On Immigration

Borders are about selection, after all.Sometimes they are pivotal occasions and other times they are mundane and random interruptions in our travel. To whit, this advice about the route I travelled: “You will frequently find heavy traffic as Vermonters return from the hockey arena in Stanstead.”1How bland these guarded strips of territory are, as if inverse to potential psychological disruption!Once, near midnight, I was by myself at the rural Vermont border crossing headed to Montreal. Rather than being waved through, I was signalled inside to the empty Canadian customs and immigration waiting room. The lights were so bright and omnispresent that no object cast a shadow. Francophone music played on a radio in a waiting-for-the-shift-to-end vibe. A guy in a tight navy uniform motioned me up to the counter without making eye contact. He used his hands rather than voice to summon me, as if he were using dog commands. He asked all the questions about where I was going, segued into questions about what sorts of things I did for fun, if I lived alone. He laughed at my French — which was laughable — but he did it while he rocked back in his chair, amused.He found a missing detail and magnified it. Told me there was no way I was getting back into Canada to start the semester the next day. I was nineteen and beginning to sweat, hating that he liked watching me blush.“I’ll tell you what. I’ll sign this, but only if you come back and we go on a date.”With those words he turned the border offices into a bar, but he had me trapped tighter than any aggressive flirt with a beer in his hand.Do I need to finish this story? Every woman has one at least. Every war or border is stitched with these stories. I’ll complete it only to say that I was able to circumvent his threat thanks to privilege. As he angled and turned angry and promised to withhold or cancel my status I told him, sure, yes, give me your name and telephone number and yeah, I’ll be back tomorrow night, yeah, for a beer, mmhmm.I fumed on the empty roads, driving the dark stripes through the townships into Montreal. The next day I missed classes because I went back in the afternoon, but with a francophone male friend who did all the talking at the counter when we spoke with another guard. I got the necessary entrance stamp. We drove straight to the immigration ombudsperson in the city and filed a complaint, complete with badge number and the agent’s telephone number. *There is no way to write about immigration without troubling the notion of the line, of stepping out of line. To think about immigration is to consider hierarchy and dominance.“Colonize” and “settle” are both given as synonyms of “immigration.”2 The pain in the word is immediate.How do I write about this transnational topic in my adopted home in Vancouver on stolen Musqueam land? These layers of movement — mine, yours, histories’ — are rooted in a practice of occupation governed by hegemonic rules that are anti-human, cruel and divisive.3 *In mid-February 2017 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) coordinated raids in at least eleven cities specifically to terrorize us. The language of these raids is loaded with historical referent. The shockwave result of ICE’s targeted, surprise actions flags Michel Foucault’s thinking on Jeremy Bentham’s structural model for the Panopticon prison in which the inmate is led to believe they are constantly under surveillance. Foucault theorizes this not only changes the inmate’s behavior by making them self-censoring in action, and ultimately thought, but also assures their captors benefit from “the automatic functioning of power.” Power, information, surveillance.Yes, I am concerned about my web searches, my (browser) history, my phone being confiscated at a border, a misunderstanding separating me from my hometown for good.

I cannot talk about the border without talking about the body.

In the one month of February 2017 there were more searches of electronic devices at the US border than in the whole of 2015.4  It’s not that there are more crimes. The searches are a tactic of border control in and of themselves.*I cannot talk about the border without talking about the body.I think about women who endure kilometres as refugees, through night, loaded with belongings and toddlers, without food or comfort, and stave off giving birth until their feet cross an arbitrary border into “safety.” How the body reacts to that line.Where is that line? What invisible geographic coordinate can protect anyone, and for how long?I think of Bhanu Kapil’s protagonist in Ban en Banlieue, a brownblack schoolgirl lying in the mud and dirt after a race riot. Her body lines the ground, twitches corporal division. Race/space, trans(dis)location, the sharp hatred towards the immigrant; these are some of the codes that pulse through her as a semaphore of trauma.Think of This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Colour by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, the first edition of which I read in the early 1980s in the context of border-crossing literature.5 It was several years old then and the questions in its essays are not resolved yet now.Transgression. Who delineates? Who traffics? What does it cost the body?*

…the letters in “genre” twist into “gender,” another border, another containment. The trope of being “boxed in” via paperwork and forms dichotomizes us: male/female, resident/nonresident.

