The cost of the story

Pixabay

I have never thought journalism was a safe profession.

I remember as a child, my parents having dinnertime conversations about journalists they knew who were attacked and left paraplegic (or who had to flee the country quite literally in middle of the night) because what they had reported enraged the powers that be.

Read the rest of this in an interactive storymapped long-form piece at AL DÍA News.

Thinking about my father ... Hope is the thing with feathers

May 7, 2014: I've been watching the movie "Missing," the Costa-Gavras' film rendition of Charles Horman's death during the Pinochet coup in Chile. The last time I watched the movie was with my father, not long before he died from pancreatic cancer. We didn't talk much during his lifetime about his experience being kidnapped and held and hurt during Guatemala's armed internal conflict, but we did that day and on subsequent days. 

I remember telling him I thought he was brave, but now I wish I had told him every day. Because these kinds of experiences ... they are relived and refought every day. At a recent Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma workshop I attended, I heard about the long term effects of immigration and refugee trauma (including, but not limited to, those who have been tortured) so the analogy I made in this post isn't as far-fetched as it might seem.

I wrote this post in 2008, four years after my father died. I'm startled now by how little has changed for immigrants in the U.S. (although all the links in the original post were dead and I had to remove them). The rest of the post is unchanged — even though the line about Guatemala was far too naive and optimistic, and written before a former military man from an earlier repressive regime, Otto Perez Molina, was elected president.

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“You must have been so scared when you were kidnapped.”

It is a few months before my father’s death in 2004, and I’m riding home with him from an appointment with his oncologist. He is driving because he still can – and because it is one of the few routines he has been able to retain from his pre-cancer days. No matter that all of the family actually likes driving more than he does, it is a way of taking care of us so ingrained that wresting the steering wheel from him would be viewed as an act of high treason.

He doesn’t answer me immediately, concentrates on guiding the hulking Land Rover through the twisty Chester County back roads on which he’s chosen to drive home. This is another idiosyncrasy of my father’s – never choose the easier road, go for the one that requires attention to navigate.

“Scared? No,” he finally answers. “Not exactly.”

He rarely talked about the experience. We lived in Guatemala when it happened. He was driving home from work one afternoon when three cars boxed his in – you’ve seen the maneuver in movies. The men dragged him out of his car, hooded him, shoved him to the floor of one of their cars and drove around to disorient him before taking him to a room. There, they alternately abandoned him to hooded isolation, or harangued him with the details of my mother’s whereabouts, and ours, and how easily we, too, could be where he was.

In those days in Guatemala we lived on tenterhooks – no family got through without some brush with terror. Cars were pulled over, houses were forcibly entered, schools and workplaces were raided. Neighbors denounced one another, and people were picked up for interrogation on the slightest suspicion of malfeasance, or misfeasance, or nonfeasance. Torture, disappearances, assassinations and all manner of the collateral damages associated with an undeclared war were commonplace.

Kidnappings funded arms purchases, and despite ransoms paid, most of the kidnapped were never seen again. Or, their bodies turned up much later.

So how could my father not be soaked in fear, not be paralyzed by the impossibility of his circumstance?

"I was too busy for fear,” he tells me as we traverse the bucolic Pennsylvania landscape where he found a home a few years after his kidnapping. “I had to figure out how to stay alive. I had to convince them to let me go, so I could get back to you kids and your Mami. To make sure you were safe.”

I look over at my dad that day in 2004, and see a man much diminished by the ravages of chemotherapy and radiation. He had always been too short to cut an imposing figure, but he had the presence that comes from years of obligations met, of words held as bond, of a fire banked so deep that no circumstance – no matter how dreadful – could extinguish it.“

Don’t you hate the people who put you through that?”’ I ask him.

“How can I hate?” he answers after a moment. “I’m here.”

Years after we moved to the United States, my dad met the father of one of my brother’s friends. The man – roughly my dad’s age – had been detained by Pinochet’s henchmen after Allende was overthrown in Chile. He was an impressive person – a man of deep intellect and erudition. His twisted hands and wrists were the result of torture. He conversed quietly about his experience – about the grotesque things human beings are willing to do to each other in the name of politics, or for fear of what that other person represents.

My dad wasn’t a man of many words – so he had to be prompted to tell his own story. He never described it as a form of torture – it hadn’t left a physical trace on his body after all – but it was clear to all of us listening that torture, indeed, was what it had been.

Listening to both of them talking that day, I felt a little pity for their captors. (Okay, not much pity, but still, some.) They had sought, by inhuman treatment, to make these men less than human. To make their lives unlivable. To make them forget to hope.

They had failed.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” American poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all.”

As much as I miss him, I am grateful my father didn’t live to see the country he loved embroiled in the sordidness of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or the debate about whether waterboarding truly qualifies as torture. I’m relieved he wasn’t alive for the revelations about extraordinary rendition, nor to see the Patriot Act enacted.

Mostly, I’m glad he – a proud U.S. citizen – didn’t live to see the fear we are visiting on undocumented immigrants in this country. It would have sounded alarmingly familiar: Cars pulled over at random. Workplaces raided. Neighbors denouncing each other and people picked up for interrogation on the slightest provocation.

If you are recoiling at the analogy, you are not alone. So did I the first time I heard it drawn for me by a priest friend who works with the undocumented. Even more, his analogy for the way we treat and deport the undocumented uses the word torture.

Told you – recoil.

But then I think back on my father’s experience and I see troubling parallels. He was plucked suddenly from his life. He was taken somewhere he didn’t know by people who held power over him. He was isolated. His family was threatened with the same treatment. Read my blog post of Oct. 23, “Disappeared in Philadelphia,” and you’ll see that Beto’s experience is not far removed from my father’s.

A number of people with voices in the immigration debate have claimed that whatever treatment undocumented immigrants get it is no more than what they deserve. That they’ve broken laws. That they negatively impact the economy. Even, as Pat Buchanan says in his book “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” that they are threatening the very nature and ideals of the nation.

The same arguments were made in Chile under Pinochet. And in Guatemala during its slow slide into genocide. Thankfully, both those countries have since come out of their long, fearful darkness.

We, on the other hand, stand poised on the edge of a feather.

Originally posted December 14, 2008.

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Jason Vourvoulias ¡presente!

