Category Archives: immigrants

Silver Linings in a Snowstorm

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Yesterday I was supposed to have my book launch reading for Immigrants at the Odyssey Bookshop, but the weather gods had other ideas. The forecast was for snow, sleet, and/or freezing rain starting in the late afternoon and continuing all the way into this morning. While accumulations were not expected to be significant, the roads were expected to be slippery.

While I’m an admitted snowphobe when it comes to driving, I knew I’d likely be able to make it to the bookstore, which is only 5 minutes away from my house. But I also knew that others who were planning to come were driving much longer distances. I didn’t want to ask people to risk their safety. And I didn’t want to risk a low turnout. Even though I’d already bought the snacks and the ingredients for brownie-making, I decided it would be best to postpone.

I don’t know if it’s from being born under the sign of Gemini, but communication has always been huge value for me. My pet peeve is when people don’t return my calls or texts, and it infuriates me when I’m not communicated information I need. So, even though the bookstore was willing to post on social media and notify the people who’d actually signed up to attend the event, I wanted to make sure that people who were thinking about coming, or might have been planning to come and not signed up, didn’t make an unnecessary drive through the slush or ice only to find out the event had been cancelled.

This meant a whole lot of texting, emailing, FB messaging, social media posts, etc. And it meant I ended up connecting with people I hadn’t spoken to directly, which felt really lovely. While my core identity is introvert, I definitely have an extroverted side, and all that communication gave me a surge of energy that kept me going and focused on the task. I was so touched by how many people answered my messages in a warm and personal way who thanked me for making a call on the side of safety. And I was surprised by the number of  people who said they had planned to come, or that they couldn’t have come tonight but they could come on the new date. It felt like such an overwhelming bubble of support from my community, this big universal love…

Between all this, I was also using that surge of energy to attend to political issues involving real immigrants, working with my immigration justice affinity group on a short emergency mailing to drive calls to Congress against the potential Senate deal that would trade away current protections and due process for people at the border seeking asylum and expand deportation of people who are already here, all in exchange for more military weapons for the Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. You can read more about that here.

So, I guess there are silver linings in a snowstorm–including the beautiful scenery when I woke up on Wednesday morning.

And, I was told by one friend that the new date February 7, has much better numerology–#8, a number which supposedly resonates with self-confidence, inner strength, and inner wisdom, among other things. I don’t know very much about numerology, but I’ll take it.

Hope to see some of you local people at the Odyssey Bookshop on February 7.

Immigrants, Centos, and Celebrations

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Last night I read at the annual 30 Poems in November reading, an annual event where each writer who participated in the fundraiser is asked to read one poem. Meanwhile, I’ve been overwhelmed by my writing/book-marketing to-do list, at the top of which is wrestling these poems to have something to send to donors by the end of the month, and continuing to spread the word about Immigrants through my web of connected networks while taking the first dips into investigating blogs, podcasts, social media sites, etc. where I don’t have a personal connection. (NOTE: Any suggestions are welcome!!!)

Most moving at last night’s reading was hearing from three of the students at the Center for New Americans who shared heart-felt writing in both English and their native languages, as well as their deep gratitude for the hard-working teachers at CNA who are helping them build their new lives.

As the negative rhetoric around immigrants starts to build again, with Republicans in Congress demanding changes in immigration policy in exchange for aid to the Ukraine that would make it even harder for people threatened by violence to escape to the safety of our country, I’m remembering a writing workshop I co-led for women in the border camp. We introduced the beautiful picture book, Somos Como Los Nubes (We Are Like the Clouds) by Salvadoran poet, Jose Argueta, which talks about the hopes and dreams of Central American children walking thousands of miles in search of safety.

Then we asked the women to write or draw their response to the book. One woman sat and started to cry. “I can’t write,” she told me. Having heard this many times from leading writing workshops for most of my adult life, I mustered up my Spanish to give her a pep talk on writers’ block. But she wasn’t talking about writers’ block. She was talking about illiteracy. I felt so embarrassed as I asked a more fluent Spanish speaker to act as her scribe, but recognized that my embarrassment was nothing compared to hers. And when it was time for her to share, her story, like every story we heard that day about kidnapping, lost livelihoods, rape, threatened or dead children broke our hearts.

While only one of the stories in Immigrants is about the border, I wrote the book to showcase all the ways that immigrants interface in our lives. While some of the stories are more political than others, in all of them, the human story takes center stage. As I worry about all the ways the U.S. is becoming less safe, it feels like an impossible nightmare to think about leaving my home to go somewhere strange and potentially unwelcoming, especially today as the winter sun is slicing a comforting wedge of light through my large porch windows. Yet, that’s what the immigrants coming to this country did–an act of incredible bravery to leave everything you know. And that’s what people displaced in wars have to do, with no opportunity for choice.

But I didn’t read a poem about politics last night. My poem, a cento, was about loving the world despite its difficulties. A cento, which is a collage of lines from other poems, might be a bit of a cheat, but hey, when you have to write 30 poems in a month, sometimes you need to take some shortcuts. And the fun thing about this one was that I only used poems for source material from the prompts that were sent out every day to participating writers.