About emigrating (leaving) and immigrating (arriving) in a literary context:Bhanu Kapil writes, “I have been variously described or introduced as a poet, a novelist, a cross-genre writer, a hybrid writer, a creative non-fiction writer, a lyric essayist, a writer working at the intersection of lyric and documentary aims, a fiction writer, a performance artist and a prose-poet. The category is after the fact, just as nationality is. I have the same vagueness about genre that arises in my body when asked where I am from.”6When I read this quote, the letters in “genre” twist into “gender,” another border, another containment. The trope of being “boxed in” via paperwork and forms dichotomizes us: male/female, resident/nonresident.The impulse to overwrite, sprawl, and surge off the margins feels natural rather than reactive. A lifeline.Erasures, inhabitations, and footnotes (among hundreds of other strategies) are methods of counter-writing, of redefining and guiding us through difficulties. Narrative possibilities teach us who and how we are. As Betsy Warland writes in Breathing the Page, “The alphabet [becomes] a strategy for not getting lost: a map.”Poet and translator John Asfour, who left Lebanon for Canada as a young man, recognized literature as a refuge. When displacement is serialized, he theorized, “the only home is in the text.”7*In the third year of college I went to Chile on a six-month study program to increase my understanding of Spanish and expand my basic, human knowledge. This was eighteen months after Pinochet had stepped down; we were assured the country was “safe” for North Americans and offered the best linguistic and cultural opportunities. I didn’t know enough to investigate how safe it was for Chileans.During a superficial conversation with my host family’s teenagers I learned the dictator’s name wasn’t said aloud in public. They shushed me and looked around nervously. Others told me about a clandestine VHS copy of 1982’s Missing in which Jack Lemmon stars as a US journalist who has disappeared in Chile. The tape circulated unlabeled. We referred to it as “the movie” because its name was associated with the Left and that was still a dangerous position.I learned some differences between inside and outside, how talk magnifies, how trust is malleable and borders are psychological, too. This was not my first experience with official lying and the abuse of power—I had had a summer job in high school in Boston volunteering at an immigration resource centre for refugees. I had seen the fall-out of immigrating under extreme circumstances in the PTSD in Hmong and Guatemalan families.

She trusted me with her story so that the news of what had happened could travel out of South America. I was an envelope she could send over the border.

But living in Chile was the first time I couldn’t step out of trouble voluntarily at the end of a day. Soldiers tear-gassed our university while we were trapped inside. Students threw desks out windows down on the soldiers. We stayed in the stairwells with bandanas over our faces for hours until the standoff de-escalated. The next day the Chilean students were unphased. No one had been taken. They had missed dinner, missed their busses, qué lata, no más.8When I was in the south I met a survivor of state-sanctioned torture who showed me scars on her body. Chilean official discourse told a history entirely divergent from her lived experience. She trusted me with her story so that the news of what had happened could travel out of South America. I was an envelope she could send over the border.*“Over the past decade, around 10% of all permanent residents entering the country every year have been refugees. Of all permanent residents landing in British Columbia every year, 5% are refugees.”9 My father-in-law was a refugee, although he took life-saving precautions to hide it, such as altering his name, hiding his mother language, changing his story. During his escape — he swam a dangerous river and hid in forests — his friend died. And because his government penalized the families of people who escaped, he lost his siblings and parents, too, to silence.Once you are safe, you are not safe. The threat of discovery and fear of being sent back are constant.*One of the first hits when you google “immigration Canada” leads to a page that reads, “Find out how you can immigrate to Canada, how to protect yourself from fraud and what to expect after you arrive in Canada.”10You are a mark. You will be ripped off.*Eventually, I applied for landing as a Canadian permanent resident. Recording every domicile I had ever lived in for the form was time-consuming but easy. Each place had an address. None were absent or obliterated as structures or locales on a map. None were politically embattled or contested. When I couldn’t remember the exact number of one apartment I called the bookstore across the street from it and the staff person poked his head out the door to read the address to me.11 I didn’t have trauma blanks or absent weeks to account for. No forced removals from homes to mitigate, no bank accounts seized, no language conflict.It took about four months. A blink. Although I delayed almost two decades longer to get citizenship, those papers, too, went through without a hitch. Within a year of applying I waved a tiny flag at a bilingual French and English ceremony in Vancouver surrounded by friends and family.Over the course of twenty-eight years I have crossed the 49th parallel repeatedly and metaphorically. I have perforated visible and invisible social borders, travelled over both the erased and embattled lines of territories and languages, and manufactured and disrespected divides, just as we all do, on some scale. How we reconcile these geographically necessary or arbitrary decisions determines where we pause and how we define our lives. Although the ultimate border crossing wasn’t the eight-day car ride I wove across Turtle Island with the person I have spent my life with, that journey demarcates a before and after most vividly, as if it were a border itself.  * * *Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of the book of poems serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016), now in a second printing. She is the co-editor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), founder of Thursdays Writing Collective, and the editor and publisher of its eight anthologies. Her second book of poems, Tunica Intima (forthcoming 2018), has already been shortlisted for the Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is originally from Boston and is a dual US/Canadian citizen. www.eleekg.comReferences