Why I love/hate my name (and therefore Audrey Hepburn)

My Aunt Norma tells the story that when they were teenagers in Mexico City, she and my mother went to see the movie Sabrina, with Audrey Hepburn. As they came out of the movie theater, my mother turned to her and said: "When I have a daughter, I'm going to name her Sabrina."

Norma, some years younger than my mother and not a sister but what in Latin America is known as a "prima-hermana" (sister-cousin), was both impressed and doubtful. There was not a whit of vacillation in my mother's voice and a teenager who doesn't doubt is an awe-inspiring thing. But they were both crazy about movies —golden age Hollywood and golden age Mexican cinema — so Norma reasonably figured some other movie role (and star) would depose Audrey's Sabrina in my mother's affections in the years remaining before either of them contemplated marriage, no less children.

As you know if you're reading this, my mother wasn't fooling around when she made that proclamation.

I can't help wondering, sometimes, why my mother couldn't fall in love with Dolores del Rio instead, or María Félix, or even Silvia Pinal — or any of their characters with culturally appropriate names.

But no. My mother had to name me something so culturally foreign (in those days) that most of the people I grew up with in Guatemala thought the name was "Sobrina," the word for niece.

In those days, even in Anglo culture Sabrina was a bit of a rarity. I searched far and wide for Sabrinas in my English-language childhood reading, and came up with two: John Milton's poem Sabrina Fair; and a character in the Archie comic books, Sabrina the Teenage Witch — a character so white they didn't ink any color in her hair or the freckles over her nose.

Just  as I have a love/hate relationship with my name, I have a love/hate relationship with the actress who embodied the person of Sabrina. Audrey was a quite capable actor with surprisingly good comedic timing; she projected charm, style and intelligence in a distinctive and particular way, impossible for any actor then, or now, to emulate.

For my mother — a born artist whose mother had made her decline a scholarship to study with the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and instead forced her to attend secretarial school — Audrey was a gently subversive role model. Many of her roles carried the whiff of the artist even within narratives of ultimate respectability.

And her look: one part student of Allen Ginsburg and Jean-Paul Sartre; three parts consumer of Givenchy and Mary Quant ....

My mother found her irresistible. She watched — and loved — every movie Hepburn ever made.

I, on the other hand, fixated on Hepburn's tiny 22-inch waist and her gloriously willowy dancer's body, and despaired of ever living up to what my mother had, in my name, wished me to be.

I suppose I might have been equally unhappy if my mother named me Jo (after Hepburn's initially bookish character in Funny Face) or Holly (the definition of whimsical in Breakfast at Tiffany's) — also cultural mismatches from roles with equally impossible style standards — but Sabrina is undeniably the worst. And as a movie? Anything that misuses Humphrey Bogart's talents so egregiously doesn't deserve tribute, much less naming after.

So what was it about the movie Sabrina that made it resonate so deeply with my mother?

Oddly, I think it's a cultural thing — tied essentially to the time period when my mother lived in Mexico City (her family split her childhood and adolescent years between Mexico City; Boca del Rio, Veracruz; and Guatemala City).

My mother's Mexico City was a heady, exciting place. It drew world artists like Luis Buñuel, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, and had its own well-known radical aesthetes in Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Churubusco studios produced both beloved populist films starring Cantinflas and more sophisticated fare starring María Félix. Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska were all developing their writing voices in the same Mexican crucible of class, race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, politics and religion as my mother.

Sabrina is, for all intents and purposes, a Hollywood rendition of a beloved and enduring Mexican melodrama and telenovela trope: the daughter of the serving class who falls in love with the master's son, is done wrong, proves her worthiness in some way or another, and ends up in an improbable happily ever after with him (or his better, but also ruling class, brother).

Some of Sabrina's narrative choices had elements that would particularly appeal to my mother: the fact that Sabrina finds her voice and style in Paris — where Mexican artists from Kahlo to Paz found validation for their very Mexican but also iconoclastic artistic visions.

And it was set in New York, the most dynamic of U.S. cities for both artist and social climber alike.

Like all rom-coms, Sabrina is a fantasy of desire and idealized circumstance. For my mother, I think the hope it best spoke to was that someday she'd be able to shake-off the yoke of middle class, Latin American convention, and that she'd create a style — and a life — of her own choosing.

And she did.

My mother became the artist my grandmother never wanted her to be. She developed her unique style in a different way than the character Sabrina did — for one thing, she was already married and a mother — but with the same single-minded focus.

When my mother wanted to produce her sculptures in reflective metal, for example, she went to work as an unpaid employee at a bicycle factory in Guatemala in exchange for unlimited use of the facility's chroming vats after hours. She learned to weld at that factory, and she learned how to survive as the only woman on the production line.

She didn't get a moment of double take, like Hepburn's character does when she comes back from Paris and the William Holden character she's been infatuated with since adolescence spots the newly glamorous and sophisticated Sabrina waiting at the train station. Instead, the many moments of double take my mother experienced were from Guatemala's ruling and middle class art patrons and gallery habitués, stunned when her exhibit openings would fill with her working class factory coworkers, there to support her. 

When my mother left Guatemala, it was with a "sculpture" her coworkers had proudly produced for her — a chromed bicycle wheel mounted upright on a base and signed by every member of the factory's production line.

But, back to Sabrina.

I still sometimes wish I had a name better suited to my ethnic and cultural identity. The other day at a journalism workshop someone jumped to the conclusion — and then tried to argue with me — that no real Latina bears my name.

*Sigh*

But I have grown fonder of my name.

It defies expectation, just like the woman who gave it to me.

And maybe, just maybe, that's the point.

The Macondo of the soul: How Gabriel García Márquez taught me to believe in words

I was a girl growing up in a Guatemala wracked by a bloody, undeclared civil war. I knew magic existed, because I knew books existed. And there was one I wanted desperately to read — Cien Años de Soledad — One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was on my mother’s nightstand and on the lips of every adult in my life. I was seven.

“Can I read it?” I asked my mother.

“No, you’re not old enough,” she responded.

I knew what that meant. It must have sex in it, and no amount of complaining would change her mind.

[...]

García Márquez was a journalist before he became a fiction writer and I, who have followed that same trajectory, understand perfectly why. Some truths can only be told in fiction; some reports rival the most vile and grotesque imaginings.

To read this column in its entirety, click here.

