We naturally oscillate between feeling anger and feeling sadness when, as on March 15, an individual with exorbitant egotism yet grave insecurities again takes lives for the causes of racial or cultural domination and nativism, that is to say for reasons anathema to free people everywhere. Coming to terms with such tragedy can seem at the outset like staring directly into Medusa’s eyes. Like the reflection in Perseus’s shield, however, allowing ourselves these feelings can reveal the true nature of our fear, our prejudice, and the capacity within each of us for violence.
In the wake of Christchurch, I have ruminated, as have others, on its relationship to Pittsburgh, Charleston, Paris, Newtown, Norway, and countless other hate-driven atrocities. And I think that if it is not self-loathing that motivates the genocidal—their perception that somehow it is shameful to be different, to be new to a place, or to be the children of people who struggled to become old in a new place—then it is at least ignorance (inadvertent or otherwise) of their own histories, their own peoples’ histories. It is probably both. And though I can’t say that what I have to suggest would remedy self-loathing, it should at least alleviate ignorance.
Learn your family history. It might sound selfish: what good is it that each person study, to the extent possible, their own family? Indeed it would be selfish to take admonition to learn as license to trumpet your learning with everyone that you meet. And it is easy for someone like me, whose family has assiduously kept the family history, to see value in doing so. But consider what knowing about your own family might help you to understand about others’: how we share history (and the future of this finite world) with those whose ancestors employed, ruled, or owned ours; were employed, ruled, or owned by ours; were friends, lovers, or rivals of ours.
The family history is humbling, and it gives intentionality to the act of being one citizen among many. The family history does not imply moral relativism. It is not the case that the actions of some ancestors are as good or as just as the actions of others simply because they are also worth studying. Indeed, the point of family histories is precision: to know exactly what happened, to know what is legend and tall tale, to know what we did and why it was right or wrong and how we perceived it, if at least so that our descendants can do better. Sometimes you might feel proud of your ancestors’ accomplishments—they started up a corner store; told the best one-liners in town; moved across country for love or to feed their loved ones. But more than proud you might feel humble, grateful even.
Unless you are indigenous to the United States (and sometimes even if you are, like Florence Owens Thompson), chances are high that your family or part of it came here fleeing hardship and seeking opportunity or, because we are fallible, by forced relocation. And then being here, indigenous and nonindigenous alike have migrated throughout the hemisphere fleeing hardship and seeking opportunity or, because we continue to be fallible, by more forced relocation. It’s this history that makes it particularly incongruous that last Friday’s mass murder of New Zealand Muslims (many of whom were new Kiwis) was followed by Sunday’s Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations. For wrapped up in celebrating Saint Patrick and Irish pride is reconnection to an oppressed people’s roots, to surviving and shrugging off centuries of English tyranny, to being newcomers everywhere, not least in the Republic of Ireland itself.
Thus, it’s angering and saddening to see violence committed in part out of estrangement from roots, a fissure shoddily plastered over with dogma about the perfection of some humans (a contradiction) compared to others. It’s angering and saddening to wake to the continuous realization that we have not outgrown evil and destructive habits. History echoes, but we ought not to let it echo needlessly, painfully. But enlightenment will not bring itself about. Dampening those painful echoes, stopping the ringing in our ears, requires education and re-education, which begin with the personal and the familial.
In the United States, each family’s differences make it stereotypically American. Why did your ancestors come here? How did they live? Everyone has roots somewhere. As Bashō observed, our roots are often in shared ventures and similar environs. How many of us come from the countryside, from agricultural traditions, from long lines of laborers making music to brighten the work of sowing a field, caulking a boat, operating a loom?
Culture’s beginnings
Matsuo Bashō, trans. Sam Hamill (The Essential BashŌ)
from the heart of the country
rice-planting songs
And despite shared roots, we move around and change and have unique needs and develop diverse outlooks.
Like the buck’s antlers,
MATSUO BASHŌ, TRANS. SAM HAMILL (THE ESSENTIAL BASHŌ)
we point in slightly different
directions, my friend
In the interest of greater appreciation for what it means to be a migrant—to be from somewhere and going somewhere—I figured that I would gather perspectives and recommend them here. Following are books, poems, movies, music, and art that I advocate exploring. Most emphasize the American experience; some focus on experiences adjacent. I expect that some will be familiar and others foreign, but they all speak to commonalities. They can serve as sources of knowledge on (among other things) immigration, the migrant’s experience, being new, being new Americans, and having roots here and elsewhere.
