Somewhere We Are Human

A Collection of Essays and Poems on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings

Reyna Grande, Sonia Guiñansaca

• Publisher: HarperVia
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063095793
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Dissertations littéraires

" "Wide-ranging yet consistently affecting, these pieces offer a crucial and inspired survey of the immigrant experience in America." " – Publishers Weekly

"[These contributions] touch on so many different facets of the immigrant experience that readers will find much to ponder... [and] experience how creative writing enriches our understanding of each other and our lives." – Booklist

Introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen

A unique collection of 41 groundbreaking essays, poems, and artwork by migrants, refugees and Dreamers—including award-winning writers, artists, and activists—that illuminate what it is like living undocumented today.

In the overheated debate about immigration, we often lose sight of the humanity at the heart of this complex issue. The immigrants and refugees living precariously in the United States are mothers and fathers, children, neighbors, and friends. Individuals propelled by hope and fear, they gamble their lives on the promise of America, yet their voices are rarely heard.

This anthology of essays, poetry, and art seeks to shift the immigration debate—now shaped by rancorous stereotypes and xenophobia—towards one rooted in humanity and justice. Through their storytelling and art, the contributors to this thought-provoking book remind us that they are human still. Transcending their current immigration status, they offer nuanced portraits of their existence before and after migration, the factors behind their choices, the pain of leaving their homeland and beginning anew in a strange country, and their collective hunger for a future not defined by borders.

Created entirely by undocumented or formerly undocumented migrants, Somewhere We Are Human is a journey of memory and yearning from people newly arrived to America, those who have been here for decades, and those who have ultimately chosen to leave or were deported. Touching on themes of race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, politics, and parenthood, Somewhere We Are Human reveals how joy, hope, mourning, and perseverance can take root in the toughest soil and bloom in the harshest conditions.

Survival

Illustration by onecentdesign/Shutterstock

Girum Seid Mulat

POEMS

When I Dream of Mother(land)

i.

Inshallah

Sun rays push the town closer together

Elders bless us like every other morning

Right palms cup foreheads

Bekeñ Yaweleh

Let God keep you on the right side

My mother circles the table where

Harar coffee boils to blend

into the black clay jebena cradling

the steaming brew/perfumes

the air with notes of nuts & earth mixed

with fire to burn a melody

throughout Debrezeit/Dreams float

with the singing steam, becoming

real with every bite of bread, buna kurs, on the side

& I left

running

from jail cells that prayed

my name like men I did not know

asking my mother where I was hiding/

I left

running

from the burning embrace gifted

by a dictator’s arms/Pushing

me away from my mother’s home/

The one by the lake where the tenadam grows/

Where I sat

on a three legged stool/

I left

running

to become a tumbleweed crossing ocean by wind

ii.

It is December/Right foot stepping

off a plane & left foot searching

for Ethiopia/My face scratched/

Lung bruised by the icicle gust/

My mind still stretched

around my mother’s round hips, letting

my cedar cheeks melt into her cinnamon skin/

Hoping to hear my mother’s voice ask

Leje metah? My son are you here?

A bitterly cold basement my only shelter/

Three roommates/One bathroom/No bedrooms/

Months pass/

I wake to work 12 hours a day/

I wake to wish for a real job/

I wake to read messages from relatives asking for cash/

I wake to worry about my papers/

I wake to question the questions on the I-589 application/

I wake to think where I will find the money to file my case/

I wake to understand immigration is expensive/

I wake to decide I should skip lunch & send money back home/

I wake to wonder when I can go back home/

I wake to ask is this all worth it/

iii.

& only in sleep I can feel the walls dancing/shrinking

onto me as I listen to the elders blessing

my sunrises/I smell

roasting coffee mixed with my mother’s fir fir

& fresh injera/But I blink too soon/

& the elders are not there/

& my mother is not there/

& now it feels like a dream/

12 hours working becomes 8/

Less than minimum wage becomes a salary/

Lunch or Western Union becomes both/

Buses become buying a car/

Renting a bedroom becomes owning a house/

I’m completely alone becomes I have a family here/

& still my case is pending/

& still my town gathers for coffee/

& still my mother makes fresh injera/

& still I miss my mother/

& still I’m dreaming/

What can be better than a motherland?

Sings me to sleep

Man ende enat, man ende hager

Yet yegegnal mesoso ena mager

Man ende enat, man ende hager

Yet yegegnal mesoso ena mager

From an Ethiopian Child Living in America

An African country overflows with uranium & oil as opal signals wealth to foreigners

There is a pool of gold the size of 10,000 football fields

It is lined with diamonds, but my father works

from dawn till the crickets chirp

& the frogs croak, alongside coworker amputees

On my way to school, I pass

clubfooted classmates cursed by the pesticides

a gift from Chinese & Hollander farm owners

who breed rainbow roses for our dictator & their lovers across borders

I never saw the harvest firsthand

The gold, the diamonds, the oil, or the opal

I never saw the uranium, but I did read of the toxic clouds it carved setting the sky ablaze

I did run from the gunfire

I did watch Muslims & Christians eat separately

I did see Gambella people pushed back for their blackness like lepers isolated for their skin

& in America,

a white woman refuses to accept $10 cash cradled

in my right palm. A cop stops me on my street

What are you doing here?