Arguing while American -- E.L. Doctorow, my mother, and arrogance

Last year, as the genocide trial of former General Efraín Rios Montt unfolded in Guatemala, I was glued to the proceedings. I live streamed enough hours of the trial that the witness of the indigenous Ixil and K’iche’ people who testified will be seared in my consciousness probably for the rest of my life. When I wasn’t watching live stream, I was reading analysis of the trial written by observers from across the world; following the tweets about it from the dozens of Guatemalans I followed even before the trial started, and adding another dozen or so Guatemalan tweeple after #sihubogenocidio became my default hashtag search. I reached out to have a Guatemalan journalist write an opinion piece in AL DÍA, and gave one of our staff reporters some contacts of Guatemalans in diaspora, in Philadelphia and nationally, for her to interview for the cover story we ran.

When Rios Montt was found guilty and sentenced to 80 years, I cried. When the trial was retroactively deemed unconstitutional and annulled, I cried again. Different tears, same heart filled with the country I’ve always loved, that I’ve lost and will never be able to fully reclaim again.

I shared much of this with my friends and family on Facebook, as is my wont. One of my cousins, who lives in Guatemala, commented — in a caring way — that I was completely and utterly wrong. About the trial, the witnesses, the meaning I was attributing to actions and counteractions. I argued. She argued. We went back and forth for bit, and then eventually dropped it and went back to sharing photos of our loved ones and updates about the work that we each feel passionately about.

But before I post anything about Guatemala these days, I think about her.

The thing is, I haven’t changed my mind, nor my politics, nor one sentiment or belief about the fundamental injustice, ruthless repression and endemic racism that drove 30+ years of horrific undeclared civil war into an even more unbearable and horrific genocide. But the country that haunts my memories and my dreams and my stories, doesn’t haunt my days — and it hasn’t for almost 40 years now.

My cousin, on the other hand, lives there. Always has. That’s where her children were born, and recently, a grandchild. It’s where her mother and grandmother are buried. Her life is there — during the worst days and the best — in what is still one of the most violent countries of the western hemisphere.

And I live in the country whose policy toward Guatemala historically included deposing a popularly-elected president, shoring up a series of dictators and repressive military governments with arms and counterinsurgency experts that, as documents released through the freedom of information act show, came this close to participation in the genocide. Guatemala’s current violence is in large part the result of narcotraffic and organized crime but grew directly from the history of impunity for crimes our American government facilitated from the mid 1950s through the early 1990s.

No matter how just the cause we Americans espouse when raising our individual voices about international issues these days, we need to keep our arrogance in check. Too often when we have these conversations (informally or formally) we accord ultimate authority to organizations and voices from outside the country in question, instead of those working to draw attention to the matter from within. We too often adopt strategies for activism that seem brave and audacious in our own cultural context but that bulldoze the far more complicated activism of those in whose name we’re presumably advocating. Femen is a good example of this, with their topless marches that insult and trivialize homegrown women’s rights activism in Muslim countries.

It’s not that we don’t do it with the best of intentions, but it is also an aspect of our American exceptionalism (and the European Union equivalent) that we believe we are “ripping the blinders off” those who are actually living through whatever we’re protesting. We need — really need — to understand how arrogant this seems to those who have more than just metaphoric skin in the game.

Years and years ago, at my college graduation, E. L. Doctorow spoke to the commencement crowd about the undeclared civil wars raging at that very moment in El Salvador and Guatemala. I remember being glad he was doing so, because I hated Ronald Reagan and hoped enough people would get riled and vote him out of office before a second term. But as Doctorow’s speech wore on my mother became more and more agitated.

My mother was Guatemalan. She had lost some  friends to the violent armed internal conflict, and seen others turned paraplegic or chased into exile because of it. In truth, she had lost her country to it as well, because it was the rampant, uncontrollable violence of that era that prompted us to leave. She spent much of her time in the United States discussing with other Guatemalans in diaspora what needed to happen for real change to take place in their country. She would, several years after Doctorow’s commencement speech, host a then-candidate for the presidency (the first civilian in 30 years to try to wrest the post away from military strongmen) in our home, and contribute to his campaign, in an effort to do something concrete from here. (That candidate was popularly elected and despite initial efforts to end human rights abuses, ended up in a test of wills against the military that culminated in his becoming a strawman — but that’s the topic for another blog post).

Anyway, back to Doctorow and my mom ... after commencement was over, I remember asking her why she was upset — after all I had heard her go on and on about the brutality of what was happening in Guatemala in much more specific and heartfelt ways than Doctorow had.

“What time would you guess he’s actually spent in Central America?” she asked me, each word hard and clipped even as her eyes glittered with tears. “A week? Two? His speech was pure arrogance.”

And she was right. It was a white savior speech: easier to swallow, certainly, than the white savior propaganda that had “justified” the U.S meddling in Guatemala in the first place, but at heart it was the very same narrative. We — Americans — would fix it. We’d decry and hector and lecture and politic, and because of our focus on it the dysfunction would disappear ... because now we saw it.

Honestly, I don’t intend to stop advocating for human and civil rights anytime soon, but thinking about this has made me realize how readily I — not even really “white” nor wholly American culturally — put on the cape of savior when I write about the world's injustices in tweet, comment section, blog, column, editorial. I realize how often I choose to speak instead of listening to the homegrown voices that are already raised in discussion about it.

Some of those are voices I like hearing, others not. But all of them have earned their opinions by living in their own country, and nothing I say from the outside — no matter how righteous I think it — should carry the same weight.

Time for a little humility.

Hago la lucha: La Gorda and the City of Silver

Vintage poster for one of Rafael Lanuza's "Superzán" luchador movies

This past July, at Readercon, I participated in a Latino SFF writers reading with two masterful readers: Daniel José Older and Julia Rios. Since I was doing a solo reading from my novel INK later, I chose to read one of my short stories La Gorda and the City of Silver, which appeared in the Crossed Genres anthology Fat Girl in a Strange Land early in 2012. The story has been one of the best received of any of my short stories, and I had never read it publicly before, so I threw myself into it and tried to match the exuberance and skill of my co-readers.

Like so many of my stories, La Gorda has a political underpinning. Guatemala has one of the highest rates of femicide in Latin America and I knew the fictional luchadora I had created was going make protecting the women and girls of her neighborhood her mission.

