Teaching is about the world outside of the classroom, as well as the community of scholars that a professor and students try to create within it. Last summer, I taught an online general education class on Migration Literature at the same time that the US Department of Justice decided to criminalize the act of seeking asylum. This coincidence raised questions about how contemporary events change our experience of reading. For those who would like to read some valuable books that are directly about recent events at the border, here are some suggestions. In class this summer, we discovered a different kind of insight. We found that a great book can, indirectly, capture the essence of contemporary events even when it is written about a different time and place. Here are three books that worked this way.
Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker I normally teach this collection of inter-connected short stories about Haitian immigrants to the United States for its evocative account of the traumatic effect of life under a totalitarian regime. In the summer of 2018, Danticat’s stories about families separated and reunited resonated with the current separation of families into jails and detention centers. Moreover, these stories trace trauma across generations and borders. Traumatic memory stretches across time and space, as it does for an elderly character in the story “The Bridal Seamstress.” A paranoid fear of the man who tortured her as a teenager in Haiti keeps her moving endlessly around the boroughs of New York. Her experience reminded us that what happens today at the border will, in this sense, go on happening long after the policies themselves end.
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist This well-known book refers to the events of 9/11 and their after-effects in the U.S. But in June, 2018 its story of assimilation and resistance gained a new significance. Students saw a similarity between the racialized US nationalism that Hamid described occurring after the 9/11 attacks and current attempts to limit immigration from Muslim countries. For Hamid’s character, Changez, this racialized nationalism is felt most pointedly at the border. He is held at airport customs after 9/11, an event that disillusions him from the possibility about reinventing himself in the US. What I saw differently as I taught the book this time was how much our sense of belonging comes from acts of recognition, both official and unofficial. Overnight, Changez is changed from a productive member of society to a criminal. Similarly, the crisis at the border occurred when the Justice Department’s declarations remade the United States from a place of acceptance and freedom –as Changez first experienced it – to one of exclusion.
Luis Urrea, The Devil’s Highway Written in 2004 about the Mexico-US border, Urrea’s account of a 2001 tragic border crossing that lead to the deaths of 14 Mexican migrants resonates most directly with the events of the summer of 2018. Citing Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey and the Mexican Migration Project, Urrea demonstrates that increased security along the Mexican border creates more problems, such as riskier migrations and migrants trapped in the US illegally. Urrea’s detailed description of the migrants’ deaths by heatstroke raised an important and overlooked aspect of migration that also became apparent in the separations and detentions at the border: the capacity of a border to undo a person’s humanity. My students used Julia Kristeva’s concept of the ‘abject’ to interpret Urrea’s harrowing descriptions of bodily decay in the desert. This concept helped them to deal with the unsettling scenes being evoked for the readers, as well as to conceptualize the way that national borders change our classification of what is acceptable and unacceptable—what is allowed into the body politic and what it refuses.
I did not instruct students to write about contemporary events or to make these connections, but they often did. One student wrote in a discussion post about Devil’s Highway, “I believe that this book gains the ability to show readers just how human these ‘illegal aliens’ can be, and that is something much needed in today's political climate.” Another wrote, “Immigration is a hot topic in the United States and I believe these readings provide this image, where nationalism is placed over humanitarianism.” A diverse international student body, such as the students at Mason, sees the relevance of these books even without the pressure of particularly dramatic current events. In the summer of 2018, however, there was another layer of relevance to our reading. Danticat, Hamid, and Urrea were contemporary in a way that went beyond an individual reader’s experience, creating instead a shared relation to experiences of borders.
February 11, 2019