Is this your driveway?

This is your home?

George Floyd’s portrait & Hachalu Hundessa’s songs burn

in my neck, pumping my heart faster. Our skins hexed.

My English doesn’t bloom. It breaks

at pronunciations my mouth has not harvested

yet. Then, I saw cotton fields for the first time less than a year ago.

Summer dying in South Carolina. The sun backing into

concrete clouds as snowballs crowned stems the color of coffee.

They alone & only the breeze there to pick at them.

Now, a corner office is labeled

with my name. Colleagues doubt that I am their peer.

Go back to your country replaces Have a nice day.

It has been six years, but still I do not know freedom.

& I realize that being both Black & immigrant

is a body dipped in cinnamon & hardened with cedar.

* * *

Girum Seid Mulat is originally from Ethiopia and has established himself as a dominant figure in the arts scene of the Amharic-speaking community. His debut poetry collection, Passengers of the Coin (2019), was released in both the United States and Ethiopia. His work is a testament to his creativity and attention to detail, while also playing as an ode to tradition and a nod to the nostalgia East Africans feel. Girum currently performs in the greater Washington, DC, area, participates in speaking engagements throughout the community, and serves as an activist for immigration rights. Girum is also the founder and president of the Ethiopian Arts Society in North America.

Aline Mello

Fit

1

I am taking up space that belongs to an American citizen.

I don’t remember the first time I heard this, but it has become a burden I carry. In college: I am taking a spot that could’ve been a citizen’s. At my job: taking up a position that should be filled by a citizen. But it is my weight that offends, that makes it so much worse. If I’m going to be in the US undocumented, shouldn’t I at least be smaller? I should take up as little space as possible—maybe if the American citizen and I are each thin enough, we can both fit.

My weight trauma was born in Brazil and raised in the US, just like I was. Back there, when I was seven years old, Mamãe would watch my food intake, and the aunts and church ladies often talked about how I’d better lose weight before I became a young lady. My mother’s obsession with my body was a reflection of her own trauma. As a young girl, after her mother passed, she went to live with an aunt who wouldn’t feed her if she felt my mom looked chubby. Food wasn’t sustenance but reward. With her daughters, my mother’s neurosis found new targets. My sister and I were drinking diet teas and taking diet pills before we even hit puberty.

When I was in sixth grade, now living in Georgia, I stood in line with my class to check out some library books. Someone smacked my behind, and I turned to see Bruno 4, the fourth and worst Bruno to join our grade, looking smug and almost angry.

“Por que?” was all I could say. The only people who ever smacked my butt were my parents and sometimes my sister when we were playing.

Bruno 4 shrugged. “You have a big butt.”

“Oh,” I turned my head to look at it as if noticing it for the first time like an extra limb that had grown overnight.

From then on, I couldn’t stop thinking about my butt. I started tying sweaters around my waist. I compared it to my friends’. The words “fat ass” haunted me. In Brazilian culture, having a big behind is normal, but I was no longer in Brazil. I was in the United States, where a bigger butt meant you were a fat person. Nobody wants that, no matter their culture. And being undocumented while in a larger body underlined the issues.

Restraint. Invisibility. These were things to work toward both in my body and in my existence because of my immigration status.

To fit in means to be small enough.

2

My mom signed me up for Weight Watchers when I was in eighth grade. I was the youngest member in the group meetings, and I was embarrassed to tell my friends at school about it. There were moments when I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my body at all, that maybe my size was normal. After all, I rarely ate junk food, didn’t drink soda, and never ate out. But those thoughts were overshadowed by calorie counting and the search for some ideal I couldn’t really visualize.

In high school, Mamãe decided she would no longer buy me my correct size of clothes. Instead, we would buy pants too small for me, an incentive to lose weight. I explained this reward system to my friend Jessica once, and she looked at me like I was crazy—not innovative and smart. So, I stopped telling people about it. Losing weight was good but talking about losing weight was not.

If I wasn’t participating in every new fad diet, I was aware of them. With the encouragement of my mother, I read the books, took the diet pills, measured my rice and beans, made sure the piece of meat I ate was no bigger than the palm of my hand.

Of course, the weight-loss tactic proved futile again and again. I’d lose the weight, but I’d gain it all back and then some.

My closet was full of too small clothes that taunted me.

3

Growing up undocumented in Georgia made me crave security above all else. The state’s strict anti-immigration laws are there to make life so intolerable for immigrants like me that we self-deport. For example, when I was a teenager, the Board of Regents decided to make every undocumented student pay out-of-state tuition for higher education. Even when President Obama signed DACA, Georgia leadership refused to change its policy. Fortunately, I was able to afford some classe...