A comparative analysis of the works of four migrant writers enables us to identify, within individual writings, a circularity of discourse on the topics of journey, displacement, narration and language. The essay highlights how the ‘relational status of identity’ exists in relationship to otherness and is defined as a multiple identity shaped in a mobile space. The long journey of Gabriella Ghermandi, Cristina Ali Farah, Igiaba Scego and Ornela Vorpsi illustrates, with different outcomes, how the topic of exile is transformed into ceaseless erring. From their experience with migration, from their nomadic condition,  unknown narrations emerge casting an estranged glance on reality. Between Italy and Ethiopia, Italy, Somalia and Albania, and other transit stations, characters move from one world to the next, all animated by painful motivations. Through their wandering, they trace a number of hybrid maps in which language becomes a vital home. Such home, drawing from the practice of listening and from encounters, delivers its memory deposits together with mappings of the present.