Writing in the Wound is a raw and poetic memoir of migration, memory, and music by award‑winning ethnomusicologist and composer Dr. Shumaila Hemani.

Born in Pakistan and cast adrift in Canada’s immigration system despite seventeen years of contribution, Hemani explores the disorienting terrain of displacement and the racial and gendered traumas of acculturation. Music becomes both witness and balm as she confronts systemic erasure, academic silencing, and the longing for a sense of home.

Blending lyrical storytelling, autoethnography, and embodied spirituality, this memoir transforms the pain of invisibility into soundscapes of resilience. This memoir is not merely read. It is felt—in the body, in the breath, in the silences between the lines. It is also an autoethnography: an intellectual and embodied reflection on how trauma inhabits the diasporic body—and how music serves as a bridge between worlds, a memory of what was lost, and a pulse toward what might yet be reclaimed. At once personal and political, lyrical and scholarly, Writing in the Wound invites the reader into a deep listening—to land, to longing, and to the music that carries us home.