Alienus
Noun
1. One not belonging to one's house, family, or country:
2. One not related to a person or thing.
3. Of another.
Alienus is the Latin root of the word alien. Which is to say – our words have roots. Our words come from somewhere – they were constructed. Which means, we can deconstruct them.
In our current American reality, the legal code defines alien as a human who is not a citizen of this nation-state. “Alien”, to our nation-state, means other, strange, non-citizen, sub-human, outside of this world. To be named alien is to be isolated from other people, from the earth, and ultimately from yourself.
But what if we dug up the root of the word alien – alienus – and infused it with new meaning? Imagined it meant something new?
This zine is an attempt to do exactly that. In a series of essays and conversation, we revitalize the root of the word alien and plant it in new soil. We use the term alienus to evoke a sense of communal alienness – to point towards the fact that being human often means feeling lonely, and accepting that inevitability is, ironically, what connects us. Alienus as: an insistence that our destiny and the destiny of the natural world are intertwined, and that world is where we draw our power. Alienus as: opening up our minds to possibilities beyond the nation-state and reclaiming our humanness. Alienus as: holding up a mirror to who we are and affirming that it belongs on this planet.
-adesuwa + esther
