SCALES #44: full of holes
Hello!
Particularly upsetting week to be living here in the U S of A. (Throat clearing: of course the current historical moment doesn’t have a monopoly on misdeeds; I have the unfathomable luck to not have to think about a situation until it and the attendant cultural outrage become unignorable; “got a lot to be mad about”; &c., &c. But——) It felt to me like living in a country and the bottom falls out. The pictures. The audio. Hearing about intimidation immigration checkpoints along the interstate by friends who went north out of town for the weekend. A massive immigration raid of Guatemalan workers in Ohio. Overhearing a conversation across the street from my lab, “We have to have laws. You need to follow the law.” And then the trying to figure out what to do.
I’ve been trying to do some reading. An interview with the director of an immigration rights nonprofit in Texas. Rebecca Onion on the long history of the “adultification” of nonwhite children. Dahlia Lithwick’s expert dismantling of the dissembling. And the executive order signed last night seems to be a non-solution, a cynical piece of theater.
I tried returning to Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, first released in early 2017. In the short book the author, a Mexican-born writer, recounts her experience as a volunteer translator doing triage screening interviews for undocumented child refugees in New York. The book’s strength lies in its tight snapshot focus on a particular moment—the immigration crisis of the late Obama years and the struggles of unaccompanied refugee children rather than the separation of families arriving together—even if that moment has already started to slide away from the present. (Most tragically, in 2018 we know better than to assert—emphasis mine—“[the Obama administration policy of] the priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children”.)
Luiselli builds the work around a sturdy conceit: the forty questions of the screening interview form. From the first page, Luiselli struggles with the role of a writer in a situation where narrative comprehensibility evaporates:
“I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.”
The struggle to navigate a world of incomprehensible and unfinished narratives recurs throughout the book. But Luiselli knows she still needs to do her best to serve as documentarian. And despite the maelstrom, Luiselli makes sure a few points of blinding clarity shine through. One, that migration from Central American countries is just a symptom of a knotty, decades-long problem in which the United States has played as much as a part as other countries:
“Debate around the matter has persistently and cynically overlooked the causes of the exodus. When causes are discussed, the general consensus and underlying assumption seem to be that the origins are circumscribed to ‘sending’ countries and their many local problems. No one suggests that the casues are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country […] but in fact a transnational problem that includes the United States—not as a distant observer or passive victim […] but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.”
Also clear is these are war refugees, with a legal (and moral) right to seek asylum in the United States. Reading the book laid out clearly to me that any superficial debate about the “legality” of refugees seeking asylum is going to fall short. I’m not sure what the path to the solution is, but I think it has to start with a clear view of the enormity of the challenge.
And the book does find its own end, one that is at least a beginning. Luiselli recounts teaching an “Advanced Conversation” course at Hofstra University, carving out a space for the students to discuss, with guest experts, the immigration crisis, whose impacts in Nassau County they know intimately. On their own, the students then decide to put their learning into practice and form the activist Teenage Immigration Integration Association. Luiselli comments:
“The United States is a country full of holes. […] But it’s also a place full of individuals who, out of a sense of duty toward other people, perhaps, are willing to fill those holes in one by one. There are lawyers and activists who work tirelessly to help communities that aren’t their own; there are students who, though not at all privileged, are willing to dedicate their time to those even less privileged than themselves.”
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Ultimately the best thing I could figure out to do was find a place to give money, a little more than was comfortable. There’s a list. I felt like my money could do the most good helping with legal defense, for a regional organization less in the spotlight, but there are no shortage of options.
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There are also good things in the world!
Neko Case has a new album, including a cover of a Crooked Fingers banger I had forgotten, and a sinister track fusing A.C. Newman melodies with a classic flexible, searching Neko Case song structure.
Longform brings on Elif Batuman and gives her the space to let her brain GO.
“The architects had no idea that the building’s exterior surface would one day serve to provide pawholds.” I wholeheartedly endorse architectural criticism through a climbing-raccoon lens.
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I just saw Coffee House Press is selling the book right now for only $5.
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—Adam