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Finding True North

Illustration by Kevin Whipple

Amy Bracken | Longreads | August 2018 | 27 minutes (6,729 words)

Samuel* bears the scars — above his mouth, on the top of his head, on both arms, on one leg — six bullet wounds in all. They’ll be considered as evidence when he goes before a Canadian immigration judge and he’ll have to tell the story that still makes his voice shake, about how gunmen attacked him at a Port-au-Prince intersection in 2013 and left him for dead. As a young police officer, he had witnessed men transporting weapons and drugs hidden in a truckload of plantains. Two of Samuel’s colleagues who were also present at the time have since been killed, he says, and when Samuel was shot at again in 2015 while taking his children to school, he knew he “had to leave Haiti.”

Thus begins the story of how Samuel, his wife, Darline, and their 1-year-old boy found themselves in a basement apartment on a chilly fall day in a quiet neighborhood of Montréal. They are part of a massive influx of asylum-seekers — mostly Haitian — who fled the United States for Canada last summer. They came at the peak of that influx, in early August 2017, when every day more than 200 people took a bus to upstate New York, then a taxi to the border, where a country road ends in grass and a well-worn dirt path. They breached the invisible boundary and turned themselves in to a Canadian Mountie, setting in motion the long process of trying to start a new life in a new country.

The urge for so many to leave the United States began to build with the election of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Then, in spring 2017, John Kelly, Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians would expire in January 2018. TPS had been granted to some 50,000 Haitians living in the United States, protecting them from deportation, after a massive earthquake struck their country in 2010. Although Secretary Kelly said that renewal of TPS was possible, he suggested it was unlikely, and he urged recipients “to use the time before January 22, 2018, to prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States.” (In November, the Trump Administration announced that TPS for Haitians would instead end in July 2019.)


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Canada became the destination for TPS recipients and many others when, in June, social media messages encouraging Haitians to apply for residency here, some even falsely claiming that the Canadian government would cover all fees, went viral. The messages spread feverishly among Haitians across in the United States and beyond.

The number of asylum claims at the Québec border had climbed since the start of 2017, but then it shot from 975 in June to 2,775 in July, and more than doubled again to 5,650 in August. Most of those claimants were Haitian.

A so-called “safe third country” agreement between the United States and Canada, in place since 2004, means that anyone presenting himself at a U.S. border station crossing to seek asylum in Canada must be turned back — with few exceptions made for some, like those with close family ties in Canada. The rule does not apply to those who cross between official ports of entry, have themselves arrested, then apply for asylum in Canada. With much of the U.S.-Canada border dominated by lakes, rivers, and remote fields, and with much of the U.S. Haitian population based on the eastern seaboard, the accessibility of the New York–Québec stretch made it the chosen entry point for the vast majority of migrants.

Samuel* bears the scars — above his mouth, on the top of his head, on both arms, on one leg — six bullet wounds in all.

As the number of irregular border-crossers mounted, public officials, service providers, and the media focused heavily on the misleading social media messages that encouraged them to come north, suggesting that deception was largely responsible for the influx and that those messages were setting migrants up for disappointment.

Indeed, most of the travelers I interviewed for this story said they had been inspired by WhatsApp and Facebook posts. One said that fellow travelers were startled by the sight of a police officer arresting people at the border, and most were unaware that in 2016, Haitian asylum claims were only accepted about 50 percent of the time.

However, newcomers’ assessments of whether or not coming to Canada was the right choice goes well beyond merely weighing the odds of getting residency or considering the fees. By other measures, there is enormous benefit in coming north.

For one, immediate deportation from Canada is unlikely for most. The fate of many who entered last summer will still be unresolved months or years from now, thanks in large part to a backlog. More than 50,000 asylum claims were made in Canada in 2017more than double the number in 2016. One result is that many saw their scheduled eligibility hearings pushed back indefinitely. A spokesperson for Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board said in February 2018 that projected hearing delays were about 20 months — despite efforts to step up capacity, such as the temporary designation of 17 Refugee Board members to focus specifically on processing the claims of recent border-crossers. The process will be longest for those whose claims are rejected, as they are entitled to appeal multiple times, dragging the process out for what might be several years.

Meanwhile, as they await a ruling on their fate, the life that Haitian asylum-seekers are able to live in Québec is often starkly different from what they had experienced in the States. Many quickly gained a foothold in Canadian society, are beginning to integrate, and are breathing easy in a way that they never could south of the border. But for some, the delays can be excruciating, for one reason above all: They prolong the time before they can send for family members they had to leave back home.

* * *

Samuel didn’t aspire to live in North America. He tried to make his way in Haiti as he was able. “I entered university but wasn’t able to finish,” he says. “I had to make a living, so I entered the police because it’s the one institution in Haiti that will hire anybody who is intelligent and physically fit.” It wasn’t a great job. He says his life was at risk on a number of occasions, yet he didn’t have a choice but to stick with it. Until he didn’t have a choice but to leave.

After Samuel was shot in Haiti in 2013, he spent two months in the hospital. Even today he has some pain in his right hand, and his fingers don’t work properly, jutting out awkwardly like sticks. And the violence did not affect him alone. He says it hurt his oldest child most.

“My daughter, who was four at the time, was shocked and traumatized,” he says. “When I returned from the hospital, she wouldn’t come near me, she was so afraid of me when she saw the scars.”

After Samuel was shot in Haiti in 2013, he spent two months in the hospital. Even today he has some pain in his right hand, and his fingers don’t work properly, jutting out awkwardly like sticks. And the violence did not affect him alone. He says it hurt his oldest child most.

When he was shot at the second time, the gunmen missed, but Samuel lost control of his motorcycle, throwing himself and his children to the pavement. Later, he says, “my daughter kept yelling, ‘Look, there’s the car that made us have an accident! Look at it, Daddy!’”

Like most Haitians crossing into Canada last summer, Samuel and Darline had entered the United States legally, flying in with five-year tourist visas. But they had been unable to get visas for their children, so they left them in Port-au-Prince with Darline’s mother. It was the hardest thing about being in Boston, but it was far from the only major challenge. Their visas did not allow them to work. Being broke, they couldn’t pay for an attorney to take Samuel’s asylum case — nor could they find one who would work pro bono. They couldn’t afford housing, so they stayed with a cousin until, Samuel says, “after six months, my wife and I needed to be independent, so we set out to find our own housing.” They wound up in a family homeless shelter an hour outside Boston, where they would spend the next year.

Samuel says messages kept circulating on Facebook about the promise of moving to Canada, but at first the couple ignored them, feeling that moving to a new country held too much uncertainty.

