By Manal Nadeem on behalf of the Editorial Team
When the Inkblot editorial team gathered in April to discuss a theme for this year’s issue, we toyed with a few options. We considered the relationship between human and nature, the role of luck and serendipity in our everyday lives, and the enduring relationship between diasporas and homelands. Together, these themes illuminated a range of concerns, environmental and cultural alike. But eventually, we settled on the following prompt:
The world demands that we understand its surroundings but spares little time for understanding ourselves. The push and pull between our inner and outer worlds, our social and private selves, informs who we are. Events in the world compel us to look inwards and seek meaning in our identities and who we truly are. These meanings can manifest as pleasant surprises and as harsh truths too. How do we gain a better understanding of our own identity? How do we perceive ourselves as individuals, as friends, as family members, as students, and the several other roles we fulfill in our lives?
The impulse for this prompt was manifold. The prompt tugged at themes of self–that elusive “I”–that are universal in their resonance, both through time and space. But these questions also felt particularly magnified at this age of metamorphosis that we all find ourselves in as late teens and twenty-somethings. After all, in the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, what is a more recurring theme than the relationship between one’s self and the world? The time when the contours of the self are in perpetual flux–when we find ourselves renegotiating some parts of ourselves and renewing others, asserting our agency and forming new attachments.
The prompt, designed to invite reflection and introspection, inspired an equally enriching range of entries. After a rigorous editorial process, our team handpicked three pieces that represent the breadth of literary talent at AUS. “A letter to a dead mother” by Younis Elayyan explores themes of love and loss, mourning and motherhood, and the dichotomy between endings and beginnings. “Snippets of a Journal: A Girl Who Occasionally Writes (and Occasionally Grows)” interrogates Israa Ahmad’s fraught and ever-evolving relationship with writing in the English language, particularly at university, and situates the self in the broader currents of culture and even colonialism. Mithushan Surendran’s “A Journey to Remember” seamlessly infuses both our human and natural worlds, reaching both upwards into the skies and inwards into the self. And lastly, our Research Papers section offers a curated selection of academic reflections from WRI 221, Peer Tutoring in Writing, on topics as varied as linguistics and gender, with Jude Saleh asking how culture impacts thought patterns and Jana Elghoraby interrogating why men are underrepresented in the Writing Center. Together, these pieces refract the self through the many prisms of love and language, culture and nature and invite us to do the same. They demonstrate a keen sensitivity to one’s surroundings and exude an inward-looking, introspective quality that captures the spirit of not only what it means to be young, but to be human.
Within these pages you will also find reflections by our editorial team on the work we do here at the Writing Center. “Graduating Tutors” rounds us off with a heartfelt farewell to our graduating tutors: the Writing Center will be a little quieter without you, but the legacy of your inkblots will persist long after you are gone. Finally, “Get to Know Us” offers a glimpse into the practice and pedagogy of how tutors work at the Writing Center (and how you can too!).
Editing this issue–the academic and personal, confessional and lyrical alike–has been a source of much joy to our team over the past few weeks and months. In these pages, we hope you will find something similar–catharsis, comic relief, or some inkling of meaning in the inkblots. Happy inkblotting and introspecting!