Eavan Boland, “The Emigrant Irish”
From the perspective of the Irish who remained in Ireland, a reminder of the hardship undertaken in migrating to America to avoid the hardship inevitable in enduring the Great Famine.
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series
In this 60-painting series of tempera on wood panel, Lawrence depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the industrial north after World War I.
West Side Story
Produced in 1957 (book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), the musical retells Romeo and Juliet with Anthony and Maria caught between their gangs, the white Jets and the Nuyorican Sharks competing over turf in immigrant-rich, working-class New York City. Originally written as a conflict between an Irish Catholic family and a Jewish family, reflecting its creators’ roots; later made into a movie with brilliance (e.g. Rita Moreno) and flaws (e.g. use of brownface).
the work of Ramiro Gomez
The son of formerly undocumented United States citizens, Gomez often depicts Los Angeles’s unseen (and often undocumented) labor, painting in workers who clean houses, tend yards, and raise children where their employers expect them not to be visible.
Aaron Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man
It is telling that we consider Aaron Copland, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn via Scotland, to be the quintessential American composer—Scott Joplin and George Gershwin also come to mind. Copland’s Fanfare as well as his Appalachian Spring convey a deep love for a country focused on the future, on nature, and on welcoming common folk everywhere “yearning to breathe free.”
Halldór Laxness, Independent People
A subtle (and thus exquisite) satire about sheep farmer Bjartur of Summerhouses, intent on becoming self-reliant in early 20th Century Iceland’s brutal, boom-and-bust economy. Self-reliant, that is, in spite of the inescapable effects of multinational war and the pull of American economies.
Frozen River
In this 2008 drama, writer and director Courtney Hunt studies two mothers struggling to put food on the table, white discount store clerk Ray and Mohawk bingo hall employee Lila, and the desperate partnership they form smuggling immigrants across the cold and uncompromising Canada–USA border.
the work of Dorothea Lange
With an eye for realism and intimacy, Lange photographed many pivotal moments in our history, from the early 20th Century westward migration of Americans to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Juan Felipe Herrera, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border
Beyond the title’s reference to Proposition 187, California’s unconstitutional attempt in 1994 to deny government services to new Americans, Herrera’s verse runs the gamut from love letters to manifestos to journal entries for the Mexican American, Chicano, and Latinx communities.
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
Gyasi traces through the centuries two lines of a Ghanaian and American family tree sundered by the Atlantic slave trade. Her chronicle consists of linked short stories, depicting struggle and resolve among the wreckage wrought by American and West African economies premised on forced labor, hierarchies of race and of color, and complicity in exploiting social divisions.
Li-Young Lee, “The Children’s Hour”
A conversation among children growing up amid political violence, in a beloved but strife-ridden homeland where the only way forward is the way out.
12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen’s meticulous, haunting film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir of his kidnapping and sale into slavery in antebellum Louisiana. Northup’s experience an antithesis to the promise of American migration.
Hayan Charara, “Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms”
Charara, the son of Lebanese immigrants to Detroit, Michigan, sets aside a pastoral moment to mourn things that get lost en route to another country, among them traditions, language, and love.
Woody Guthrie, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”
Guthrie did not get all of the details right about the January 1948 crash near California’s Los Gatos Canyon of a plane carrying twenty-eight braceros (i.e. migrant farm workers) being deported to Mexico. For example, the braceros worked above board under the existing Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, albeit in unacceptable workplace conditions. Yet Guthrie’s lyrics, set to music by Martin Hoffman, imply that they were employed in the shadowy, undocumented manner that actually came to characterize much of American agriculture when the Agreement was terminated in 1964. Details aside, the protest song took the folk and country music worlds by storm with its heartfelt condemnation of the exploitation of migrant laborers.
Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
Stieglitz’s 1907 photograph of the steerage section of a German ocean liner eastbound from New York City likely depicts European migrants who were denied entry at Ellis Island. The photo is doubly noteworthy: demonstrating Modernist composition principles and documenting a period of immense immigration to the United States.
The Godfather Part II
The second act of Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of the Mario Puzo novel elucidates young Vito Corleone’s arrival in the United States (and, in a memorable sequence, how he became Vito “Corleone”). The movie is not only about his (at first unwilling) growth into a powerful mafia don but also about our governments’ failures to serve entire communities of new Americans and how ethnically-based syndicates stepped in to fill the void.
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, “Learning to Love America”
A consideration of what new Americans might feel in transplanting old roots into new soil—and what a strange place America must seem at first!—and of sacrifices made to begin again.