From the ashes, p.10
From the Ashes, page 10
Around the world the protests for Palestine dwarfed the “March for Israel” because, Aviah Sarah Day said, “we are increasingly able to see our disposability to capitalism,” and in Gaza we are getting a real-time demonstration. “Every time we see the utter disposability of Palestinian lives,” she continued, “we’re also reckoning with our own disposability.”118
Break II
My family doesn’t do grief.
My mother skipped her own mother’s funeral, in the brick church in New Hampshire built with bricks from her grandfather’s brickyard. There was no funeral for my father’s parents, he just packed their things and crawled into himself. I do not remember how my mother grieved her mother, though I know she did. I just did not see it. We don’t show emotion in my family.
So I should not have been surprised when my mother’s desire to wait a bit to hold a funeral for my father stayed on hold while my life fell apart. If it were to happen, I would have been the one to do it, to make the calls and the plans, and I simply could not. I was too busy finding a place to live, remembering how to be alone, releasing the future I thought I had. I could not carry the weight of my family this time. I had done it for years.
Instead I held rituals myself, or with friends. On Rosh Hashanah my friend and I broke bread and tossed it in the Hudson River outside my latest sublet and I cried into my dog’s fur. On my father’s yahrzeit (the Yiddish term for the Jewish commemoration of the day of someone’s death) friends held me and we ate and they listened while I told stories. I do not know how my mother grieved but I learned that sometimes the last people who can hold you when you need it are the other people mourning the same loss.
Grief was a fog I lived in. I could not see in front of me so I stayed still until someone offered me a hand to the next step. I had editors who liked me so enough work came my way to pay the suddenly inflated single-in-New-York bills. I had friends who liked me so I left the house and I ate and I did not have to hold my chest together all the time. I forgot for a while, I laughed, I got drunk, I kissed the wrong people. I moved and moved again, lived out of a storage unit and my ex’s house, spent an entire month on the road between New York and Madison, Wisconsin, on a whim, recorded work from rented rooms, and walked the dog on lake shores. Nothing felt like home so I was at home everywhere. I made “rootless cosmopolitan” jokes myself.
When I was sixteen my parents moved our family to South Carolina after my entire life in one of two Boston suburbs (best bagels in Boston). I clung desperately to the life I had only begun to understand was mine until the last possible moment. I did not understand what I went through as a kind of grief, only that I was too much for my teenage friends, that everyone wondered what the hell was wrong with me.
I was sixteen. I was a theater kid, a school newspaper kid, a weird kid who wore too much black and put together a thing we didn’t even know yet to call a zine with the other weird kids and wrote terrible poetry in an overpriced hardback journal and kept my crushes to myself. I divided my time between trying to be seen and trying to be hidden. I both believed and did not believe my parents when for years they discussed moving away, and when the process finally began, when they finally sold their house at a huge loss and began to pack it and sell or give things away and my mother and sister left, when we left the house and my father and I stayed behind with some friends of his so he could wind down what was left of the business and I could finish the school year, I refused to believe that it was really going to happen. I thought, somehow, we would stay.
The family friends my father and I stayed with hated me after a while. I drooped and made too many tearful phone calls that were technically long distance, abused their hospitality, though they never said so to my face. I overheard it one night.
My friends at school hated me after a while, or at least found me a convenient target. It was so easy to make me cry.
We did not stay.
I had never had my little heart broken by teenage boyfriends, not yet anyway—that would come later—had not yet lost anyone close to me, so I had nothing to compare the feeling of loss to. I felt disordered; my parents wanted to send me to therapy, but that sounded like hell: you want me to actually talk about my feelings, how could I possibly do that, I’ve never done that.
When we were finally gone, reunited with my mother and my sister, who already had new friends, I tried to reinvent myself briefly, but that didn’t work and I reverted to type, to theater and writing and wearing lots of black. It wasn’t so bad, or maybe it was so bad but I learned how to manage, to make friends, to use the skill I already had at hiding my feelings to make sure I got along with people.
I did not see my parents grieve their old lives, but they must have. They must have done that alone or with one another, at night or behind closed doors or while I was out doing teenager things. I remember my mother’s hurt at the friends who did not write or call afterward. I do not remember my father showing emotion at all, but I caught him smoking again while waiting to drive me to school. He shrugged, admitted he’d never really quit. I did not see him show emotion about the business that had collapsed or the house that he’d been underwater on, only saw him throw himself into his new work.
South Carolina became home, I suppose. By the time I applied to universities, I did not think of going back to Boston. New York was the closest I tried, and I chose New Orleans instead, farther south, something new, a risk I could take though I was scared again. No one ever told me it was grief that I went through, the kind of ambiguous loss where the thing I lost was still there but I would not have a place in it anymore. When I went “home” to visit, my friends had moved on. My crush was seeing a girl who looked like me.
