Between Fatum and the Void: A Reading Note on Sana Goyal’s Review of Tice Cin’s Safe Spaces

September 19, 2026

Book III of The Aeneid tells of Aeneas and his Trojans sailing through life’s vicissitudes to reach the destined place, Italy. The voyage is perilous and circuitous; it is almost ridiculous that, even when they reach Sicily, Aeneas must detour yet again because obstacles keep preventing him from reaching Italy smoothly. But he knows that it is his fatum—his destiny, written by Fate and scripted by the Olympians. Thus, his voyage is never aimless, nor does he abandon himself to the force of fatalism or an existential vacuum.

In the case of the nameless young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer in Safe Spaces by Tice Cin, the emptiness of an uprooted life in working-class London is existential: through her eyes, it becomes a void in the meaning of life. Told in the first person, her ballad moves through shifting perspectives, as though she were an alien songbird observing from a separate space. She moves through doorways, “walking past each one,” because she seems to feel that no one cares whether she is an artist from Cyprus whose first language is Turkish. She feels her presence as a songwriter and music producer in the streets of London is insignificant, or worse, invisible. One’s creative value, wrapped in attitudinal value, dims beneath an outward identity defined by culture and gender.

In contrast to her comparison of memory to a messy laundry cupboard, memory, to me, is a messy pile of CDs and cassettes stored on the closet shelves: the first music I came to know, the favorites I could listen to a hundred times over, and the ones I can hardly believe I ever bought. But I don’t want to discard or sell them. And still, I haven’t decided what to do with them while I am listening to “Hunter” by Dido on my iPhone.

The choice of personal pronouns can elegantly convey the author’s shift in perspective, diluting subjectivity with objectivity, and vice versa. I write to create, she writes to speak, and you write to express. We know that the different pronouns work in different ways.

I haven’t read the book yet, and honestly, I don’t think it will be on my book list. From the review, the book seems written for peers of the author’s generation, and its narrator works in the music industry. (Yes, art has money too.) As a young immigrant girl, my concern was getting a job while going to school so that I could help support my family. The narrator does face financial precarity, but she doesn’t seem to carry the same familial pietas—the obligation to help support a family—that shaped my youth. I feel more akin to Aeneas navigating the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis than to the nameless young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer in London.