In July 2017, Samuel finally got his work permit, but Darline did not. And there was a drumbeat they could not ignore. “Trump was really applying pressure, sending messages that if you don’t have papers, you can’t stay in the country,” Samuel says. “I couldn’t return to Haiti. There was too much at stake. We decided it wasn’t worth [staying there]. We had to cross over to Canada.”

* * *

On an evening in August 2017, on a strip of highway in, Plattsburgh New York, near a Dollar Store, a Super 8 motel, and an A&W fast-food restaurant, a bus pulled into a Mobile station parking lot. Slowly, the front door opened, and a plastic toy truck tumbled down the stairs and hit the pavement. A family followed, lugging bags bursting at the seams. Then out came another, then another. About 20 Haitian men, women, and children descended from the bus and began looking around for taxis. Those days there were many more cabs than usual. After migration through the area exploded, new companies popped up, and old ones began working extra hours and longer routes. They also began charging astronomical prices. The New York Attorney General’s office fined a taxi company for charging migrants up to hundreds of dollars in excess of the going rate.

The cabs headed north on the highway, then along some country roads through vast stretches of cornfields punctuated by trailer homes, then down quiet, green, Roxham Road, until, at the end, beyond a thicket of vines and Queen Anne’s lace and signs that read Road Closed and No Pedestrians, a white canopy tent appeared. A Canadian police officer stood before it, poised like a nightclub bouncer, ready to check IDs at the door.

Matthew Turner had moved into a trailer home on Roxham Road in October 2016 and said that ever since then he’d been seeing taxis drive past his house to the dead end. Last summer it was a steady stream of cabs, often with names he’d never heard of. He said he found it annoying when cars unloaded in his driveway, especially if the travelers dropped trash. But he placed blame elsewhere. “All they’re trying to do is escape a pretty crappy system that we constructed because a blond wig got elected into office,” he said. “It’s sad, really. The whole Ellis Island thing just went out the window, and now they have to leave our country and seek it in a country that’s, honestly, at this point, better than ours.”

Turner, who lives with his wife and young son, works temp jobs, mostly loading and unloading for shipping companies. He said finding work is hard, but the best companies — in terms of safety, pay, and organization — are Canadian. He, too, imagines life to be better on the northern side of the border, in part because of universal health care.

As we spoke, a taxi marked WISH TRANSPORT passed, reached the end of the road, and deposited three people.

As we spoke, a taxi marked Wish Transport passed, reached the end of the road, and deposited three people. They formed a single-file line where the dirt path began. The middle-aged man at the back stood stiffly, clutching the handle of his zebra-print wheelie suitcase as he watched the others cross. I asked why he had come.

“I had problems in the U.S.,” he said.

“Is it because of TPS?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

In loud, slow English, the officer asked him, “Monsieur, do you speak English?”

“A little.”

“OK, this is the Canadian border right here. OK? Over there, you’re fine. As soon as you cross over here, you’ve entered Canada illegally, and you’ll be placed under arrest. OK?”

“OK.”

“Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“OK, so you decide if you want to enter Canada. If you come in here, you’re under arrest, and then whatever the consequences are, you’ll have to deal with them.”

“OK.”

With that, the man soberly approached the policeman, luggage scraping along the dirt path. The officer told him he was under arrest and had a right to an attorney. He didn’t handcuff the man, though. Instead, he pointed to a sanitizer dispenser and asked him to wash his hands, before escorting him into the tent for processing.

Where Roxham Road picks up again, as Chemin Roxham, cornfields give way to orchards and houses obscured by high hedges. At the corner, there’s a turtle-crossing sign, and the air smells of apples. From the white tent, a bus took the new arrivals down narrow country roads and across a highway to a camp at the official border crossing a few minutes away. In August 2017, with the number of new arrivals exploding, the Canadian military set up rows of green canvas tents at the official crossing, as well as at a conference center in Cornwall, Ontario, with a combined capacity of close to 2,000 people. The Canadian Red Cross was at this camp, handing out blankets and hygiene kits, assigning beds, and performing medical checks.

* * *

In late September, perhaps unaware that the military had begun dismantling the camp at the border because of a decline in the number of border-crossers, the anti-immigrant, right-wing Canadian group Storm Alliance had chosen the spot for a rally. Several dozen men and women, looking like a motorcycle gang in black clothing and bandanas, marched toward the border, between the highway and the tent camp, some waving signs with crossed out pictures of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But they were stopped short by a boisterous crowd, a bit larger than their own, of young anarchists and members of Solidarité Sans Frontières, who chanted, “Haitians in, racists out!” and held signs with slogans like Make racists afraid again, and a banner with a sketch of President Trump’s crossed-out face, and the words Resist the Far Right — some of many indications that these activists also worry about a threat from south of the border.

In the province of Québec, public sentiment about the new arrivals has been mixed. At the height of last summer’s migrant influx, a poll by the media agency SOM-Cogeco Nouvelles found that 51 percent of Québec residents believed migrants should be prevented from crossing the border into Canada. It also found that 39 percent of the Québecois surveyed believed the influx would make the province less secure.

Still, generally what the newcomers experience upon arrival is a relatively warm welcome by the Canadian government and key organizations working alongside it, like the Canadian Red Cross. When Samuel and Darline spent a few days at the border at the height of the influx, the military camp hadn’t opened yet, and they say the government was clearly not ready for such a flood of people. For them, it meant standing in long lines for medical checks, photos, and fingerprinting. But they’re quick to add that the welcome was generally good. “They don’t push you around,” Samuel says. “They don’t handcuff you. They speak with you intelligently and in a way that you can understand. Everything went really well.”

Still, generally what the newcomers experience upon arrival is a relatively warm welcome by the Canadian government and key organizations working alongside it, like the Canadian Red Cross.

The language helps. Although many of the Canadian police who are greeting and arresting people at the unofficial border do not speak French, most officials in Québec after that point do. And for Haitians who do not speak French, at some points there are Haitian Creole interpreters.

Last August, after spending a few hours to a few days at the border, newcomers were bused to an immigrant shelter in Montréal. Normally there is only one such shelter, a YMCA. Over the summer, 12 more were added. Now there are just four.

Samuel and his family were dropped off at the Y, where they were connected with all the information they needed about government services, such as health care, and then they went to stay at Samuel’s brother’s place in Montréal. On August 14, 12 days after crossing the border, they began getting their monthly check from the Canadian government — about $1,122 Canadian ($883, in U.S. dollars) for the family, and they began looking for their own place.