The odd thing about La Gorda is that her family life — she is the daughter of a lucha libre filmmaker, and goddaughter to his stable of luchadores — is based on reality. My grandmother actually lived in Ciudad de Plata (City of Silver), the Zone 7 neighborhood in Guatemala I describe in the story, and her next door neighbor was a man called Rafael Lanuza.

Still from Superzán & the boy from space

If you look at the photo at the top of this blog post you will see a poster of one of Lanuza's most popular early films, Superzán y el niño del espacio —Superzan and the boy from space — which, like others of his lucha libre films, was partially filmed in his backyard in City of Silver. I watched, over my grandmother's fence, as scenes from some of Lanuza's luchador short films were being shot, and remember my grandmother introducing the filmmaker to me once. He wore a suit, and a hat, and looked so staid to me — but out of his mind came these wild movies that combined a popular luchador hero and pulpy Sci Fi elements....

While Lanuza went on to earn his fame as Guatemala's leading filmmaker with a non-lucha libre film called Terremoto (Earthquake), the luchador films are the ones my grandmother took us to a Zone 7 movie theater to see.

Still from Superzán & the boy from space

They were super low-budget films (many of Lanuza's actors were his relatives), tacky and over the top, and called forth audience participation on par with that of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the height of its popularity. But, unlike Rocky Horror, the interaction, the jeers and cheers, were completely unstudied. Just the community reacting to good and evil playing out in black and white on the screen in front of them.

I loved the experience even as I was embarrassed by it.

By the way, my story hinges on La Gorda not being able to become an official luchadora because she is a woman, and while that accurately reflects the world of lucha libre in Guatemala during the 1970s of Lanuza's filmic heyday — it is no longer true. There are luchadoras in Mexican lucha libre these days (though at least one article I've read argues there are still too few of them, and that they are poorly paid compared to their male counterparts).

"The cautionary tale of numero cinco." episode of Angel.

It is interesting to note that as more Mexicans and Central Americans have immigrated to the United States, lucha libre has immigrated with us. So much so, in fact, that the luchadores with their iconographic masks have found their way into more mainstream pop culture. There is a Hellboy as luchador series of books, and even the TV show, Angel, featured an episode with a luchador character.

At their heart, luchadores are populist folk heroes, the defenders of good and of the people. In Lanuza's Superzán movie, the boy from space bears a message of peace, love and goodwill. It is up to the luchador Superzán, along with a couple of indigenous Maya allies, to save the boy from those who would silence him and use his telepathic ability to nefarious purpose.

My stories are often resolved in bittersweet ways. But not La Gorda. Hers is a triumph of community, of ordinary people putting a stop to the predation and evil that takes place in the streets around them.

Because everyone — mask or not — can stand as a hero.

Ándele pues. Haga la lucha.

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Long Hidden

Editor’s note: Elianne Ramos is the scheduled “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices” writer spotlight for March, but as she has been swamped and hasn’t been able to send her guest blog post yet, I wanted to introduce you, in the interim, to an anthology very much in the spirit of “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices.”

"¡Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre! Como zumbido de oídos persistía el rumor de las campanas ...."

I read this in Guatemala more than three decades ago.

And while some of my memories of the country I called home during my earliest years have faded (or healed or diminished or become distant and pale as old photographs) the opening of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ seminal magical realist novel, El Señor Presidente, never has.

Because books shape us.

I read it as a form of resistance. It was, after all, about Manuel Estrada Cabrera, an early 20th century Guatemalan dictator heading a regime very much like the ones that would follow his. The ones that would put the country through thirty-plus years of armed internal conflict and genocide. The ones I was living under when I read the book.

I read it as an incantation against forgetting. I was young when I read it, but even my juvenile, half-formed conscience knew what this book did: it called out the present by looking at the past. It saw the dispossessed, the marginalized, the invisible. And if it could do that, couldn’t we all?

I read it as magic. Because words are the beginning of magic, and with them, we learn to make and unmake. To spell. To create speculation about what could be, or might be — if only we conjure it true.

Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History is an anthology that sets out to conjure  history true. Writer Daniel José Older, editor Rose Fox and publisher Crossed Genres describe the book (slated for release in early 2014) this way:

“Most written chronicles of history, and most speculative stories, put rulers, conquerors, and invaders front and center. People with less power, money, or status—enslaved people, indigenous people, people of color, queer people, laborers, women, people with disabilities, the very young and very old, and religious minorities, among others—are relegated to the margins. Today, mainstream history continues to perpetuate one-sided versions of the past while mistelling or erasing the stories of the rest of the world.

There is a long and honorable legacy of literary resistance to erasure. This anthology partakes of that legacy. It will feature stories from the margins of speculative history, each taking place between 1400 and the early 1900s and putting a speculative twist—an element of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the unclassifiably strange—on real past events.”

They have enough funds to include approximately 20 stories in the anthology, and have asked a number of very accomplished speculative fiction writers to submit work to be considered for it. But they are also planning to have an open submission period, and would like to be able to gather enough supplemental funding to include 10 additional stories.

If you are a reader of this “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices” series, you already know that there are many fine, undiscovered writers that deserve to be heard. In fact, some of you are those writers. If fully funded, Long Hidden will be a book of stories of resistance, of incantation, of magic. Please help make it a reality by clicking here and pledging your support.

As Rios Montt trial about to start: Uncovering the genocide in Guatemala

As the trial of Efraín Rios-Montt is set to start tomorrow, I'm posting a video of an interview with Fredy Peccerelli, a forensic anthropologist who has worked for the past 19 years with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) to identify the remains of the genocide's massacre victims buried in mass graves, as well as the individual remains of those forcibly disappeared and executed extrajudicially. He, members of the organization, and survivors of the armed internal conflict who have requested mass graves exhumed, have all received death threats in order to prevent this work from being done.



Peccerelli's work was instrumental in reuniting a father with the sole remaining son he didn't know had survived the Dos Erres massacre (where his wife and other eight children had been killed). You can read the fantastic ProPublica report about that amazing case here.

To read more about the important work the FAFG does, click here. There is also a NYT interview with Peccerelli from 2004 here.

The upcoming trial of Rios Montt has gotten a lot of non-mainstream press, but here is a NYT article (finally) about it, in advance of the trial. But, before we get too excited about how much things have changed, here is an article about human rights workers and journalists still being intimidated and targeted (in Spanish) and here is an article about declassified U.S. documents that indicated that we knew about and colluded with architects of the genocide.