So next time you’re stuck, leaf through some poems and write down lines that strike you (best if you’re not sure why) and then try to meld them together. I guarantee, this will be fun, even if you’re just tasting other people’s words, whether or not you come up with a poem of your own. Here are the first few lines of my cento. Poetic sources are from Mary Oliver, Dean Young, Mahmoud Darwish, Winnie Lewis Gravitt and Richard Fox.

VOCATION

My work is loving the world.
Because of you, I’m talking to crickets, clouds.
I have a saturated meadow,
where, like plants sprouting where they don’t belong,
sorrow, grief and trouble sit like blackbirds on the fence
scanning the topography of prayer

Navigating the Unexpected

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On the day after Hurricane Irene, I woke up and looked out my window and saw that the river had completely covered the fields across the street from my house. As the water lapped at the edge of the road, I wondered if I’d be trapped. We are on high ground, but our only way out is Route 47 North or South unless we want to walk across the Mt. Holyoke Range, or get hold of a canoe. Many of our neighbors have showed us pictures of their families escaping on boats during the historical floods of 1936 and 1938, which are commemorated by the flood marker I pass every day, about a mile north of my house.

The flooding from Irene never got to the road, thanks to the Hadley DPW trucks and their well placed distribution of sandbags, but I did lose my entire garden, which had been in one of the fields by the river. A truly sad day, even though the tomatoes were pretty much done and we’d already enjoyed several months of the harvest.

My garden is now on higher ground

closer to the house, and the flooding on the river plain in my neighborhood has been far less than we anticipated this time. When I look across the street I see deep pools, similar to what’s common in the spring, where people sometimes stand on the road and fish, though some of the corn is clearly lost.

However many farms in the area including two that I feel personally connected to: Grow Food Northampton,  Mountain View Farm and Stone Soup Farm lost nearly all of their crops.  And north of us in Vermont, the situation is much worse, with many homes and businesses devastated.

I often find myself pondering what I would do in face of tragedy, especially the sudden, unexpected kind that threatens the foundations on which I live my life: family, home, sustenance, livelihood. And the thought brings me right back to the week I spent in Matamoros on the Mexican border, walking past wet and sagging tents perched in the hot, muddy field, talking to people who lost everything when tragedy forced them to leave their home countries, people whose only remaining possession is hope.

My husband (who’s always been more attached to food than I am) still occasionally grumbles about the burgeoning crop of sesame seeds we lost in the Irene flood, which we’ve never been able to successfully reproduce. But in reality it was no big deal to lose my garden that summer. I’ve led an exceptionally privileged life whose tragedies, while still difficult, are expected outcomes in the cycle of life and death that all of us on the planet endure. And while sometimes acknowledging that privilege makes me edgy, it also reminds me of my responsibility to participate in tikkun olam, the healing of the world, and to feel gratitude for all that I have.

The farmers at Mountain View write, “We are going to take things one step at a time as we plan for how to proceed. We will continue to distribute farm shares with our heads held high for as long as we can with what we have left.” This seems in line with the mindset of many of the people I spoke with on the border. Despite how bleak their situation appeared, they kept pressing on, determined to get through each day and take one step closer to their dreams, no matter how unachievable they might seem.

Good advice–for all of us, no matter what our state of privilege/challenge might be and no matter how essential our goal(s) might be to our ability to survive. That, along with my meditation app’s suggestion of 10 deep breaths, a reset, and a step forward.

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Valentine’s Day on the Border

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Three years ago on Valentine’s Day I woke up before dawn to witness deportation flights at the airport in Brownsville, Texas. They always scheduled these flights for the wee hours of the night, because they didn’t want others to see what they were doing. It was a cold morning for Texas, and the thirty of us who were there that morning shivered in our inadequate fleeces as we watched a plane at the ready behind a fence. As the night broke into the beginnings of a cloud-covered day, we watched a bus pull up. A man held up his shackled wrists to the window. We stood in front of the bus, holding up hearts, and for a moment, we held up “business as usual” as the bus came to standstill. We surrounded the bus, shouting “I love you,” to the shadowy faces in the windows. And “No están solos. Estamos con ustedes.” (You are not alone. We are with you.) Then, the police came and since we had not planned for a civil disobedience action that would end in arrest, we let the bus pass through the gate to the plane. They parked a truck in front of the stairway, so we couldn’t see the people limping with their shackles up the stairs into the plane’s belly, but that image, along with other accounts of abuse, has been captured in this article in the Intercept.

Quietly, we stood until the plane took off. Needless to say, Valentine’s Day will never be the same again.

