We who are sheltered know that there are those who are homeless. But what does it mean to think—thinking is active, as against knowing—about those who do not have a home? Thinking births questions: What kind of life is possible without a home? How is a person’s stance in the world shaped in their relation to it or the absence of it? In our prayers and meditations on the condition of the dispossessed, we find our minds move more to the hungry, the maimed, the disabled, the killed, even the grieving. But all of these conditions, critical as they are to our understanding of our shared humanity, are not quite the same as being without a home—without that most basic of things, a place to lay one’s head, sheltered from the elements, a room to call one’s own.
And so in this call, we the editors of A Long House have decided to make “Homelessness” the theme of our third issue. In defining the modes of engagement with this theme, we hope, at least at first, to resist the easy lure of statistics, for to rely on it would be to run the risk of reducing the enormity of the situation to just numbers, our inner responses trained, without our being aware of it, to see a problem only when the numbers are large, the goal being to keep the figures down. The numbers then become the measure of our misery. But in this issue, the call is to put the focus on the homeless person themself, to see them, and to be brought up close to the power and inadequacy of language to bear witness to their life.
Lines from Donika Kelly’s poem “Sonnet in which only one bird appears” come to mind:
Here … a man wearing
all his clothes, asleep on the beach.
The lines capture a poignant image of what homelessness looks like, and what it means. The homeless, when they have things, carry all their things with them; they wear all their clothes; they sleep at the mouth of the waves, at the mercy of the earth itself.
This is the kind of witness-bearing we are looking for. Language that is tender yet unflinching, that recognises its limitation but whose truth is irrefutable. We want work that delves into the complexity and varied dimensions of the condition of the homeless. For to be homeless is not only to be without a physical home but also to be disfavoured by governments, despised by society, and left vulnerable to violence and exploitation of various kinds. It is to bear around a shaken sense of one’s self and relation with respect to the world.
Across cities in Africa and the black diaspora—Lagos, Nairobi, Harare, Durban, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, New York—governments have enacted and implemented policies to demolish the estates of the poor, scattering them about and taking away their homes and communities. Until they find some other place to resettle, it is hard to imagine how they live and find shelter. And even when they resettle, there is always the nagging fear of a future forced eviction. There is always the sense, borne like a brand mark, of being unwanted, of being a sore on the landscape.
To carry around this dreadful sense, it doesn’t matter whether the government was directly involved in taking away their homes or whether a natural disaster was what befell them. The slowness, perhaps even reluctance, of governments to restore the homes of victims of natural disasters really confirms how the authorities view these people: as problems they would rather not be saddled with.
In countries like Sudan and the Congo, torn apart by war and conflict, many have become destitute and homeless. For people who live in regions like these, violence is always present, like the very blood that boils behind the ears. But how do people stand when everything that constituted their home is destroyed? What becomes their stake in the fighting when they wander about their country and can no longer point and say, “That is our home,” when their claim to a patch of their homeland has not only been challenged but obliterated? What about the ones sent into exile, the ones displaced, the ones for whom the loss of home has taken on an existential and mythic meaning? How do the survivors rebuild their dwellings when the last fires cease? In war’s ugly affordances, home takes on new and uneasy meanings.
Of course, we recognise that there are those who by their choices, by their actions or inactions, have become homeless. But even in these cases, it would be instructive to see how as humans we wrestle with choice and consequence, with rage and regret, and with the societal inequalities that distribute consequences unevenly—the poor having larger consequences for their actions and choices than those more favoured. There must be ways people who lie down daily in the sun and the rain and are lashed by strong winds look at their society that are different from those who do not live under such conditions. There must be ways they look at others and themselves. Their existence and conception of life would unavoidably be complicated by their particular situation.
Perhaps our writing would enable us to grapple with these things. Perhaps through language we may create a space for the homeless in a world that has refused them one. And so we would be glad if you could send us work that engages with the theme of homelessness in intricate and insightful ways, moving us to re-examine our understanding, assumptions, and feelings on this very important subject.
Who Can Submit
This call is open to African and black writers around the world. Especially encouraged to submit are black people who, either from personal experience or close association with those who suffer or have suffered from homelessness, know intimately what it means to be homeless.
What to Submit
We accept fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Guidelines
For poetry, upload 3 to 6 poems in a single document (length: not more than 120 lines for a single poem).
For fiction, upload a story (length: 1000 to 6000 words).
For nonfiction (which includes memoirs, travel essays, lyrical or meditative pieces, critical discourse, philosophy, and writing on art, film, photography, dance, performance, or theatre), upload an essay or work of prose (length: 1000 to 6000 words).
All work should be submitted as Word documents in Times New Roman, Georgia, or Garamond 12-point font. Where necessary, you can send an accompanying PDF to show us how your work is spaced or arranged on the page, but please include a Word version for easy editing.
Prose submissions should be double-spaced. Poetry may require special space formatting depending on form, so there are no restrictions.
Submit only work that has not been previously published. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please withdraw your prose submission on Submittable if it is accepted by another publication. For poetry, use the “messages” tab on Submittable to let us know which of your poems in the packet has been accepted elsewhere.
We pay $40 for accepted poetry, and $50 for accepted prose.
Submissions are open from August 5 – October 31, 2025.
We are open to answering questions on submissions and helping out where necessary via email. Reach us at alh@alonghouse.com.
Click here to submit your work.