Rambling on about my novel Ink, dancing while writing, Guatemala and more at Anthony Cardno's Rambling On blog

Read the interview by Anthony Cardno here: http://anthonycardno.com/2013/02/interview-with-sabrina-vourvoulias/

Fox News Latino: Sabrina Vourvoulias releases novel Ink

Thrilled to have Fox News Latino showcase my novel, INK! Read about its immigration theme, its link to Guatemala and my love of magical realism:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2012/11/01/sabrina-vourvoulias-releases-new-novel-ink/

Crossed Genres Publications releases INK, a Latino novel with immigration theme

Al Día News editor Sabrina Vourvoulias’ novel, “Ink,” highlights news media and anti-immigrant sentiment in novel combining dystopia and magical realism

On Monday, Oct. 15, on the last day of the observance of Hispanic Heritage Month, Crossed Genres Publications of Somerville, Mass., releases Sabrina Vourvoulias’ novel, “Ink,” a fictional look at what happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system. (To read a portion of the first chapter and order on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ink-Sabrina-Vourvoulias/dp/0615657818/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350269229&sr=1-1&keywords=ink+by+sabrina+vourvoulias)

The near-future, dark speculative novel opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history - collectively known as inks. This “chilling tale of American apartheid, and the power of love, myth and community” (Reforma: The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking) has its main characters grapple with ever-changing definitions of power, home and community, and perceptions of “otherness” based on ethnicity, language, class and inclusion.

Set in a fictional city and small, rural town in the U.S. during a 10-year span, the novel is told in four voices: a journalist; an “ink” who works in a local population control office; an artist strongly tied to a specific piece of land; and a teenager whose mother runs an inkatorium (a sanitarium-internment center opened in response to public health concerns about inks). Vourvoulias, of Guatemalan-American descent and the managing editor of Philadelphia’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, Al Día, has described the characters as “complicated people in complicated times trying to live their lives as best they can. You know, us.”

“Readers will be moved by this call for justice in the future and the present.” (Publishers Weekly)

“The conflict driving the novel will fill readers with dismay, seeing parallels between what has already taken place—Japanese locked in concentration camps, narcos controlling swaths of territory in Mexico, rednecks with power—and the novel’s permutations of today’s ugly commonplaces.” (Michael Sedano, La Bloga)

 “In Ink, Vourvoulias masterfully weaves an increasingly complex parallel universe at once fantastical and eerily familiar: a not-so-farfetched future world where myth and legend cohabit with population control schemes, media cover-ups, and subcutaneous GPS trackers.” (Elianne Ramos, the vice chair of Latinos in Social Media – LATISM)

Ink’s publication is part of Crossed Genres’ commitment to bringing new and underrepresented voices into fiction. CG’s list of publications include Daniel José Older’s “Salsa Nocturna;” Kelly Jennings’ “Broken Slate;” RJ Astruc’s “A Festival of Skeletons;” as well as the anthologies “Subversion,” “Fat Girl in a Strange Land” and the upcoming “Menial: Skilled Labor in SF.”

For more information about “Ink,” or any of Crossed Genres’ titles, contact Bart Leib at 617- 335- 2101 or by sending an email to publicity@crossedgenres.com.

Advanced Reading Copies of INK are in the house

Well, not my house — but at Crossed Genres Publications. I'll get to see my first perfect bound copy at Readercon 23 (where I'll be part of the Crossed Genres reading on Saturday at noon).

Excited doesn't even begin to cover how I feel...

For review copies of INK please contact publicity @ crossedgenres . com  

Format: Paperback (240 pp.) & Ebook
Release date: Monday, October 15, 2012
ISBN: 0615657818 / ISBN-13: 978-0615657813
Cost: $13.95 (print) / $5.99 (ebook)

In la lucha

 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ...

1 day left before you can get Fat Girl in a Strange Land (with my story "La Gorda and the City of Silver") from Amazon.com and I've decided to set up my own little giveaway here. Participate and you'll be entered into the raffle to receive one of my copies of the anthology.

Okay, here's the catch. You have to do three things and post a comment here so I know to enter you in the raffle.

1) A teeny, tiny bit of research. La Gorda's father was inspired by a real person, a Guatemalan filmmaker who started out filming episodic lucha libre movies that showed before feature films in some Guatemalan movie theaters. His first full-length film featured one of his luchadores and a child from outer space. What's his name?

2) A nod toward those living en la lucha. Femicide rates in places like Guatemala and Honduras are extraordinarily high. I follow Vivas Guatemala@vivasgt and Campo Algodonero@femicidios, in addition to a number of independent Guatemalan women journalists, on Twitter who are serious about drawing attention to the issue. Of course, femicide isn't only a problem in Central America, so go on the net, read something about it (UNICEF issues reports and alerts about femicide rates, for example) and then just let me know here you did - no proof required. I trust you.

3) Insight into who you really are. If you were part of Lucha Libre team, what would your luchador/a name be?

That's it. I'll give you all a week or so before I pick the winner.

Guatemala elects new president - a reflection on memory and forgetting

 

Otto Perez Molina, a former general, won Guatemala's election Sunday. It is the first time since Vinizio Cerezo's election in 1986 that Guatemalan citizens have elected a member of the military to rule them. And there's a reason for that - the 30 years prior to the 1986 election had been years of repressive military rule in Guatemala - regimes with death squads, torturers and architects of genocide in their ranks.

Perez Molina was part of that military that waged undeclared war on its own people. And despite extensive documentation (see the Archdiocese of Guatemala's massive report with eyewitness accounts of massacres and government-led genocide of indigenous peoples here ) the new Guatemalan president denies that the massacres and genocide ever occurred.

An Associated Press report about the election (read it here) makes the point that most Guatemalans are young and don't remember the genocide years. What's more, the culturally rich but otherwise impoverished nation has been wracked by drug cartel and gang violence and, the report states, people voted in someone they hope can curb that violence.

And he probably can - after all, he's a representative of the most insidious gang that beleaguered nation has ever known, and the most pernicious and entrenched of cartels.

No one outside a country - no matter how much they remember and love it, or how many family ties they have to it - has the right to tell the people who live there how, or for whom, to vote.  But I worry this outcome.