With all the problems in our broken world, I don’t know what has compelled me to focus my social action energy and a big chunk of my writing on immigrant justice (including two poems about this experience on the border, published in Wordpeace, and my forthcoming short-story collection, which focuses not only on detention and deportation, but also on the myriad of ways immigrants are woven into the fabric of our daily life.) I do know that when Trump was in power, I felt his rhetoric like a dagger piercing my heart–and not in a Cupid-like way. Though I’m a fourth generation American, and nearly all of my family was here in the U.S. during the Holocaust, I still feel a visceral connection between those who are currently fleeing for their lives and those Jews in Eastern Europe who were turned away for the same xenophobic reasons that people give now for limiting the number of people who can come to this country and denying them their due process rights to seek asylum. The stories we heard from people on the border about why they left still keep me up night. And while I’m not at the border, this Valentine’s Day, I’m grateful for groups like Team Brownsville and Solidarity Engineering and so many others who are working tirelessly to provide food, shelter, sanitation, and basic humanitarian relief to people as they wait for a new chance at life. No estan solos. 

Happy Valentine’s Day.

 

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Taking Stock of 2022–Part I: Won’t Get Fooled Again

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“An artist needs to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.”–Romare Beardon

Ten days into 2022, I lost my brother, Danny–an unexpected death due to an imploded port. The malfunction had scheduled for repair, but that had been delayed due to COVID (one of many statistics that would not be included in the pandemic’s path of destruction). Beset with mental illness from the age of 15, which was later accompanied by a host of physical problems, Danny’s life was not easy and neither was our relationship. Yet, as teens, we bonded over baseball and rock music. I’d play the guitar and we’d sing together. Danny would ask me to listen as he turned the amp on high and belted along with The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” As his illness became worse, he got more delusional about being a rock star, his stubborn insistence occasionally edging on violence when my parents tried to curtail the raucous sound from being blasted out into the neighborhood.

When I think of what I “absorbed” this year, this sad life event from early January continues to stand out despite its countering with one of my happiest life events: the birth in September of my grandchild, Manu. Both have inspired a lot of writing, and watching the awe and wonder with which Manu approaches the world fills me with a poignancy hard to describe without resorting to clichés about both the preciousness and fragility of life, and how one of the most healing things we can do for grief (at least for me) is to continue to practice gratitude and look forward, even as we continue to struggle to make sense of the cracks in our past.

Meanwhile, the echoes of Won’t Get Fooled Again continue to resonate as a backdrop on my musings, as in the song I can feel both the anger at the state of the world and (despite the sarcasm) the hope of better tomorrows that don’t need to be mere delusions. I say this after reading about the Governor of Texas sending busloads of migrants to the Vice President’s House in subfreezing weather on Christmas Eve–an anti-nativity story if there ever was one. However one feels about the situation at our borders, it’s this kind of deliberate cruelty that triggers my anger at both sides of the government for “fooling us” into thinking that they care. And yet, I hang on to the hope of better tomorrows, reflected in the many people who are on the streets, helping migrants and other unhoused people who are stranded in the cold.

I’m determined not to get fooled (or worse, despondent) in 2023. Out of grief comes hope, the awe of new discovery, and the determination to work for a better world.

 

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Gratitude, Mourning, and Alice’s Restaurant

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Sometimes it’s hard for me to get into Thanksgiving, even though as a Jew, it at least feels more inclusive than the hoopla around Christmas. Yet, the holiday is still problematic, especially as we find ourselves needing to let go of the old elementary school story of the Pilgrims and Indians sitting down at the table together and sharing a big feast–perhaps a moment in our common history, but certainly not where the tragic plot ended.

So, as I attempt to pull off small bits of our family dinner menu (cooking one-handed is not easy), I expect to again be listening to the livestream of the United American Indians of New England National Day of Mourning from Plymouth. Here’s a snippet of a poem I wrote last year on that topic.

….earlier I listened

to indigenous speakers lamenting loss of their land,
made a pastry with cranberries

harvested from the place pilgrims landed,
wondered what truth in bogs,

in magenta juices
spilling onto the oven’s bottom,

refusing to be smothered
by my pale and doughy crust?

And I think this cartoon I saw on Facebook also needs some contemplation as we think about what is happening right now to immigrants in our country, the Governor of Texas going so far as to call for the National Guard to shoot immigrants on site.

But on to gratitude: One of the many things I’m grateful for is  that my ancestors were able to escape pogroms and come to this country to build a new life. That is my wish for those now facing death threats, gang violence, war, climate devastation, and other pressing issues who are now seeking to cross our borders.

Thanksgiving to me is also all about Arlo Guthrie’s, Alice’s Restaurant, which we used to search for on the car radio when we drove from Massachusetts to my parents home in New York City every Thanksgiving morning. Hilarious and uplifting in its snarky sarcasm, the best message I take home from Arlo is that we don’t need to accept that status quo, even as we do feel gratitude. I look forward to sharing this family tradition with my grandchild, Manu who will be spending his first Thanksgiving with us tomorrow.

So, whatever y’all do or don’t do to celebrate this fourth Thursday in November, I hope that as the song comes around again on the guitar, you’ll think about gratitude, and mourning, and hope for those in search of a better world.

 

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