The apartment hunt was hard at first, with landlords demanding references and credit reports, but then a Turkish immigrant, who lived above a rental unit, “saw our temperament and saw what kind of people we are,” Samuel says, “and demanded neither credit nor references.” He charges $600 Canadian ($472 U.S.) for the one-bedroom. With the government stipend, it left the family a little over $400 a month for food and incidentals, but Samuel says they were used to being frugal.

It’s easy to understand the landlord’s assessment of the family. Samuel is thin, with delicate features, and a soft, contemplative air, defying any stereotype of a police officer. And when I visited, Darline smiled warmly from the couch, where she nursed a robust 1-year-old, before releasing him to trot around the living room, making eye contact with each adult before bursting into delighted laughter.

A paper banner on the otherwise blank wall proclaimed Bon Fet – a Haitian Creole birthday celebration to honor Samuel, turning 36, and his son, turning 1. The rest of the place was immaculate, with only a few objects — synthetic flowers adorning a shiny yellow varnished wood dining table.

After more than a year of being homeless, lawyerless, and jobless in the States, Samuel and Darline were able to get their own place in Canada in less than a month. They’d also been assigned a public defender, accessed basic health care, and started getting free monthly public transportation passes. “Everything is moving much faster here,” Samuel told me last September. He knew he might never get to bring his two older children here to Canada, and that they might instead end up back in Haiti, but at the time he felt he’d placed his bet on the right country. “I don’t know tomorrow,” he said, “but I don’t regret coming to Canada, because the three of us, we’re really comfortable here.”

After more than a year of being homeless, lawyerless, and jobless in the States, Samuel and Darline were able to get their own place in Canada in less than a month.

Two months later, in November, the couple got their work papers, and Samuel found a minimum-wage job through a temp agency, scanning orders at a clothing-rental company.

But not everything was as fast as they’d like. It took months more for Darline to find work, and the asylum eligibility interview Samuel had scheduled for December was postponed indefinitely.

Most of the new arrivals stay at shelters for their first weeks in Montréal, until they start getting their monthly check and find their own place. When the provincial government saw that the YMCA would not be enough to meet the need, it cast around to see who had space, and managers of the Olympic Park, used in the 1976 Summer Games, offered up part of the stadium to eventually accommodate 900 people in rows of cots, while all around international competitions, concerts, and the renovation of the stadium’s landmark skyline tower whirled on. Other shelters opened around town, including in an old hospital and an old convent, but it was the image of refugees — mostly from Haiti, but also from around the world (other top asylum-seeker nationalities were Nigerian, Turkish, and Syrian) — being bused to the stadium that brought in waves of international media.

It also attracted activists. An anti-immigrant demonstration to be held outside the Olympic Stadium was canceled, but a pro-immigrant counter-rally went ahead, drawing hundreds of people, many carrying Réfugiées Bienvenues signs.

The stadium stopped housing migrants in September 2017, and today, due to the drop in new arrivals, the only shelters in use are an old hospital, an unused youth center on the grounds of what feels like a leafy boarding school campus, and the YMCA near downtown.

* * *

Jesula and James moved into the Y after coming to Québec in August. Their story is starkly different from that of Samuel and Darline, but it’s not unusual among new Haitian arrivals from the United States. For them, Canada is the eleventh country — and, they hope, last — on an odyssey that began more than a decade ago.

The two were high school sweethearts in the dusty northern Haitian city of Gonaïves. James remembers relatives who lived in the States coming back to visit and being treated like royalty. “I thought the sky over the U.S. was different from the sky over other countries,” he says with a laugh. Still, he never wanted to leave Gonaïves. He excelled in school, participated in a local debate club, and played on a national youth soccer team. But after their city was virtually wiped out by floods from a tropical storm in 2004, he decided to move to the Dominican Republic to live with his mother and continue his education there. His dream was to get a medical degree and return to Haiti to help meet a desperate need for doctors.

Jesula, meanwhile, stayed in Gonaïves. In the market, she sold goods imported from Canada with the help of relatives here. Assuming she had money because of her business, she says, thieves raided her house, stole her things, and raped her.

Asked if the perpetrators were caught, she laughs bitterly and says, “In Haiti, it’s not like it is here.”

Traumatized and fearful, Jesula fled to the Dominican Republic to live with James. But things didn’t work out there either. Both lacked the funds to complete school, and both were unable to find work.

Soon Brazil beckoned. Its economy was booming, and it needed workers to prepare for the World Cup and the upcoming Summer Olympics. In 2012 James made his way there, and in 2013 Jesula joined him. “There was no stress because from the moment we got there we were so lucky,” Jesula says. “I arrived in September, and in January I had residency. Imagine how comfortable we were.” Both found jobs easily, learned Portuguese, and settled in, forging strong friendships and a sense of community. But by 2015, the Brazilian economy was in serious trouble, jobs were lost, and Haitian migrants were no longer welcome.

Like thousands of other Haitians, Jesula and James made their way north, through Colombia, Central America, and Mexico, and finally to the United States. Once there, also like thousands of others, they were thrown in detention.

Their treatment by U.S. officials came as a shock. “I thought the U.S. was like Canaan, like paradise, like something out of the Bible,” James says. But as soon as they crossed the border, the couple was split up and sent to separate detention centers.

On an August afternoon in 2017, the couple sat in a park across the street from the Y, where they’d stayed for the previous four nights. Swing music blasted from a speaker nearby, and a man came over to ask if they want to join a free dance class. They politely declined.

Both said they felt at home in Canada. James dreamt of getting a doctorate in anthropology, and Jesula wanted to go to nursing school and learn to draw landscapes. She was pregnant for the third time. She’s miscarried twice — once in Brazil and once in the United States, but here she said she believed everything would work out. “I’m better here,” she said, “because I don’t like living in stress, and there [in the U.S.], the president would say something different every day, so I didn’t know where he really stood on anything. Here I can just be at peace.”

After arriving in the United States, they were detained for just a few days. They say they were lucky to be released much sooner than other Haitians, but the rest of their time in the States was hard. They moved to Boston, and eventually James got a work permit and a job, but the permit was set to expire last September, and he’d been unable to renew it. He also didn’t feel he was making progress in his asylum case.

Finally, Trump took office. “We heard about people being deported for nothing … people who went to see a judge and got deported,” James says. “We were afraid.”

Removals overall have slowed under Trump, but for Haitians they jumped from 300 in the 2016 fiscal year to 5,500 in 2017. That’s largely due to the end of a stay on deportations and a surge in Haitian migrants entering through Mexico. Meanwhile, arrests of immigrants with no known criminal conviction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement more than doubled from 2016 to 2017. Behind those stats are countless stories of men and women who have lived in the United States for decades being taken from families, jobs, and communities, often at a regular check-in at an immigration office.