See, unlike those young Guatemalans the AP report mentions, I do remember just exactly what it was like to live in the Guatemala of brutal military dictatorship. I do remember how a word - critical or compassionate - had the power to drive you and yours into exile, or worse, had the power to disappear you. I do remember people who lived in some of those indigenous villages where only a handful survived the massacres. Those were the years when people tried to avoid rivers and creeks because so many of them carried the body parts of the tortured and dismembered downstream. Those were the years when journalists and editors who dared print the truth of what was happening died, or were tortured, or were so grievously injured they'd never walk or write again. Those were the years when the first peoples of the nation came close to being wiped from its future.

I remember.

I was going through some of my mother's most treasured things today, thinking about the strange ways of memory. My mother was Guatemalan, and she owned many indigenous huipiles she wore even after we moved to the U.S. Those photos at the top of this blog post are traditional huipiles from a village called Nebaj. During the worst of the genocide and undeclared war in Guatemala, wearing the traditional garb in Nebaj was tantamount to wearing a bullseye. Paramilitary groups and a government-led scorched earth campaign turned Nebaj into a village of widows and orphans. Many of the Guatemalans who fled to refugee camps Mexico in the early 1980s were from Nebaj - and although the village still exists (a better fate than other villages completely erased by the genocide) it is probably impossible to tally the real human cost of those years.

Not so long ago I was discussing the undeclared civil war and genocide on Facebook with some of my classmates from Guatemala. I mentioned some of the people we had known who were killed in the violence and some of the incidents that had taken place before our eyes, just beyond the schoolyard. Some of my classmates have forgotten, others have vague recollections, but none have memories near as vivid and present as I have.

And that makes me wonder - are some of us born to be memory-keepers? To worry the shreds of history? To want to remember even when it is painful to do so?

In the 1980s the GAM (Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo) marched through Guatemala with the photos of their loved ones who had been disappeared. They placed humanitarian calls - with photos and descriptions - in the newspapers. Most of them understood their loved ones had probably died in extrajudicial killings, in massacres, at the hands of torturers. But they kept their names and faces present and in doing so they took part, to use poet writer Milan Kundera's words, in the struggle of memory against forgetting.

That struggle is clearly still taking place. Genocide is an ugly thing to remember, but it cannot be denied and its memory must be kept. I pray Guatemalans do so - because their new president has made it clear he will not - and forgetting is a dangerous invitation.

I pray for Guatemala, really, because I cannot stop loving it. And remembering it.

--------------------

I wrote the following poem in the 1980s, shortly after hearing that one of the founders of GAM was killed under suspicious circumstances. She had long asked for an accounting of her husband's disappearance some years before and, by some odd quirk of fate, I had clipped and kept one of the humanitarian calls she had placed in the Guatemalan newspapers asking for his safe return. I suppose if I were to write it today it'd be a different poem, and perhaps I'd choose to make it less graphic. But the circumstance would be the same, and just as undeniable.

The poem first appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of Graham House Review.

Suite for Rosario Godoy de Cuevas

1.
For this disappearance:
25 cents per line - minimum
two by two inches. Last three pages
of the dailies; last five
of the weekly. Humanitarian Call
to those holding Carlos Ernesto Cuevas Molina
that they respect his physical integrity
and that they set him free, so that he
can join his young son and distressed wife
Maria del Rosario Godoy de Cuevas
5th Avenue 2-30 Zone 13
Telephone #62188, Guatemala City
June 27, 1982.

2.
One believes time alone kills them.
But for us, waiting real news
time breaks to bated breath of days,
hours, minutes. My child forgets
his father's face - only glimpses
offered by grainy black-and-white photographs
in El Grafico or Prensa Libre,
or marched with a dozen similar faces
on placards of the GAM. If any
of them reappeared my child would likely
avalanche himself on the returning dead
proclaiming him a parent. Know this:
he was tall, handsome, fond of plaid
flannel shirts, endlessly dancing
to the Alma Tuneca marimba.
I tire of marching, of leading
this band of gathered hopeless.
Each body that makes an appearance
dragging its weight through river
or sprouting from beneath undergrowth
in fields, precipitates
the rush of all these familiar faces.
We meet in morgues, trash dumps,
communal graves. It comes down to this:
they have stripped us of memories
and we are willing to claim all as our own.

3.
Xibalba is the underworld of Mayan legend -
a person and a place -
peopled with 20,000 unburied voices,
built on a ground threaded with bodies.
The mythology is as follows:
at night, cars with no headlights
crawl through the city searching
for the marks of the furies. The white
hand-print that indicates no house
should be passed over. Doors open,
families are rewritten. In DIT centers
men perform reconstructive surgery
without scalpels or anaesthesia.
In our myths, none of the heroes survive.
The truth is as follows:
Zipacna was a legendary villain.
He carried one hundred men and a mountain
on his back, for the pleasure
in feats of strength. We invoke
him through the years, to cover
our crust of fossils. Yes,
even we admit it is archaeology
when the farmer plows his field
and arranges the rows into ribs,
or a spine.

4.
Female, 29 years old.
Olive skin, brown hair and eyes.
Third degree burns over 50% of body.
Ribcage crushed. Mutiple
contusions. Human bitemarks
on breasts. Evidence of rape.
Victim was pulled from burning
wreckage of automobile:
Honda, 4-door, 1981, no license plates.

5.
A primer for children.
Set the table in the following way:
salad fork, then dinner fork, on the left.
Knife (blade inward) tablespoon, soup spoon
on right. Teaspoon, dessert fork
above, arranged.

Do not serve yourself too much food,
or more than once. Balance your
implements delicately: the knife
between the fingers on the breath
of a feather. No coarse grasping
to indicate desperation or lack
of understanding for cutting edges.

Contemplate the ironed table linen:
a rectangular patch of material swished
ceremoniously onto the lap.
Knotting the cloth in anxious substitution
for speech. Each knot a thought,
each thought a disappeared person.
When you finish, show me the results -
I'll teach you to count.

Parishioner of St. Katharine Drexel in Chester slated for deportation

Zulma Villatoro was brought to the US from Guatemala in 1998 at the age of 14 by her mother and stepfather, who have obtained permanent residency. The St. Katharine Drexel parishioner is the mother of a 4-year-old Reina (from whom she'd be permanently separated by the deportation) and is expecting a second child.

