JULY 9, 2017

In Times of Division,

Finding Refuge—

And Fighting Back

—Through Art

Ficre Ghebreyesus, Eden
Photo: Courtesy of Ficre Ghebreyesus Fine Arts

i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

These words, from Warsan Shire’s viral poem, “what they did yesterday afternoon,” were among the first to come to mind when President Trump issued his initial travel ban (the one with seven countries, rather than the current six). Though Shire’s words no longer encouraged me to dance, or celebrate, as they had when they were espoused by Beyoncé in Lemonade, they felt like the only familiar thing I could cling to. Crowds were gathering at airports in New York and Washington, lawyers were arriving en masse to help would-be travelers paper their way out of the problem, and I sat at my desk and thought about what the order would mean for my family, and for me.

I was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, raised in the suburbs of Washington, attended university in Rome, and now live in New York. My parents have lived just outside D.C. for about a decade. I am a former refugee, and a permanent resident. Instead of having a passport, I have a refugee travel document issued by the State Department. That turquoise document, with a U.S. seal on its cover, states on the opening page that it is “not a United States passport,” but it allows me to travel internationally. For all intents and purposes, it is my passport. Now, however, that document could be what keeps me from being admitted into the country. A lawyer I contacted after I got news of the ban put it this way: “The safest way to proceed is to not travel right now. . . . While technically and legally [you] should be admitted to the U.S. as a legal permanent resident who is not from one of the seven countries, [the fact of it being called a] ‘Refugee Travel Document’ may confuse things, and officers could detain and question [you].”

The facts: An abstract fear of having my movement restricted was coming into focus, as Trump’s campaign bravado became a reality. As I worked to learn more about the nuances of the ban and what my shifting, shrinking world meant for my life and work as a journalist, it dawned on me that the voices I cared most to hear weren’t those of the esteemed correspondents I’d read in journalism school, but those of young women of color who could speak with powerful rhetoric to the experience of not belonging—an experience that, in the increasingly divisive age of Trump, mattered more now than ever before. Shire’s poems, which largely revolve around the experience of being an African woman who is also an immigrant, were a reminder that my position—forced to leave one home to build a new one, and to straddle the border of two religions, two cultures, two countries—was far from unique. Her words made me feel less alone.

While novelists like Chimamanda Adichie, Imbolo Mbue, and Yaa Gyasi have written about some of the experiences of being an African woman in the West, it was poetry I found myself the most drawn to. For her part, Shire has said that there are many poems about the migrant experience “floating around the strange streets of the internet.” All I really needed to do was look for myself.

Soon, I found solace in the poems written by the young “Afropolitans,” a group whose name was popularized by the writer Taiye Selasi, who defined the classification this way: “Our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes, e.g. Ghanaian and Canadian, Nigerian and Swiss; others merely cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos. Most of us are multilingual: In addition to English and a Romantic or two, we understand some indigenous tongue and speak a few urban vernaculars. There is at least one place on the African Continent to which we tie our sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or an auntie’s kitchen. Then there’s the G8 city or two (or three) that we know like the backs of our hands.”

New Generation African Poets, a 2017 anthology of the work of 10 Afropolitan poets (nine of whom are women) managed to tap into the anxiety I’d felt even before Trump took office, over many years of various detainments at airports in the United Kingdom, in Italy, and in the United States, as I once again would wait to explain that no, I wasn’t American, so I didn’t have an American passport, and no, I didn’t have any other passport, but I had the right documents to travel. They were here for me again, now that the anxiety had reached a new tenor, particularly sharp in its sense of disappointment that the world I had been raised in was somehow closing. With countries shutting borders, and with leaders from Trump to Malcolm Turnbull attempting to force people to self-identify as one or the other, these women were grappling with the difficulties of being forced to choose an identity. Afropolitans, I realized, are the answer to Trump’s vision of America and Theresa May’s vision of Britain. We will not identify as any one “thing,” as we are intrinsically so many. In that way, we are the future.

There are other ways in which these poems reflect our current moment. Nearly every part of the anthology is weighted by histories of colonization and the fight for independence. Each book in the anthology is adorned with images of dark bodies; traveling, in gardens, in the sea. Images of African bodies as angels and mermaids painted by the late Eritrean artist Ficre Ghebreyesus seem to eerily reflect the perilous daily journey made by Africans crossing the Mediterranean (“This sea has always swallowed us/ boats have always failed us/ land has always meant barbed wire,” writes Momtaza Mehri) and fleeing their own countries for safer ground, as in Lena Bezawork Gronlund’s “Everything Here.” But no poet’s work remains rooted in a time period: Rather, each poem moves through history and transitions into the present, where war and a sense of belonging remain continued struggles. The poets reach, through the most delicate prose, for something many people are still in search of: understanding.

The scariest part of living in Trump’s America is knowing that everything is random. At any moment, buffeted on by the winds of fate, or flattery, or harsh, unstudied action, he could sign an executive order that could irrevocably change my life— and that’s not something I can fight directly or alone. This anthology reminds me that poetry and all art that gives voice to women, immigrants, and people of color has a crucial place in the fight against demagoguery—and that history will remember the way that we treat the most vulnerable among us.

It’s fitting that the anthology ends with Chimweme Undi’s “The Habitual Be,” a collection about the experiences of itinerant Southern Africans, whether migrant workers or political refugees. Undi’s collection, perhaps unintentionally, ends with a reminder that despite our differences, we are connected:
Of course we come together different,
found a better way to separate this breath
from our bad habit of living, to name a
circle a circle and disregard a line.

>via: https://www.vogue.com/article/trump-travel-ban-african-refugee-art-poetry