24 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” As you may have heard in Switzerland, this is the new standard for intelligence in America as stated by our “president” Donald J. Trump, who proudly “aced” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test (MOCA).
Memorize these five words and you get extra points. Remember the five words again after taking the remainder of the test that measures cognitive presence and you are deemed worthy of being given the keys to your car.
Let me subvert the criteria with Carina before me. She is a person. She is a young woman who imagined more from Miss Liberty than merely a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). She met a man with a camera after attending mass at the Sacred Heart Chapel in Cleveland, Ohio. She was invited to sit for a portrait—which she did with an imperturbable tranquility. She is a modern Mona Lisa, not painted but photographed. In Italian and Latin, “carina” means “dear” or “beloved.”
But there is nothing about this country of ours in this shadowed moment of craven rhetoric that promises undocumented immigrants of all ages what is engraved in bronze on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, that supports this kind of care, for one as strong and beautiful as Carina. This is a long sentence I have just written to mirror the long sentences of abuse now being faced by those seeking refuge in America. ICE is the cold and violent heart of the United States immigration policy traumatizing communities at night, shattering families. Trump’s wall is being erected to keep weary immigrants outside instead of inside a country of sanctuary and dreams.
These words “From her beacon-hand/Glows world-wide welcome” have become a farce at best and a lie in truth that shames this “Mother of Exiles,” who is being asked to darken her torch and turn her back on this beloved child named Carina, even as an act of deportation is being deferred.
When I re-read the sonnet The New Colossus written by the American poet (1849–1887) placed on the pedestal of this great welcoming, I still want to believe there is a place for the calm heart of a young woman as dear as Carina.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering
limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed,
sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose
flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother
of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome;
her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin
cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”
cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your
poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The
wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the
homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the
golden door!”
Let me make a prediction: The “silent lips” of this young woman named Carina will one day be speaking up and speaking out as Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the state of Minnesota’s 5th district is doing now on behalf of the protection of DACA recipients, both as a Muslim woman and new member of the House of Representatives.
Congresswoman Omar, born in Somalia in 1982, came with her family to America where they were able to seek asylum in New York City in 1995. Ilhan would have been thirteen years old, probably close to Carina’s age now. She became a U.S. citizen in the year 2000 and remains fearless with her essential voice.
“This is really a country that welcomes people and treats them like family. We don’t only just welcome refugees and immigrants, but we send them to Washington,” Ilhan Omar says, and she means it. Representative Omar assumed office on January 3, 2019, the same year Carina sat with you in a moment of found serenity after attending mass.
Person. Woman. Man. Camera.
I want to leave the TV off and step out from our political silos that have kept us in the stranglehold of our own convictions. We have forgotten what it means to look deeply into one another’s eyes and recognize the multiplicity of our stories as an integral part of our shared humanity. Fear has isolated us. Curiosity and the capacity to care opens the latch that has kept empathy and action at bay.
It is time to reengage with our communities and protest with our hearts in the name of racial justice and equity for all. As a person of color, you know this story of racism from the inside out. As a white person of privilege, I am educating myself from the outside in. With George Floyd’s murder, we have taken to the streets—black people, brown people, white people and people of color side by side in solidarity—finally—as we remember what binds us together, and all that has kept us apart.
•
Fazal, I retrieved our texts from when you were working in Cleveland last June:
6/1/19
FS: Just back from Cleveland yesterday. Trying to
take a deep breath and then imagine a future…
TTW: Were you happy in the end with what you made in Cleveland? I think we are all struggling to imagine a future. What we imagined, I fear, is gone.
FS: Still awaiting the images from Cleveland. Wildly difficult, though I hope I may have eked out something. Most interviews conducted in Kiswahili, which was fun with Congolese from the border.
5/28/19
FS: Got thrown off of detention facilities and
sweatshops for undocumented workers twice yesterday. Perfect
record.
And then, in July, you sent me these images from Cleveland. I remember being deeply moved by the stillness of each photograph, the depth of focus, yours and theirs.
7/20/19
[4:35:13 AM] FS: Some crude images from the days
of working in Cleveland…so many complicated stories, but such a
wonderful organization there. Full of heartening and committed
staff and legal aid...
