immigrant

From another intellectual gathering where I sat in the back row in my leather jacket and scrawled highly subjective notes in the dark: some entirely unacademic thoughts on migration.  On the many meanings of being an "immigrant" or an "outsider".  On the spectrum of choice and no-choice, of needs inner and outer, of searches practical and spiritual, that heave us travellers onto all our very different roads.  This came from a talk a few years ago at the Santa Fe Art Instititute.  Their fall lecture series was titled "Outsider:  Tourism, Migration, Exile" and featured, on this particular night, Iranian professor/writer/producer Hamid Naficy.  Documentary footage which Mr. Naficy shared, about a young woman from India attempting to assimilate in this country, contained the resonant line "she will not use the language of her tradition".  These words still reverberate in my head, with their significance to any of us who left behind our cultures of origin. Along with their languages (of prejudice, of violence, of smallness) which were unconscionable for us to continue. Those who migrate because physical safety or practical necessity says that they must are followed, at a reverent distance, by those of us who receive the same mandate from conscience and from heart.  All of us starting over, often with next to nothing, taking on the labor of the search for new voices and new homelands (geographical, emotional, spiritual homelands) that are safe. That allow us to thrive.

Connecting also with a favorite line from T. S. Eliot:  “For last year's words belong to last year's language/ And next year's words await another voice.”  As well as the declaration to "speak your truth, even if your voice shakes".


impervious border defenses only defy with this:
the crossing denied is worth all imagined risk
hostile walls accost with their heartache stories
of an other motherland
for those who are living without

her past will not uphold her
and there is no future in the familiar
no nurture in nexus of home
the dry wells they have given her to draw from
do not quench or offer growth
she quits the austere earth of her known
for an unimagined country
silences the words that dessicate, dominate, and desecrate
obscuring all the sacred
she will go free, mutable, and if need be, mute
but she will not use the language of her tradition
this land lets a new expression rise
this here's words await another voice
choice of pure presence though imperfect
now is all the power that she owns

forward out from fear
she will speak and stumble
accept the stubborn strength
of a yet unmastered tongue
to shape approximations of her real
from an unseasoned lexicon
in a voice that shatters, shakes, diminishes, returns
but belongs to her and here
alone