The Winter Between Worlds: Finding Our Song in the Silence

Happy New Year, everyone.

There is a line from Dr. Nnamdi Nwogwugwu’s latest work that has been haunting me as the calendar turned: "Exile is not just a place. It is the silence between who you were and who you are becoming".

As we stand at the threshold of a new year, many of us are navigating our own kind of "winter between worlds". We are leaving behind the "fire" of past conflicts and learning to live with the "ash" that settles in our bones afterward. Whether we are physically displaced or simply emotionally unmoored, the beginning of the year often feels like that disorienting elsewhere—a place of cold walls and unanswered letters.

In The Winter and the Ash, we follow Kasi and Nadia, two "daughters and sons of fracture" who find each other in the frozen silence of 1980s Russia. Their story reminds us that even when the world is coming undone, warmth can be discovered in the most frozen of places.

As we draft our own stories for the year ahead, let’s remember:

Exile doesn't unfold in straight lines. Healing resists choreography, and what is broken doesn't always return whole. It's okay if your progress feels fragmented.

Silence can be an art of survival, but music is the way home. Just as Babushka’s svirel (flute) saved a soldier in the trenches by reminding him what it meant to feel, we must find the "flicker of song" that makes us human again.

Hope is never easy, but it is always needed. Like Nadia’s name—Nadezhda—hope is a thread we must choose to carry, even when it feels fragile.

This year, I want this Substack to be a place where we "breathe life into what might otherwise have stayed forgotten". We are the story-keepers, the ones who refuse to let silence have the final word.

So, as the snow falls or the harmattan dust settles, listen for that note that still rings somewhere between the silence and the scream.

What is the song you are carrying into this new year?

Leave a comment and let’s walk through this winter together.