In this issue of ITF, we explore the tricky proposition of peace. It’s a state more often missed than celebrated, more often yearned for in its absence than lauded in its presence. In many parts of the world, it remains fragile, held together by borders, troops, and guns, the very forces that often threaten it. Often imagining peace and making it the subject of our words and music is a laborious task.

What separates us from others anyway? Guest columnist Brigid Moriarty kicks off this issue by positing the provocative idea of doing away with borders in Waging peace by deconstructing what keeps us bound.

Next, in Through the Looking Glass, ITF Contributing Writer Penny Newbury remembers her time in East Timor, digging latrines and chasing ghosts, after the massacres that followed the 1999 vote for independence.

Then, in Off the Shelf John Bringardner reviews Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, a novel narrated by a Palestinian doctor trying to keep his dying friend conscious by telling stories in this modern  version of Shahrazad’s project in 1,001 Arabian Nights. The result is a window onto the life of Palestinian refugees, displaced by the world’s inability to make peace in the Middle East a reality.

Finally, Vanessa H. Larson writes about a member of a Palestinian Israeli band and the consequences of his attempts to make music with the other side.

Waging peace. If anything, it involves embracing ghosts, burying the dead, somehow accommodating the past while learning to sing new songs.

Nicole Leistikow
Managing Editor
Baltimore, Maryland

Nicole Leistikow