* * *

Comparisons between the United States and Canada are constant, especially among those who entered both countries illegally. One man describes surviving a harrowing boat trip from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico only to be shackled at the wrists and ankles by U.S. border patrol agents. Others talk about being thrown in cold cells at the Mexico-U.S. border.

Elsie is a nurse and a resident of Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, in plateau farm country north of Montréal. She has been living in Canada for 30 years, but occasionally returns to her Haitian homeland. “I’m proud to be Canadian and proud to be Haitian, too,” she says. And she stays tuned in to the experiences of Haitian migrants around the region.

She spent a Sunday afternoon in October 2017 like she spent most Sundays: cooking rice and beans for family members and venting about what she’d been hearing. “There was that little Haitian woman who went to the U.S. from Brazil,” she said, “and she had to pay $20,000 to get out of prison! It’s a business! If people don’t pay $15,000 to $20,000, they put them on a plane.” Elsie understands that people are not deported merely for failing to pay the required bond, but she also knows that asylum-seekers are much less likely to get asylum if they are stuck behind bars. “Canada respects asylum law,” she said. “They don’t respect asylum law in the United States right now.”

In his first week in office, President Trump issued an executive order expanding the grounds for which immigrants can be detained, and limiting the use of parole for detained asylum-seekers. Over the first eight months of his presidency, according to a report by the nonprofit Human Rights First, parole rates for asylum-seekers appear to have plummeted, asylum-seekers are held for many months, and sometimes their release is contingent on payment of bonds as high as $15,000 to $20,000.

Canada respects asylum law,” she said. “They don’t respect asylum law in the United States right now.

Elsie’s Sunday gatherings now feature a special guest — her younger brother Yves. In July, Yves walked across the border at Roxham Road, then skipped the shelter by staying with his sister. He says he fled Haiti for the United States after “jealous” people attacked his business in Port-au-Prince. But with Trump in office, he says, he had a bad feeling about his prospects there. “He was withdrawing everything, banning refugees, talking about eliminating TPS, getting rid of protections for immigrants who came as children … so I didn’t know if I could get asylum.”

Like Samuel and Darline, Yves says he had to leave a child back in Haiti, so he’s anxious to get papers to bring her here.

Within a few months, Yves had his own place and a job at a pig slaughterhouse, but in April, a judge rejected his asylum claim, saying he should have sought protection in the United States. Yves is appealing the decision and says, whatever the outcome, he’s still convinced he made the right decision in moving to Canada. “Even if some of us are not qualified [for asylum],” he says, “the welcome is completely different here.”

* * *

In my conversations with asylum-seekers last year, I kept bringing up the statistic I’d seen, that only about half of Haitian asylum-seekers with cases finalized in 2016 were granted asylum. (For 2017, the acceptance rate dropped to 22 percent.) The response was usually a recognition that they might not succeed but an insistence that they made the right choice in coming to Canada anyway.

As Matthew Turner, the Roxham Road resident, suggests, “that Ellis Island thing” is more evident in Canada than in the United States today. This is certainly true in public discourse. In October, Canada swore in a new Governor General, an important Canadian figurehead selected by the Prime Minister. Trudeau chose astronaut Julie Payette, who delivered an installation speech in a mix of French and English, dotted with phrases in Algonquin. The speech seemed a delineation of what distinguishes Canada from its southern neighbor today. She talked about the importance of trusting science, of internationalism, tolerance, and compassion, and among her last words were these: “We are the true north, strong and free, and we should always look after those who have less, stand up for those who can’t, reach out across differences, use our land intelligently, open our borders, and welcome those who seek harbor.”

When it came to Syrian refugees, in the past couple of years, Canada has served to inspire and shame Americans wishing to be a more welcoming country. Since November 2015, more than 54,000 Syrian refugees have resettled in Canada, compared with fewer than 19,000 in the United States. Facebook video posts showed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeting families at the airport with winter coats and words of welcome. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of regular citizens stepped in to help. Private sponsors actually brought in and supported 43 percent of those refugees for a year.

It would be hard to draw comparisons between pre-approved Syrian refugees flying in and Haitians crossing the border and being arrested. For one, there is no private sponsorship system in place to care for the new arrivals from the States. However, many private organizations in and around Montréal are committed to helping them get settled and integrated.

Take Christ en Action church. It’s in an unmarked brick box-shaped building in a quiet neighborhood, but on Sunday mornings the drums draw you through the open door and into a vast space packed with parishioners in a full spectrum of garb, from form-fitting dresses to suits in black, white, and shiny pastel damask. Several turn to greet unfamiliar faces, offering greetings in French.

The churchgoers — largely Haitian and African — pride themselves on the warm welcome. At a service last September, Pastor Fofy Ndelo, who is Congolese, said a few words in Haitian Creole, then returned to French to give an update on which donations were now needed for “the refugees” — winter coats for adults and children, as well as furniture and bedding for those who’d found their own places to live.

About 15 so-called refugees sat in pews at the far end of the church, and after the service they filed into a back room for lunch. They found out about Christ en Action when members visited their shelters and brought them here on buses. While a number of them now lived in their own places, after their meal a volunteer would drive them all home. Later, another volunteer would pick them up to bring them back for dinner. These are services orchestrated by the church’s social action team, which, team member Shirley René told me, has 10 subgroups. “One group serves nonperishable food, a follow-up group sees what your needs are, another team gives clothes and bedding and furniture, another helps people find a place to live. … There’s a group that visits them in their homes,” and so on.

René, who is of Haitian descent and has been with the church for more than a decade, said about 50 new arrivals were regularly coming to the church, “because they love the way we welcome them.”

Many other Montréal churches also stepped up to help the new arrivals, especially in the heavily Haitian Saint-Michel neighborhood. So did Maison d’Haiti, a 46-year-old organization now housed in a modern, windowy, art-filled space that bustled last fall with Haitian men, women, and children, picking up and dropping off clothing and diapers, standing in line to get help with things like filling out asylum applications, or grabbing a Haitian meat pastry in the organization’s café.

A few blocks away, on Boulevard Crémazie, is CPAM, one of several Haitian radio stations here, and down the street is a towering, shining example of Haitian success in Montréal. Groupe 3737, named after its street number, inhabits some of the 12 floors in the curtain-glass-wall building, using them for start-up incubation and training. Frantz Saintellemy, Haitian-born and Saint-Michel–raised, founded the group with his wife, Vickie Joseph, with the intent of encouraging talented young people, mostly immigrants or children of immigrants — a reflection of the community — to invest in this long-depressed neighborhood.

