Are you there, or somewhere you no longer belong?
More often than we like to admit, we are obliged to cross borders we never planned to cross. Some are physical, others deeply emotional or symbolic. There are moments when circumstances leave us with no real choice: family struggles, personal crises, sudden upheavals. And so, we move. We leave. Sometimes, we run. But there is another kind of departure, harder to explain: leaving not out of desire, but out of necessity. Those who have lived under bombings and unstable political conditions already know what that means. They understand the weight of abandoning home, the places tied to memory, stepping into uncertainty without knowing if return will ever be possible.
This is the emotional landscape at the heart of Are You There?, the latest album by Anana Kaye. While rooted in her personal experience, the record speaks in a language that feels widely recognisable. Written at the dawn of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and alongside ongoing struggles for freedom in Georgia, the album weaves together local musical influences with western folk textures. What emerges is not a neat balance between rootedness and displacement, but a tension that never quite settles. What stands out is the pressure carried in her words, not loud or declarative, but persistent, like something pulling beneath the surface. “Where we come from doesn’t matter anymore,” Kaye sings in Cross The Water. It sounds like surrender at first, but opens a deeper question: what remains when belonging begins to dissolve?
We live in a time where borders feel increasingly blurred. The digital world allows us to exist everywhere at once, creating the illusion of a borderless identity. Especially for younger generations, ideas like patriotism or belonging can feel distant, something inherited but not fully inhabited. And yet, while many learn to feel at home anywhere, others are forced to leave the one place they belong to. For them, the idea of home does not fade, it sharpens. In a world where mobility is often framed as freedom, their movement registers as loss. Kaye captures this contradiction with clarity. In the album, she reflects: “Some of us are wanderers, some of us are lost, we meet there at the border where we don’t know how to cross.” It may not resonate universally, but for those who have experienced that rupture, it lands immediately. Because the uncertainty doesn’t end at the border. Crossing is only the beginning. What follows is often more disorienting: rebuilding, redefining, learning how to exist in a space that doesn’t feel like yours.
There is a moment in Infinitely Blue that, despite the instability surrounding it, leans on memory while still moving forward: “Darlin’, close your eyes, it’s alright to dream, there’s no law against wishing on a star, and it’s no crime in believing.” It would be easy to read this as comfort, but it operates more like resistance. Not grand or declarative, but quiet and persistent. The album doesn’t resolve the tension it sets up, nor does it offer a clear way through it. Instead, it stays with the question it began with, holding that sense of dislocation in place. And in doing so, it suggests that not being able to fully locate yourself is not a failure, but a condition many are already living in.