The Magic of the Margins: Rethinking Healing from the Perspective of Queer Exile

In this deeply personal and political essay, Awadalla reflects on healing through the lens of queer exile and marginality. Drawing from life experiences in Egypt and Berlin, the piece challenges Western-centric models of mental health by situating healing in the embodied realities of racialized, displaced, and queer lives. Awadalla traces their path from early marginalization and activism in Cairo to navigating the bureaucratic and racialized structures of mental health care in Germany. The text critiques the structural whiteness of therapeutic systems and centers collective, culturally rooted approaches to care—including oral storytelling, grief rituals, humor, and chosen kinship. By weaving together memory, psychoanalytic theory, and political resistance, Awadalla proposes a radical, decolonial theory of healing from the margins—where surviving becomes a form of worldmaking.

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