Saintellemy wanted to help his community thrive by capitalizing on what is true in Canada as well as the United States: Immigrants are far more likely than the rest of the population to start businesses. And he sees particular promise in Haitian immigrants, who make up about a third of his group’s participants.

“If you’re from Haiti,” he says, “you were trading. It’s the number one business in Haiti. Trading is in their DNA, so a lot of them have an entrepreneurial mindset.” In Haiti, with so few formal jobs available, many people buy food or clothes in one part of the country — often on the Dominican border — to sell in another.

Saintellemy smiles as he speaks, sitting in a bright, spacious office behind a large desk cluttered only with some copies of Groupe 3737’s glossy bilingual magazine Black is Beautiful. He says in Montréal there are great prospects for new Haitian immigrants importing food and other goods from Haiti to sell to members of the diaspora here. There are also artists and artisans, and educated Haitians who spent years in the United States and are well-positioned to work as translators. What’s more, belying the image of asylum-seekers arriving on foot and staying in shelters, many actually have money to invest in a new business, Saintellemy says.

For those with tenuous status, he says, they’re particularly worth investing in for several reasons: For one, many employers are leery of hiring people without permanent status, and for another, creating a business could help them get asylum. “The quicker you can generate income [and] hire your own lawyer, your chances increase significantly,” he says, “and if you’re working and paying taxes, the harder it is for the government to tell you to leave.”

Saintellemy says that “without question” enthusiasm for starting a business is higher among people with tenuous status. He knows this because, in addition to doing clothing drives for new arrivals last summer, Groupe 3737 offered regular Business 101 classes for those living in immigrant shelters. Participants were taught about business laws and policies in Canada, specifically Québec, and given tips like how to advertise and bid on contracts online. Saintellemy says the courses drew up to 50 people.

Before founding Groupe 3737, Saintellemy spent years in the States, including studying electrical engineering at Northeastern University and taking a fellowship at MIT Sloan. I ask him about something James told me: that in Montréal, “the Haitians ahead of you help you,” but in the United States, not so much.

“Yeah,” Saintellemy says. “The Haitian community is very well organized here in Québec.” He says Haitians generally thrive more here. “I think it’s easier because of the French. Language isn’t as much of a barrier,” he says. “Second of all, the Haitian community is more financially secure here than in Boston or even New York or Miami … if you look at the percentage of Haitians doing well. … So it’s easier for them to help others when they’re doing well.”

James told me…that in Montréal, ‘the Haitians ahead of you help you,’ but in the United States, not so much.

Of course, many Haitians in Canada live in poverty and obscurity. But there are also plenty of Haitian luminaries in Canadian sport, arts, and politics — including several Olympic athletes; the novelist Dany Laferrière, inducted into the prestigious Académie Française; parliamentarian Emmanuel Dubourg; former Governor General Michaëlle Jean; and the deputy premier of Québec, Dominique Anglade.

* * *

Migration across the border into Canada has fallen considerably since last summer, and Haitians now make up a small portion of that population, down from more than 80 percent. By last fall, Nigerians were overtaking Haitians in number, with shelter residents talking of horrors in Biafra.

Jean Nicolas Beuze, of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, says the overall decline in numbers might be due to falling temperatures and the start of school (the summer’s migrants included hundreds of children), and he believes the particularly precipitous decline in the number of Haitians coming across is likely because messages were sent through consulates and visiting politicians to correct misperceptions about the ease of getting asylum in Canada.

However, with the Trump administration’s announcement on November 20 that TPS for Haitians will end in July 2019, officials in Canada prepared for more Haitian asylum-seekers, with 27 winterized trailers — able to accommodate 200 people — set up at the border. The TPS decision affects at least 50,000 Haitian-born people who’ve been in the United States for more than eight years, and their American-born children, estimated at some 27,000.

Canada’s own version of TPS for Haitians expired in 2014, but most of its recipients were not made to leave the country. The estimated 3,200 undocumented Haitians living in Canada at the time were given almost two more years to apply for permanent residency without threat of removal, and most have been able to get permanent residency through “H&C,” or humanitarian and compassionate grounds, which takes into consideration the ties one has forged to Canada while living here.

Still, coming to Canada does not make Haitian border crossers safe from deportation. Canada deported several hundred Haitians last year — a dramatic increase over 2016, and 120 just in the first seven months of this year.

James is well aware that deportation from Canada is possible, and it’s a terrible thought. “If I’m deported, it’s like the end of the world,” he says with a nervous shriek of a laugh. “Haiti has no work. And when you are overseas, you have like 20 people depending on you, who are waiting for your help. Imagine, if they deport me to Haiti, you’ll see how many people will suffer.” He says his brothers, sisters and some friends rely on him for school and other expenses.

James doesn’t wallow in the fear of deportation though. “We have to await a response, we have to pray, and we have to accept the response, whatever it is,” he says. “But for now we have to recognize how well Canada has received us.”

Haitians who left the United States to seek asylum in Canada essentially left one uncertainty for another. And yet, for now, there is a sense that they can breathe easy because there is reason and justice in the system, that the rules will be followed, and that meanwhile the tools are there for asylum-seekers to make a life for themselves while they wait.

For Samuel, the only problem with being in Canada is that his two older children aren’t with him. “That makes me feel really, really bad,” he says, “because I grew up without my father, and I don’t want the same for my children.” He talks to them on WhatsApp every day, but, he says, “It hurts to hear them say, ‘Papi, when are you coming back? Papi, come get us!’”

A year after coming here, Samuel still has no idea when he’ll go before an immigration judge. It’s clearly wearing on him. His life is better here in many ways, but even with both of them working — him during the day and Darline as a night caretaker for handicapped adults, the cost of living is harder to manage here. Meanwhile, their two older children are growing up in another country, and there’s no knowing when and where they will reunite.

Now, when I ask him if he regrets moving to Canada, he hesitates, but then gives a firm no. “It’s a choice we made, without knowing how things would go.”

*The names of all asylum-seekers in this article have been changed to protect their identities.