I learned to take moving lightly, to pack my things and exchange a few goodbye kisses and shove my cat in a carrier and hit the road. I did not grieve another home until I left the one I had made with my partner, two hours or so north of New York City, overlooking the river. Cheaper on our freelance incomes, with office space for both of us and a backyard for the dog. The night I realized that I had to leave, weeks after my father died, my partner was not there. He’d left again on another work trip right after the first one he’d gone on right after I came home from saying goodbye to my father. I tossed and turned and stared at the ceiling and held my chest together and thought wildly about what it would mean to leave. Where would I go? Where was home, now? Did I have one?
It was my mother finally who pointed out to me that I was essentially getting divorced, that the legal entanglement I had avoided was not actually the hardest part of ending something that was supposed to last forever. Even as she also thought I was acting out, pushing away the people who loved me in my grief. He did love me, I know that, but he did not love me in my grief because he could not see it. Because he packed and went on those trips. Because he cheerily, finally, told me at a party in front of friends that he would have to miss my birthday for a meeting, and I sat down at a table and one of those friends told me that she was going away for the summer and I could stay in her Brooklyn apartment if I wanted to.
The next day I told him I was leaving and I told her yes.
It wasn’t home, that place where I landed, but it was beautiful if small and it was near a park for the dog and it was around the corner from someone I didn’t know what to call yet but wanted to be close to all the same. I cried in that bed and wrote long journal entries on the table that doubled as a desk and one night that new man came over and drank wine at the desk that doubled as a table and he said something about moving to Europe and it occurred to me briefly that I too could leave this place entirely.
I’d done it enough by then, hadn’t I?
I could not leave my grief behind but I could leave anyway. Eventually I would leave New York too, I would understand why my new almost-lover had to go and write him from a hotel room years later to tell him so. I would understand why my parents needed to leave the home they’d built. I would reach for a new home in a strange place and build myself a new support system among strangers and love people who were a different kind of family.
I would throw more bread in the water, put my father’s photo on a desk or mantel or altar everywhere I went, with candles and trinkets that I picked up: a stone from an Irish beach, a flower from a London tree blooming in an extra-warm February. Rather than outrun my grief, I gave it new spaces to dwell in, found it in different parts of my body at unexpected times: a knot in my jaw that a lover massaged away, a day that my chest clenched so tight my housemate brought me a hot water bottle to sit with.
I could not leave what hurt behind me, so eventually I learned to live with it, to recognize it when it arrived. I learned to talk to it, to rarely but sometimes be grateful for it.
CHAPTER 2
Flow
Migration, home, and freedom
2.1 Border
Five rich men disappeared in a tourist submersible, and the rich world was obsessed with them. In the same week 750 poor people were crammed onto a fishing boat called the Adriana that the rich world let sink.
On the sub were two billionaires, two millionaires, and a millionaire’s son. One of the millionaires and his son were from Pakistan, the same country from which many of the migrants on the Adriana had come, looking for refuge in Europe. On the sub they sought adventure, a quick trip down to the wreckage of the Titanic, where, famously, the rich people got the lifeboats and the poor were left to drown. On the Adriana they sought a different life, a risky voyage that they hoped would finally pay off with safety at the end. They had already left everything behind. One hundred and four of them were saved. The rest lost at sea.1
The rescue operation for the sub was international, pricey, expansive. By contrast, Mohammed, a survivor of the Adriana, said that helicopters and ships passed them by as their overfilled boat stalled, their distress calls ignored, and that when the Greek coast guard finally arrived, “they were right next to us when it capsized. In the moment it sank, they moved away from us. They deliberately made us sink.” (The Greek government denied this.) The Washington Post, in a detailed investigation, suggested that “the deadliest Mediterranean shipwreck in years was a preventable tragedy.” An anonymous former Mediterranean coast guard official told the Post, “It’s an open secret that no country wants to take them.”2
The sinking of the Adriana was possibly “the worst tragedy ever” in that sea, according to one EU official, yet it was also not rare. Protesters in Thessaloniki, in response to the sinking, marched to the port with a massive banner reading, “Tourists enjoy your cruise in Europe’s biggest migrant’s cemetery,” words echoing those of Pope Francis before his 2021 visit to migrant camps in Greece.3
Carola Rackete, a German ship captain, called them “ghost boats,” the various rickety vessels or rafts that carry desperate migrants across the sea, that too often do not survive the journey. Rackete’s time leading rescues on the Sea-Watch 3 coincided with the growing shift toward criminalizing this desperate passage. It was June 2019 when her ship rescued fifty-three people from a raft floating between Libya and Lampedusa, an island in the Mediterranean, part of Italy, where the relatively new government included the hard-right anti-migrant party, the Lega. Its loudest voice, Matteo Salvini, was the interior minister. Some of the people who boarded the Sea-Watch 3 from the raft were sick, some injured, some pregnant, some young children. Rackete was forbidden from landing her vessel at Lampedusa, but after days in limbo, she did so anyway.4
