There is a moment in every migration — you may know it — when the momentum of the journey pauses.
The departure is behind you. The arrival is still becoming real. You are suspended between two versions of yourself: the one who left, and the one who has not yet fully arrived. You wait for papers, for news, for a sign that life is ready to move again.
Anthropology calls this “liminality“—the threshold state where transformation becomes possible. Most people encounter the idea in a classroom. Migrants live it, sometimes for years, in waiting rooms and temporary addresses, in the gap between the language you dream in and the one you must use before breakfast.
It is not emptiness. It is charged with both uncertainty and hope. And it is, quietly, where identity is remade.
The oscillation
Sabrina Aureli, the Gallery’s featured visual artist this cycle, calls her Becoming work Oltre l’orizzonte—beyond the horizon. The image holds Parliament Hill in a haze, figures moving through a landscape that is neither fully familiar nor fully foreign. It is not a postcard of arrival. It is a portrait of the suspended moment.
Migration mirrors the motion of oscillation: forward into the unknown, backward toward what was left behind, and at the apex, a pause. That pause is where identity lives.
Over time, the oscillation softens. A steadier rhythm emerges—one that holds both memory and belonging. New connections are built, new rituals established, identities stitched together from what was carried and what was found. This is not the end of the journey. It is the moment the journey becomes a life.
Heroines
Sabrina Aureli has been thinking about this for a long time. Before she became the Gallery’s featured visual artist for this cycle, she made something with us—a video work called Heroines.
Not a film about exceptional women. A film about the ordinary woman who does something extraordinary and doesn’t always know it. Through image and movement, Heroines holds the space between leaving and becoming—the moment when a woman decides, when the known falls away and she steps forward anyway. She didn’t make the news. There was no photograph of her at the border, no policy paper written in her name. She simply packed what she could carry, said goodbye to people she didn’t know how to leave, and moved.
Heroines is what the Gallery means when it says the women thread is not a category. It is the narrative spine.
Women, silence, and the cost of survival
That is the ground Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann’s work stands on. History’s most enduring injustices are often preserved not by noise, but by silence. Women have borne this silence disproportionately—within families, communities, and nations shaped by exclusion and fear. The cost of survival, for so many women who move, has been the quiet agreement to carry trauma forward so that others might one day belong.
Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann’s book The Nail That Sticks Out gives voice to those silences. Through personal and historical memory, it reveals how racialized persecution and displacement are lived not as abstract policy, but as intimate, gendered experience—where resilience is demanded, yet rarely acknowledged.
The nail that sticks out is punished not only because it resists. It is punished because it exposes a system built on enforced conformity.
Equality is not achieved when women merely endure history, but when they are allowed to shape it.
—Gallery Editorial
Nearly half of all international migrants are women. Not dependents. Not footnotes. Primary movers of their own stories — many of whom have shaped the nations that received them without ever being written into those nations’ accounts of themselves.
When Fear Becomes Policy
March 21 marks the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,commemorating the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Its lesson is not confined to apartheid South Africa. It is universal and recurring. Racial discrimination rarely announces itself as cruelty. It presents itself as necessity.
Documentary filmmaker Sun-Kyung (Sunny) Yi—juror for the 2025 Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award—has spent her career returning, again and again, to communities that were not asked to leave. They were told to.
Her RE:Location documentary series traces four such communities across Canadian history: Africville, the Métis of Alberta, Japanese Canadians interned during World War II, and the Lost Villages of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Each episode is a story of forced displacement. Each is also a story of what survives it—identity, memory, and the refusal to disappear. Its four episodes resonate with the Gallery’s own four movements: Beckoning, Beginning, Becoming, and Belonging.
In The Italian Question, Sunny Yi examines Canada’s internment of Italian Canadians during the Second World War. Thousands were arrested, confined, and stigmatized—not for what they had done, but for who they were presumed to be. Law was not absent. It was misused—bent to serve fear, nationalism, and a myth of exceptionalism. → Read our full conversation with her.
That myth has justified humanity’s gravest crimes across centuries. Today, racial profiling, mass displacement, collective suspicion, and selective empathy persist. The language has changed. The logic has not.
Rights must be enforceable, universal, and inconvenient to power, or they are merely symbolic.
—Gallery Editorial
A Mirror Held Across Generations
There is another voice that belongs in this month’s conversation.
Keiko Honda, a 2025 Honourable Mention recipient of the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award, translated her grandfather’s memoir of displacement—a Japanese civilian family stranded above the 38th parallel in 1945, the day an empire collapsed beneath them. Her book, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945, is what she calls a mirror, not a memorial.
The paradox at its heart is one that March 21 asks us to sit with honestly: can colonizers also be victims? Can both truths be held at the same time—the real suffering of her grandfather’s family, and the real harm of the colonial system that placed them there? Keiko refuses to resolve that paradox. That refusal is the point.
What saved her grandfather’s family was not a policy or a program. It was a Korean ship captain—a man across the enemy line—who chose, in one quiet, unwitnessed moment, compassion over compliance. No audience. No recognition. No history book recorded his name. And yet without him, Keiko Honda does not exist.
That is what migration asks of those who receive, she says. Not grand gestures. Just the willingness to see, in the person in front of you, someone whose life is worth the small risk of your compassion.
→ Read our full conversation with Keiko—on forced beginnings, on the language of empire that never quite changes, and on the question she asks every reader to carry home: Where is my moment? And am I paying enough attention to recognise it when it comes?
What Canada Becomes
In Becoming Canadian, also directed by Sunny Yi in association with the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, the descendants of Canada’s first official citizens speak. The Canadian Citizenship Act was not passed until 1947—a fact often overlooked in the country’s story of itself. The film gathers the voices of the descendants of Canada’s first official citizens, tracing how that act began to shape a more inclusive and diverse society.
And The Good Canadian—directed by Leena Minifie and David Paperny—moves behind the curtain of national identity to ask, “What if the image of the good Canadian concealed something darker?” From the Indian Act to residential schools to modern-day family separation, the film is told through the voices of those working on the frontlines of a destructive system.
A society becomes just only when it confronts the histories it would rather forget—especially those that complicate national myths or expose democratic failure.
Becoming, for a nation as for a person, requires listening: to receiving people, to women’s testimonies, to migrant histories, and to stories of internment and exclusion that resist simplification.
—Gallery Editorial
To Remember March 8 Without March 21 Is Incomplete
To commemorate discrimination without examining power is hollow.
To speak of becoming without justice is an illusion.
March holds both dates because both are necessary. The transformation the Gallery names Becoming is not personal growth in the self-help sense. It is the harder, slower, more communal work of a self—or a society—that refuses to become by forgetting.
Sunny Yi asks what Canada becomes when it confronts what it has done. Keiko Honda asks what we become when we stop looking away. Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann asks what it costs a woman to survive in silence, and what it might cost us all if we let that silence stand.
Three voices. Three mirrors. One question at the centre of each:
Are we finished learning from history, or is history still waiting for us to begin?
— Gallery Editorial
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The Stories Collection
Is this your story too?
You don’t have to have crossed a border to find yourself in what you just read.
If you have ever been suspended between two versions of yourself—the one who left, and the one who has not yet arrived—that is Becoming’s weight.
If you have ever carried something forward in silence so that others might one day belong—that is the cost this article is talking about.
If you have ever been the one who opened a door, or closed one, and felt the gravity of that choice—that is migration’s call on those who receive.
The Gallery of Human Migration’s Stories Collectionholds experiences like yours. Not the polished version. The real one, however quiet, however complicated, however unfinished. Becoming is not passive. Neither is bearing witness.