After Jhumpa Lahiri made history by publishing her novel_ In Other Words_, written in Italian, her work as a British-born Indian American writer remained misunderstood. In her essay collection Translating Myself and Others, she recounts how she was repeatedly asked why she would study a language so utterly foreign to her (Was it merely because of a film or an author? That wouldn't be a good cause). She defended herself repeatedly, yet for a long time couldn't pinpoint the true reason, eventually framing it as a kind of “freedom” that allowed her to exist outside the confines of her two native languages. The Chinese-speaking world has a similar example—an Italian man named Alessandro Ceschi studied Chinese in China, gradually began writing in Chinese, and later published a book, I Dreamed in Chinese, there. A year after its release, I happened upon his book signing in Hangzhou. He effortlessly recited amusing anecdotes about learning and writing in Chinese, yet faltered when asked “Why Chinese?” during Q&A, swiftly shifting to another joke about stereotypes of foreigners in China. While Alessandro dreamed in Chinese, was Chinese itself a beautiful dream for him? Italian must also be a dream for Lahiri—a place of peaceful towns and writers unknown to the English-speaking world.

Linguistic freedom may not only be the right to randomly choose a second or third language, but also the ease of always being able to return to the most familiar and intimate tongue. Writing in one's mother tongue is the root of Graft, and it was also the idea that first took root in my mind last April. In an academic environment where English holds absolute dominance, reading and writing in one's mother tongue is almost a luxury for non-native English speakers. Language freedom is ultimately not a privilege; it is a means of survival. Yet granting special privilege to just one language risks oppressing and silencing speakers of others. Thus I envisioned a linguistic utopia—akin to the Tower of Babel, where all possess a shared language for communication while retaining their unique mother tongues—enabling everyone to freely use any language to converse and understand one another, transcending linguistic barriers. I believe writing is when we come closest to a language, serving as a channel for cross-cultural and linguistic understanding. Thus, _Graft _was born, gradually learning how to walk, embarking on its mission in this diverse campus.

Graft is a special craft: the Grafter organically merges two disparate, even incompatible elements, breathing new life into each. The Grafter is also a linguistic and cultural bridge-builder, navigating between cultural contexts to construct connections (which is why Jhumpa Lahiri also cherishes the word “graft”). This is particularly vital in Graft's contemporary context: since English was designated America's official language last year, multilingualism has been discarded alongside other “radical” ideas. The Claremont Colleges, long celebrated for its cultural and linguistic diversity, must return to this proud tradition—expressing, understanding, and connecting through writing across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

To dream in a foreign language is an act of crossing, not of abandonment, but of grafting. When Alessandro dreamed in Chinese, and Lahiri found freedom in Italian, they did not erase the languages already living in their bodies; they added new roots to a stem already alive. This magazine is born from that same belief: that writing in the language of one's mother, grandmother, neighborhood, or exile, within an institution where English so often occupies all available space, is at once an act of resistance and an act of love. In a political moment when monolingualism is being imposed as the national norm, every verse in Mandarin, every essay in Portuguese, every poem that moves between languages without asking permission, is a way of insisting that we exist in ways multiple and irreducible.

This is why our Pilot Issue is called Dream. Not only because dreams inhabit a language that waking logic sometimes refuses, but because dreaming is where languages mix without hierarchy, where the grandmother still speaks, where accent needs no apology. The works gathered here are the first grains of this harvest: students of the Claremont Colleges who wrote, translated, and crossed linguistic borders on the page. From Xie Yuhang's dreamy reimagining and reflection on the landscapes of his hometown and college, to Sebastian Amador's whisperings oscillating between dreams and reality, and Khalab Blagburn's relentless questioning of the meaning of voice in his essay, the metaphor of dreams as a state of existence seems particularly apt in today's social landscape. With our next issue, Issue 1: Translanguaging, we move toward the heart of our mission: the fluid practice of moving between languages as a way of making meaning, building community, imagining other possible worlds. To graft is always an act of hope. Welcome to the beginning.

Bowen Xu & Zena Almeida-Warwin