Other countries refused or ignored distress calls from Rackete’s ship. She would face charges for “promoting illegal immigration,” but rescuing people in distress at sea, she noted, is an obligation under Article 98 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. She pointed out that simply banning the boats would not stop them: “No one signs up for something like this for the sake of adventure, or on some insubstantial whim. You can’t scare people into staying at home when their lives were already at risk there.” No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark, British Somali poet Warsan Shire wrote. Yet when and if they make it to a European port, migrants are required to tell their stories over and over so that comfortable officials can parse meaning and weigh desperation, gauging whether the reasons a person has left her home are good enough, by which we mean sufficiently horrifying, to give them leave to stay.5
Rackete was released, eventually; a judge ruled that her actions in docking at Lampedusa were justified. By 2021, the last charges against her had been dropped, and Salvini faced charges of his own over his refusal to allow migrants to land in Italian ports.6
But the borders have not softened. Rather, they keep expanding. When I spoke to Rackete in 2023 over a jittery Zoom connection, she told me that Frontex—the European border patrol—is extending its reach deeper into Africa, surveilling the movements of migrants and signing contracts with countries like Ghana and Senegal. Like US border patrol agencies, Frontex has grown more and more powerful as politicians get louder about migrants, painting them as a security threat rather than as humans moving from place to place for a variety of reasons, as Europeans themselves have done with impunity for centuries. “De facto, the asylum system already doesn’t work or the Geneva Convention isn’t applied anymore,” she said. “Not in the US nor in Europe, nor in Australia. It’s already kind of dead, and we are still keeping it alive a little bit with our efforts.”7
It is easier, Rackete noted, to create a court case against someone like her for something they did or to claim that migrants are breaking the law by moving. It is harder to prosecute someone for what they failed to do, for neglect, for leaving boats drifting in the waves for hours days weeks while pretending not to have heard distress calls. In 2019, Salvini in Italy felt like an outlier, but in 2023, she said, “It just seems like the fascist tendency right now is far, far greater and far more notable across Europe.” Center-left parties, in hopes of capturing back some of the vote from the right, capitulate on immigration, making scapegoats of those who take to the seas.
Rackete and Pia Klemp, another ship’s captain, were offered the Grand Vermeil Medal by the mayor of Paris in 2019, but like Rackete, Klemp insisted she was no hero. “Paris, I’m not a humanitarian. I am not there to ‘aid.’ I stand with you in solidarity,” she wrote. “We do not need medals. We do not need authorities deciding about who is a ‘hero’ and who is ‘illegal.’” Their sea rescues, Rackete said, are a form of triage, one person at a time, not a structural solution but important, nevertheless, to prove that it is possible to make a difference, that regular people (not heroes) can push back against the impersonal forces of border and state and capital. In her book, she argued, “There’s only one way to address this justice crisis: we need to reframe migration—as an integral part of life, fresh momentum for societies, a human right, and as an undeniable reality in a radically changing world.”8
I cannot comprehend the strength it took to step onto that crowded ship with hundreds of strangers and maybe one or two loved ones. The bravery of the people on the Adriana far exceeds that of five rich men in a submersible bound for adventure, yet the world treated their lives as less valuable. Syrian refugees now have to risk their lives on ghost boats, ghost travelers along the borders, when once Syrians had sailed for the United States on the Titanic. Like the steerage-class passengers on that ship, they are denied rescue, the lifeboats reserved for those in first class.9
Matloob Hussein called his brother Adiil from the Adriana; Adiil was awaiting him in Greece, but Matloob said the boat was “very bad,” that they had been loaded on “like cattle” and he was stuck below deck, in the belly of a boat made to hold a cargo of fish rather than live people. He turned his phone off for the journey. That was the last anyone heard from him.10
Donald Trump built his political career on the promise of a wall at the border, a wall that would somehow make impervious the US body politic. The wall, journalist Daniel Denvir noted, “is a structure of political feeling.”11
“Every time I talk about the border to people who are not from the Southwest, I say, my grandmother was alive when the border was drawn,” Viktoria Zerda, now an immigration lawyer in Philadelphia but a child of the borderlands, told me. The border was drawn right through her family, which now exists on both sides of the line between Texas and Mexico. For many years, they crossed back and forth easily, and then slowly the border tightened, the journey became illegal and the family sliced in two. The United States had won Texas and surrounding lands from Mexico in a war sparked by settlers who opposed Mexico’s decision to outlaw slavery. The enslavers won, and along the way tens of thousands of Mexicans became Americans. Or, as the protest chant goes, the border crossed us.12
What the changing nature of the border should remind us is that the border produces the migrant. Borders are anything but natural even when they are bodies of water, rivers and seas; countries negotiate and split hairs over which portion of a river is theirs, how far into the sea their territory extends. And the migrant constructs the nation in turn: their image is, as Robin D. G. Kelley wrote, used to define who belongs, to justify “inclusion, exclusion, and outright criminalization.”13