Unfortunately, Zulma's lawyer made errors that caused her petition to be rejected. She has been engaged in a legal struggle for years and is facing deportation July 2.

Please sign this petition urging Senator Casey, Representative Brady, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, John Morton, and Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano to stop the deportation.

There will be a vigil for Zulma at 5 p.m. Tuesday, June 7 in front of the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. Please join us there to pray and petition that this young family not be split up, and that Zulma not be deported to Guatemala -- a country where violence against women and girls has become epidemic according to recent U.N. Human Rights Council reports.

Poets Responding to SB 1070

A new poem of mine is up on Poets Responding to SB 1070 page on facebook: http://on.fb.me/gonkFM

Go read, comment (or not), "like" the page. And be aware that 1070 copycat legislation is proposed for Pennsylvania. (See one of my previous blog posts for a list of anti-immigrant legislation introduced to the Pa. legislature this session.)

Flying with the Dead

Guatemala. Mexico. The United States.

Immigrant. First generation citizen. Second gen.

What we carry from our parents and for our parents.

Across borders that separate nations and worlds and human hearts.

In communion with saints, in remembrance of souls, and in praise of what persists - beyond all odds.

My short fiction "Flying with the Dead" is on line at Crossed Genres magazine here.
Please read it and comment at that site. Good, bad, semi-indifferent - I welcome, appreciate and look forward to all of your comments.

And if you can see your way to it, please consider purchasing a print or ebook version of the magazine. Small, independent presses and magazines are vital to those of us who write fiction - and for those of us who love discovering new and emergent writers.

Or, purchase the Crossed Genres Year Two anthology, available in December, which also has my story - along with many other fine short stories.

Guatemala: the continuing tragedy of the disappeared

"Tens of thousands of Guatemalan families still do not know what happened to relatives who disappeared during the armed conflict that racked the country from the 1960s to the 1990s. Carlos Batallas heads the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Guatemala office. He explained the difficulties these families face."

Read the report: : http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/guatemala-interview-220210

(Thanks to Greg Beals for the heads-up.)

How to make an immigrant quilt

Let’s be clear – I don’t sew.

I don’t own a sewing machine -- and even if I did I’m not sure I could figure out how to turn the thing on, much less get it to do what I’d want it to do.

I’m not a good candidate to be making a quilt.

But – God help me – I am making one, and have been, on and off, for the past 13 years.

Before you ask, no, I’m not finished yet.

I told you – I don’t sew.

Years ago, in Guatemala, I was forced to take sewing class – costura – at the Colegio Maya. It was one of the only classes I ever took that I came this close to failing. Sra. Alonzo hated me. God’s truth. I insisted on talking while I sewed. My stitches wandered, and I was indifferent to their meandering. And I think I once told her – more or less – that her class was an unwelcome remnant of musty 19th century educational thinking.

My brothers (taking handicrafts like all the other boys in those days of gender-segregated classes) were coming home with cool things like lamps and magazine racks they had made; I carted home samplers and twee crocheted doilies only my grandmother could love.

I tried to persuade my parents to get me out of the class. My father sat on the school’s board of directors and my mother was the hip young artist the school administrators consulted to determine just how many inches above the knee our miniskirts were allowed to be. But no dice. Even after the appeal and the sympathetic looks I still had to attend the stupid class. And mind my manners while I was at it.

Mrs. Alonzo glared at my hopeless cross stitch, pursed her lips at my imperfect chain stitch and cleared her throat every time I chose the fat crochet hooks and thick yarns that speeded the delivery of completed (if utterly graceless) projects.

As we sewed, outside the windows of our classroom a war of insurgency and counterinsurgency raged.

When I first moved to the States people didn’t believe me when I told them I’d never experienced a school fire drill. Our Colegio Maya drills prepared us for crossfire; for the military vs. guerilla shootouts that frequently took place in that part of Zone 10 during those years.

We watched our classmates’ fathers killed in front of the school during recess; saw one of our bus drivers go down in crossfire as he escorted us from the playground into the school; even witnessed one of our teachers collapse at the news that her son had been caught by the country’s politically-driven violence that left no family untouched.

Inside, we stitched in silence.

We never talked about what we saw outside the school’s door – not even the afternoon after C’s father was killed in front of our eyes. Instead, we focused on samplers that evoked a gentility long disappeared from the country.

I’ve come to think of that sewing class as emblematic of the country during those years – enforced silence and an obtuse pretense that everything was as it should be.

Still, I cried when my family had to move to the United States (see “Hope is the thing with feathers” blog post of Dec. 14, 2008 to read why we moved). Though I have been an American citizen from birth I had only visited the States on vacations every so often and I understood, even from those short visits, that I was an American without the slightest idea about how to feel or be American.

But when my mother took us one summer day to enroll in Downingtown High School (a huge school it would take me weeks to find my way around and which I’d never really understand how to navigate) I was gratified to learn that here, at least, sewing classes were not mandatory.

You could fast-forward through the next 15 or 20 years of my life (years in which every poem and story I wrote was about Guatemala’s bloody unfolding history and every political cause I embraced had at its heart a hope for justice in that country) and see very few moments in which I picked up needle and thread willingly.

Once, shortly before my daughter was born I crocheted just long enough to produce a small baby blanket for her. Another time, I managed to finish a short hooded capelet which she wore a handful of times as a toddler. That’s it. I even eschewed hemming pants – that’s what safety pins are for, isn’t it?

Strangely, some of my best friends turned out to be people unusually skilled with the needle.

Quilters.

I loved watching them work. For a couple of years running I spent nearly every morning at Robin’s house, watching him graph patterns, cut strips of fabric, piece them, and put together into quilts. Some carried well-known pattern names like Log Cabin and Tree of Life, others were original patterns. They were all exquisite (to see his work go to http://tristanrobinblakeman.com/ArtQuilts.html).

Irrationally, I found myself wanting to create a quilt too, and started collecting my daughter’s outgrown clothing to that purpose.

Robin was encouraging – after he got over his shock at the sheer folly of it.

I had no sewing machine and so proposed to make a crazy quilt – a type of quilt popular in the Victorian era in which the pieces of fabric were randomly placed and set off by decorative stitchery. I think he understood that it was the very randomness of the crazy quilt that appealed to me.

Still, he warned me, it's not as random as it seems.

Unheeding, I went ahead.