***

Amy Bracken is an independent reporter and radio producer. She covers migration, economic development, religion, and human rights. She’s based in Boston, but in recent years she’s reported from Europe and across the Americas, especially Haiti. Her stories have been aired and published by PRI’s The World, Latino USA, USA Today, and Al Jazeera America, among others. She’s a graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she wrote her thesis on the detention of asylum-seekers.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Matt Giles

We Stand on Guard for Bieber

Dominic Lipinski / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2018 | 18 minutes (4,330 words)

Stratford, Ontario, doesn’t announce itself. The first time I traveled there, in mid-February, I drove into its center before knowing I was actually in it. I had not noticed a sign. All I had seen were miles of flat snowy farmland — the odd silo, field upon field — a row of frosted evergreens lining the horizon. Stratford, population 31,465, is like any other small tourist town in Ontario — shabby strip malls, magisterial churches, brick Main Street, overpriced eateries. Like so many Canadian cities, it’s the kind of place where a kid could be born and, happily enough, have just as much chance of staying as leaving.

People generally visit Stratford in the summer for its renowned Shakespeare festival, but I went during the off-season. A couple of miles ahead of the town center, my boyfriend and I passed what appeared to be a school bus holding zone — about a dozen of them, parked like blocks of life-size Legos — before arriving at the Stratford Perth Museum. It was 10 a.m. on a Saturday, the opening time for the press day of the “Steps to Stardom” exhibit, which traced Justin Bieber’s life, all 24 years of it, back to his Stratford childhood. It was quiet. The exhibit scarcely announced itself either, aside from two festive planters flanking the entrance, each festooned with curlicued silver-sprayed twigs wrapped in bows and billowy purple gauze, a color that, for those in the know, announces JUSTIN BIEBER as surely as it might have once announced royalty. In the next room, even quieter, the “Railway Century” exhibit politely stood by with its black-and-white photographs of the industry that had built the town that had built Justin Bieber. Read more…

Weird in the Daylight

Photo by Todd Gunsher

Corbie Hill | No Depression | Spring 2018 | 20 minutes (4,135 words)

The apocalypse came early to Maiden Lane.

The houses on this short dead-end road stand empty and condemned, their doors yawning open and letting in the weather. Just a few hundred yards away, traffic buzzes on Hillsborough Street, a main thoroughfare in Raleigh, North Carolina, that borders N.C. State University. Here, though, everything is uninhabited and decaying. Someone has spray painted “fuck frats” in bold red across the face of the first house on the left, a little single-story blue place in the shadow of a spotless new building. Skillet Gilmore walks into the dilapidated structure without hesitation.

“Karl [Agell] from Corrosion [of Conformity] lived here,” he says. Then he goes room by room, naming other friends who lived in them in the 1990s.

The place is completely wrecked. The floors complain underfoot as if they could give way, and there are gaping holes where the heater vents used to be. The fireplaces have been disassembled with sledgehammers.

“Honestly, it doesn’t look that much worse than it did,” Gilmore offers.

He would know. The house Gilmore lived in at one point in the ‘90s is farther down Maiden Lane on the right. So he and Caitlin Cary, who both played in storied Raleigh alt-country band Whiskeytown and who now are married, lead me into that one, too, again going room by room and naming the previous occupants. A construction truck idles outside and across the street, but nobody comes out to tell us to leave. Nobody bothers us at all. Read more…

The Killer Who Spared My Mother

Nicodemos / Getty, Associated Press, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Diana Whitney | Longreads | August 2018 | 13 minutes (3,338 words)

 
My mother never warned me about anything before I left home. She never came into my room, sat down on my bed, ventured a comment about condoms or consent. No little talks about protection of the body or the soul, the ways a woman might use her voice. Was it her responsibility to start that conversation? Did I dismiss her attempts? I was naive and covetous and hungry to be desired. She couldn’t have changed my nature.

I was 29 before I learned she’d nearly been murdered in college. She didn’t tell me. My father did, over a pot of earl grey in my Vermont farmhouse kitchen. They’d driven up north for a visit before I moved out west with my new rower boyfriend. Tim sat beside me, tall and glorious in his sweats post-workout, while my mom chatted on about the cool weather, the sudden frost.

Dad a-hemmed professorially. “We’re flying down to Philadelphia next month. Your mother’s been asked to be a witness in a murder trial.”

“What?” I didn’t understand.

Mom looked down into her lap, her red hair loose, cheeks flushed. In her late 50s she was still a statuesque beauty, a half-Irish mix of Julianne Moore and Janis Joplin, radiant except when worry furrowed her face.

“Someone your mother dated at Penn is on trial for murdering a woman back in 1977,” Dad continued in his formal baritone. “The prosecuting attorney wants her to testify.”

“Who is this guy?” I asked.

“Ira Einhorn,” Mom said, softly. “He was crazy.”

“Ira was a kind of cult figure on campus,” Dad explained. “A charismatic Sixties radical. Your mother went out with him and he… well, he hit her over the head and left her unconscious.”

“I thought he was going to kill me,” Mom corrected.

I glanced from one parent to the other in the sunlit kitchen. A log shifted in the wood stove. The neighbor’s milking herd lumbered into the back pasture.

My quiet boyfriend, Tim, summoned the courage to speak when I couldn’t. “What happened?”

Dad sketched out the story for us then, Mom nodding in assent, adding a detail here and there. Stunned, I could barely follow their voices, unable to grasp the existence of this man, his connection to my mother, and the trial she was about to attend. I don’t remember wishing her luck or hugging them goodbye, though I hope I did both. I don’t remember following up on the conversation. Like smoke I let the name Ira Einhorn dissolve and recede from my consciousness.
Read more…

Going the Distance: A Reading List on Running

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As the sun washes the sky pastel, my feet clip in an even rhythm down the street and my breath settles into a ragged cadence. Swallows dart out from beneath a bridge, swooping through the new morning. When my Garmin lights, notifying me of a mile, I press forward. As the time stretches on, the sear in my hamstrings heightens and my lungs seek air. Hunting down the same elusive times I do nearly every morning, I run until I hit the six-mile mark where I ease up, allowing my legs to rest.

When I return from my runs, I record the distance and splits from each individual mile. I have been doing so for 13 years. When I line my records up on the floor, a profile of my former self takes shape. When I was merely 13, for example, I recorded that I started running at 7:11 AM, and ran eight miles in 59:21, averaging a pace of 7:25. My records sometimes list complaints: “Legs felt like bricks,” “legs hurt,” “windy,” or “toe bled a lot,” and still the mileage remains consistent with my training plan, the splits even.

There is a theme in my journals — and in my daily pursuit of distance — of the identity I’ve found in running, one that thrives on equal parts pleasure and pain. Running requires diligence that often borders on obsession, and, in chasing faster times and longer distances, I perpetually push my body to the brink of what is possible, until I teeter on the precipice of harm.

I used to find community in my high school team, and, for a short time, as a Division I athlete, but now alone, I find solace in several exceptional essays that open conversations about the limits of the body, of developing an identity through running, and, mostly, why any of us run in the first place.

