MagDA – Inherited Hands
November 1, 2026
Dear reader,
We inherit long before we know we’re inheriting.
A story. A silence. A gesture. A way of loving, remembering, creating, or surviving. Some things are placed directly into our hands. Others live quietly within us, and we spend years wondering where they came from.
This sixth edition of MagDA follows inheritance to the places where it actually lives: a cezve lifted from the flame just before it spills over, a piece of lead dropped into water, a candle lit during a power cut, a house that will soon make way for a monument, a thread pulled through white linen. Across essays, articles, poems, illustrations, and photography, in more than one language, our contributors trace what is carried through families and communities, often through women’s hands: hospitality and superstition, care and creative work, the histories we are taught and the ones we are not.
Again and again, these pages return to hands: the ones that stir, stitch, mend, write, and hold on. Not everything they pass down is gentle. Alongside tenderness come expectations, unpaid labor, silence, and grief, and several writers ask what it costs to carry them.
There is no single answer to what we inherit, and these pages don’t pretend to offer one. What connects them is the moment of noticing, when we look at what’s been handed to us and ask: What do I carry forward? What do I question? What do I make my own? And what ends with me?
They don’t answer that for you. They invite you to look a little closer.
In strength and solidarity,
Aida Fejzullahu, Chief Editor, DA Alumnae 2023
Dardana Fetahu, Editor, DA Alumnae 2017