I chose absolutely the worst possible fabric to serve as the backing block, and within seconds of sewing the first piece on it, it went radically and permanently out of square.

I kept going anyway.

I added a piece of an antique woven Nepalese cap my mother had presented to me when my daughter was days old, then a piece from a very downtown-New-York toddler’s outfit one of my brothers had bought for her, followed by a scrap of organza collar from a ridiculously pouffy little girl’s dress only a mother would have the nerve to buy for her kid.

I sewed them on with satin stitch and chain stitch and blanket stitch, and stitches without proper names because they were really “make-betters” on stitches I had tried but mucked up.

I wasn’t producing art (or even straight seams) like Robin or another quilting friend, Donna – but I could live with that.

As I kept going with this first block, providence seemed to encourage me.

My brother-in-law went up to the attic of their family home and found a piece of a quilt that their deceased mother or grandmother or grand-aunt had started and abandoned years ago. Guess what? It was a piece of crazy quilt, with the old leaded silks and taffetas and shirting fabric simply basted on to a seed-bag backing block.

When I held it up to the square I was working on, it was almost exactly the same size. If my block had actually been square, that is.

For about two or three weeks after the discovery of the Saunders quilt piece I dreamt about the finished crazy quilt. I loved the idea of piecing together these bits of lives in cloth and putting them in a quilt for my daughter.

At that time I hadn’t yet seen the movie “How to Make an American Quilt,” which is, in essence, an extended riff on just that. I had heard about the movie however, from Robin, who railed at the last scene where Winona Ryder wraps herself in the lovely quilt just completed for her and literally drags it through the dirt.

Several more weeks passed after the discovery of the Saunders piece, and my usual sewing animus reemerged.

I wondered whether I should just sew the two blocks back-to-back into a crazy pillow and be done with it already.

I don’t remember when I officially laid the project aside.

My mother died suddenly of an aneurism we never knew she had.

My husband, daughter and I moved to Pennsylvania, where our lives, for a while, seemed like the miscarriage I had soon after moving – a promise so compromised it could not be sustained.

My father got pancreatic cancer, and died after two years of a battle that rent my heart.

Through it all, my daughter grew, and outgrew clothing. But instead of cutting them into pieces to incorporate into the crazy quilt, I carted the clothing to donation bins.

I didn’t know where I had put the two existing quilt blocks, or even whether I had packed them and brought them along with us on the move.

Providence seemed to have lost interest in this particular quilt –and anyway, I wasn’t sure I believed in providence anymore.

People vanish from our lives. Quickly, when a bullet or aneurism takes them. Or slow and excruciating, like the long dying of those who disappear during a dirty war, or in cancer. We train ourselves not to talk about these deaths – as in that long remembered sewing class of mine – for fear that our voices will tear.

Or that we will fray into nothingness as we consider our losses.

Each death is a piece out of a fabric that started out whole. What do we do when we are surrounded by the pieces?

People are fond of saying that God writes with crooked lines, I prefer to think He sews with them.

His grace sometimes punches through our lives with an unbearably sharp needle, but then, great generous blanket stitches bind our frayed edges. Backstitches advance us even as we seem to be going back. And His wandering, loopy chain stitches link us to the strong fabric that remains in our lives.

I found those two quilt blocks a few months ago.

My daughter didn’t remember them, and for an hour or so, I regaled her with the provenance of each piece on the block I had created. I mused about the sayings I had stitched-in back then – redes from a different religion, from the radically different life I had led.

And still, I recognize I had been searching then, like now, for recognition of the moments when the numinous touches our lives. For the moment we find ourselves in still center of the labyrinth, and look, there's no minotaur there but a pair of wings.

I speculated, as my daughter examined the two pieces, about the fabrics used in the block basted together by the Saunders women– onto which I had stitched the names of my daughter’s grandparents and great-grandparents.

Then, like now, family is the spine, the ribs, the invisible frame that enables us to stand. No matter that I had never met these members of my husband’s family, no matter that in my own extended family there is some scar tissue along with the supporting bone. I wanted those Welsh, Mexican, German, Guatemalan, Greek and American names all there where my daughter could run her fingers over them and know that, along with her unique gifts, this is the stuff she is made of.

A crazy quilt – light and dark, smooth and coarse, rich fabrics and poor, straight lines and crooked.

Random only on the surface.

“Are you ever going to finish the quilt for me?” she asked.

“Can’t I just make you a pillow?” I asked in answer.

“No,” she said. “You can’t.”

I don’t think I say yes to her, but in the next few days I start on a new block.

Then another. And another.

Each piece I add has history and memory: the salmon silk onto which I sewed the old blocks and on which I built the new is from a formal gown my mother wore in Thailand to meet the king. The rough yellow silk cut into leaf shapes was hand-woven in the San Marcos region of my mother’s homeland (the Guatemala that so shaped my youth).

The feather-shaped pieces of sophisticated Italian silk used faced and reversed in the wings of one of the birds on the end pieces is from my father’s tie, and the white-on-white cutwork feathers on the other bird are from handkerchiefs that once belonged to my grandmothers.

I think of a Dorothy Day quote as I sew the memories on: “We cannot live alone. We cannot go to heaven alone. Otherwise God will say to us ‘Where are the others?’”

Each piece I add has a present: my daughter’s school ribbons, a piece of the beaded Indian silk she wore for my older brother’s wedding, symbols from the manga she currently reads and loves. A machine-embroidered Virgin of Guadalupe from one of my pillowcases. Pieces from a scarf that belongs to my husband made into the trees of his woods in central New York. Milagros representing the prayers I’ve taught myself to remember, and the ones I’ve made up in gratitude.

Each piece I add has a future: I plan to take the quilt top to the aunt of one of my husband’s Mennonite co-workers who routinely adds batting and edging to finish pieces like this into proper quilts. I set aside yards of backing fabric for it (kente cloth my father bought years ago in Zaire for my mother) and conjure images of new faced with old, of a whole made from pieces.

I start to embroider on one of the blocks (an oblong, actually) the words of a William Stafford poem I’ve found by chance, by providence, recently: “There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.”

How much a wayfarer I still am.

I’ve made an immigrant’s quilt for my daughter, and sewn into it the messiness, the incertitude, the striving and suffering and faith that pace every pilgrimage.

I don’t know when I’ll finish – I told you, I don’t sew.

But I have learned to piece together.