1. “Running Towards My Father” (Devin Kelly, LitHub, June 2017)

Devin Kelly opens his essay with a description of his father, who is out for his daily three-mile run.

When he runs, my father’s breathing hustles to a rhythmic grunt punctuated by each footfall, accompanied by the swish of his nylon jacket. I have never seen my father bend or stretch. Before he runs, he takes off the clothes he does not need and begins, simply, as if a bird did not have to flap a feather before flying.

Kelly deftly weaves together his father’s running habit with his own pursuit of long distances, exploring failure, connections between running and writing, our identity as “creatures of longing,” and accepting pain, describing the sensation of “knowing how to dance along the thin line that is where your mind meets your body, about listening and being generous to yourself, about adjusting and re-adjusting, about, like so much else, trust.”

2. “How Running Ruined my Relationship, Killed My Faith…and Saved My Life” (Allison Stockman, Narratively, April 2018)

Allison Stockman, at 15, meets her first boyfriend who, while running, “had transformed from a skinny, seemingly weak, invisible kid to a lithe, powerful athlete who ran with the joy and abandon of Pheidippides and the irresistible style and charisma of Prefontaine.” So begins their romance, one complicated by her Mormon faith.

I had to explain that, as a true believer and follower of the faith, I was 100 percent committed to: no drinking, no smoking, no coffee, no tea, church for three hours every Sunday, and, of course, no premarital sex.

Throughout this essay, one that opens with a doctor prescribing Prozac and a 20-minute daily run in an in-patient psych ward, Stockman makes clear the ways that religion, running, and identity are linked in complicated — and often heartbreaking — ways. Running becomes both a lifeline and a metaphor, a way of making sense of an arduous personal transformation.

I knew I had to find some way to will myself back out there, even if there wasn’t a heaven anymore, no finish line to cross, no reward to be won from all that self-denial and sacrifice to live a “good” life.

3. “This Man Expects to Run a 2:50 in the Boston Marathon on Monday” (Lindsay Crouse, The New York Times, April 12, 2018)

Tim Don, at 40, had spent the majority of his life pursuing excellence as a competitive athlete, which not only gave him sponsorships and a career, but also much of his identity. When he was hit by a car during a pre-race bike ride, he suffered a hangman’s fracture, breaking his C2 vertebrae. Immobile and in pain, he made it clear that “a return to competition was his only option.”

In this harrowing story, Lindsay Crouse chronicles Don’s will to not only run the Boston Marathon, but run it in under 2:50. In order to reach the starting line, Don’s doctors equip him with a halo device, one in which titanium pins are screwed directly into the skull. Don’s story is one that raises questions about how far a person can — and should — go to pursue a sport:

Is his drive to compete again — the same drive that enabled him to record the world’s fastest time in one of the world’s most grueling races — fueling an incredible comeback? Or is he risking his health in pursuit of athletic feats that may no longer be attainable?

4. Amelia Boone is Stronger Than Ever (as told to Marissa Stephenson, Runner’s World, June 19, 2018)

Amelia Boone, who won the “World’s Toughest Mudder — a 24-hour nonstop obstacle course race – in 2012, 2014, and 2015,” was known as the “Queen of Pain” in endurance running for pushing the limits of bodily discomfort, course difficulty, and distance. There seemed to be no end to what Boone could accomplish with what she describes as a vicious internal pressure to never let herself fail:

I felt so much external pressure to keep winning. You have to keep winning, Amelia. You have to keep winning. What happens when you don’t win anymore? I felt like I had to put on this persona: Amelia’s a badass. Amelia will power through. This was an image I lived in for years, and it never felt comfortable to me.

After suffering a femur fracture, Boone attempts to return to competition by cross-training with unmatched intensity. But instead of finding herself back on the starting line, she ends up with a stress fracture in the base of her spine, and is finally forced to reconcile the disparity between the voice in her head telling her to chase perfection and the limits of her body. In this candid, moving essay, she addresses the importance of dismantling her own veneer of perfection to find true, lasting strength.

5. A Marathon, a Goal Time, the Sublime, and a Wolf (Jeanne Mack, Medium, November 2017)

Jeanne Mack, in an essay chronicling her training for the New York City Marathon, articulates the way in which long distance running asks us to press against the borders of everything we believe possible.

In literature, the concept of the sublime is something equally beautiful and terrifying; it is awe-filling. It’s something so great, infinite, or obscure that it’s inconceivable. This fall, that, for me, described the marathon distance. It towered somewhere in the sky, above anything else I’d tried to accomplish before.

Mack, who trains mostly in solitude, explores the tension between the recommended splits she hits during training and the inherent knowledge of her own potential. In isolation, she proves her strength time and time again to herself, communing with her body and the world around her during runs. Always, even in light of too-quick splits or a wayward GPS, she finds a way to surge toward her goals, what she terms “the edge of the sublime.”

6. The Immortal Horizon (Leslie Jamison, The Believer, May 2011)

Set at the Barkley Marathons, a race notorious for its difficult terrain, length, and mysterious entry procedures, Leslie Jamison illuminates how myths and stories are created while asking, why do we run? Jamison explores obsession, redemption, control, willpower, and pain, circling the idea of long distance running as if she was a hawk, wheeling closer and closer to the heart of the sport as this eleven-part essay progresses.

The persistence of “why” is the point: the elusive horizon of an unanswerable question, the conceptual equivalent of an un-runnable race.

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir of running and illness.

Smooth Spaces, Fuzzy Lives

Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Rachel Andrews | Brick | Summer 2018 | 18 minutes (4,831 words)

A photograph in an Irish newspaper depicts a member of the Garda Síochána shaking hands with his counterpart from the Police Service of Northern Ireland at one of the points where the territory of the Republic turns into that of Northern Ireland. The photograph, published in November 2015, seven months before Britain voted to exit the European Union, accompanies an article on plans for a “border corridor,” whereby police on both sides of the border can pursue fleeing criminals into each other’s region.

There’s a kind of joviality to the photograph: firm clasping of hands, big smiles. Behind the two men is the Irish landscape, rolling, misted, a river cutting through fields of green. The officers wear different uniforms, but the only obvious territorial demarcation, the only hint that they inhabit different countries, with different laws, health systems, and currencies, is a sharp change in road color, from black to sudden grey.

I remember this non-distinctiveness, the dawning awareness that I had crossed a boundary, from the many trips I took to Northern Ireland between 2007 and 2010, when I worked on an essay that documented the systematic demolition of the Maze prison, a story that presented itself symbolically and — as it turned out — all too simplistically as one of a settling of the past and a coming together for the future.

