple Books. Kimia and I will open this book together, offer it to the world, and place it into your hands. The hardcover and paperback editions will follow on January 25th, 2027, on Amazon. This is an invitation to join us.
Between Silence and Return is the first volume of an ongoing dialogue between an Afghan artist and an Afghan writer: fifteen art pieces, fifteen reflections, three movements (Departure, Distance, Return), and one long contemplation on what it means to leave a country, a body, or a self behind, and to keep living.
I want to tell you why we are making this book.
For decades, we have been written about, encoded, narrated, and explained. Empires have written us. Regimes have written us. News cycles have written us. Even our allies, with the gentlest of hands, have written us. Now, in this book, Kimia and I are saying: enough.
Let us walk our own way home to ourselves. Let us paint our bodies in our own colors. Let us write our own threshold, our own distance, our own return. We are done being the subject of someone else's sentence. We are the sentence now.
To my sisters around the globe: if you want to be free, understand this one thing. My freedom is bound to yours; there has never been another arrangement. We are one bird, flying into different corners of the world: the Afghan wing, the Iranian wing, the Syrian, the Sudanese, the Ukrainian, the Palestinian, the Yazidi, the Kurdish, the Rohingya, the Uyghur, the Tigrayan, and every sister in her own private country who has had to leave behind something the world refused to name.
A one-winged bird cannot soar.
Come, my love, and help me fly high, and I will help you fly high. This is the only flight there is; it is the only flight there has ever been.
Preorder the ebook on Apple Books, and it will reach you on November 8th, wherever you are in the world:
Read more about the book, and join the circle for the slower path, with the monthly letter, the drafts, and the art pieces as they arrive: one letter a month, no noise, and you may leave at any time.
However you find your way to us, you are already here. This book is the beginning of the gathering.
With love,
Anosha Zereh
Berkeley · November 2026
Apple Book: link
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