The first issue Dalia wanted it to feel “personal and intimate”, full of found imagery and collage pieces, like peeking inside a family archive. Now on its second issue, the magazine has seen some changes from its first, significantly, in its design.
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“If you look through the magazine, none of it is really political, but you can probably guess our politics from the way we express ourselves.” Instead, Dalia wants the magazine to include moments on mundane life and joy a free space for someone to express themselves anyway they may wish. Moreover, Dalia shares that she is also keen to prevent the magazine from becoming something inherently “political”. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, the magazine seeks to give second generation immigrants the agency to tell their own stories, “how we’ve experienced them, not how people think we exist,” Dalia adds. These musings, call-outs and a desire to platform honest, genuine stories resulted in The Road to Nowhere, a magazine constructed with passion, thoughtfulness and drive.
And so, wanting to raise some money for charity, and explore the aforementioned issues and questions of identity, Dalia put out an open call on The Dots, “like, can’t pay anyone, this is a pure passion project,” she recalls detailing, “but does anyone want to explore these themes with me?” The resurgence of Black Lives Matter, the largely unreported famine in Yemen and the Beirut blast left Dalia feeling somewhat “helpless”. There were other extenuating factors alongside the wealth of material being produced that compelled Dalia to take action in any way that she could. “They hadn’t had much time before to just sit down and think about who they are and how they identified,” Dalia begins, “I think that made a lot of people of colour review their whole lives – not in a super deep way – but I think it did make us rethink everything our place in white spaces, and our value as creatives.” As a result of this, Dalia began to encounter a lot of amazing, responsive work being posted online, pushing her toward the idea of collating these projects into one cohesive space. It was this period that journalist Dalia Al-Dujaili observes as having been “a turning point” for many second generation immigrants and children of diaspora.
The slowing down of life in 2020 left space unseen before for self-reflection.
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