I never went North as a child. I remember a drawing in a newspaper depicting a map of Ireland. In the sliver of space that is Northern Ireland, the cartoonist had penned: “there be dragons.” In truth, it was worse than that. Ask me as a 6-year-old, a 12-year-old, about Northern Ireland and I would have responded: bombs and blood. Ask my young daughter today and she might look at you blankly. It means nothing to her, and that is a good thing.

There were ways it meant nothing to us too. I grew up in Cork, in the very south of Ireland, and that meant growing up a world away from bombs and blood. As children in the 1970s and 1980s, we were safe from soldiers in the back gardens, from streets we couldn’t walk down. But things filtered into our child worlds. From television: the dark loom of the watchtower, the helicopters, the aerial prison shots following the 1983 Maze escape; Gordon Wilson, who lost his 20-year-old daughter in the 1987 Enniskillen bombing: “I shall pray for those people tonight and every night.” Of the few discussions in school, I remember one: the classmate who had relatives in Belfast, and her upset, her anger, at our fear, our distancing and distaste.

As I got older and traveled in Europe, the easy comfort of that distancing — you and I are not alike — was undercut. “So where did you hide the bomb?” a French colleague joked when I worked for a summer at a hotel in Munich. “Until I met you, I thought all Irish people were savages,” a German girl told me during my Erasmus year in France. This was the early to mid-90s and everywhere I went, there it was. “We in Australia just can’t understand it,” said the visitor to my apartment in London. I still remember the insult of his bemusement and sincerity, as well as my own avoidance. As far as everyone on the outside was concerned, I was them and they were me. I knew better — I mean, was it not obvious?

The first time I went North was in 2000, two years after the Good Friday Agreement, after the Omagh bombing and the howl of anguish that went with it, after it became imaginable, almost normal, for me to drive in my tiny Southern-registered Fiat from Dublin to Belfast and back again as I researched a writing project on women working in politics in Northern Ireland. I was in my late 20s by then, and I wasn’t afraid in Belfast’s city center, which had the same familiar department store names as any British or Irish main street; nor on the Falls Road, which wrapped me in a warm blanket of tri-colors and Celtic symbols; but I felt heavy and intimidated as I made my way up the red, white, and blue pavements on Shankill Road to the offices of the Progressive Unionist Party, hesitant to speak in the corner store lest I betray myself through the soft spill of my Southern tones. But then this dissolved too, and seven years later, when I spent time interviewing former prison officers at the Maze, as well as the residents who had grown up beside the prison, all from a Unionist background, the sing of my Cork accent felt more like a benign curiosity than anything traitorous or threatening.

“Merging is dangerous,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “at least to the boundaries and definition of the self.” Is that why we wrestle against it so? The border with Northern Ireland, once a site of blocked roads and lookout towers, has evaporated, at least on the surface of things, but it remains a place of struggle, of contest, a tussle between those who wish to take it one way and those who would move in another direction, either within the boundaries of a unified Ireland or into the space of clarity that tells us where we end and they begin. The amorphous situation that has existed along the border for nearly twenty years, a fudge that has resisted discrete categorizations and that we seemed to have found a way to live with, or live within, is under pressure in the wake of the Brexit vote, as the clamor to once again define what we are and what we are not, begins to accelerate. We look for the solace of certainty, of knowing if we are one thing or the other, rather than allow ourselves to remain within the complicated, messy space of the both/and, a state made possible by the exhaustion left after thirty years of violence.

Hannah Arendt had a particular view of merging. As she searched out a meaningful concept of a Jew’s place in the world following the sundering caused by the Second World War, she ultimately rejected a form of Zionism that connected citizenship to ethnicity and tethered both to the boundaries of the nation-state. On the other hand, she wrote scathingly of those European Jews who would assimilate, who would ape the Gentiles in an effort to find their way into the ranks of the human, who would, she wrote in disgust, become “good Frenchmen in France,” “good Germans in Germany.” Arendt, you could say, had been one such good German. As a child she did not know that she or her family were Jewish; she learned of her ethnicity only through the anti-Semitic taunts of children on the street. But it was the shocking stripping of her German citizenship as an adult in the 1930s that ultimately woke her to the helpless vulnerability of the assimilated Jew and formed her conviction that Jews must stand defiantly aloof from the boundaries of nationality, turning instead toward the belonging of the citizen; the belonging that attaches to full and complete membership of a political community; the belonging that confers the right to meaningfully speak, act, and be heard in such a community; the belonging that means inhabiting a territory without subscribing to an overarching identity narrative. “Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples — if they keep their identity,” she wrote. Today her sentiments do not appear so different from those of Dina Nayeri, an Iranian refugee who received U.S. citizenship at 15 and became a French national at 30, and who wrote in the Guardian that she had lost interest in the need to rub out her face as tribute for these benefactions. “As refugees, we owed them our previous identity. We had to lay it at their door like an offering, and gleefully deny it to earn our place in this new country. There would be no straddling. No third culture here,” she said, although a third culture appears to be the choice made by Arendt’s beloved Heinrich Heine, at least as she described it, which was to live as both a German and a Jew rather than deny his Jewishness as the price of belonging. “He simply ignored the condition which had characterized emancipation everywhere in Europe — namely, that the Jew might only become a man when he ceased to be a Jew,” she wrote.

Arendt came out of a Europe that had, she witnessed, conclusively intertwined national rights with human rights, which left her as mistrustful of a national, bordered identity as she was of the “abstraction” of any solemn notions of the inalienable rights of man. Heine, the Prussian-born poet and literary critic, came of age in the early nineteenth century, an era of political instability and contentiousness in his homeland; his conversion to Lutheranism was reluctant, regretted, and carried out only as the price of “admission into European culture.” In the early years of the twenty-first century, there was a feeling —I had the feeling — that Europe, at least on some parts of its continent, had found its way beyond these aspects of its shattering history and was on the turn toward the global and the flexible. In 2002, when I lived for a time in Paris, I could board a plane in France and emerge in Italy, where I could retrieve my bags and leave the airport without showing any identification, without queues or questions. This identity-less travel, the result of the then seven-year-old Schengen Agreement and so opposite to my conditioned, normalized experience of waiting in dutiful lines, gave me the very real sense of being a human in the world. The continent of Europe — the part of it that now had a common currency and permeable frontiers, and even onwards toward the rapidly opening East — felt magical, enlightened even, as if we were all in this together. The distinctions between us, forged through cultural, religious, and geographic experience, appeared shapeless now. I could be both Irish and European; I felt that I could, as Arendt wrote, “speak the language of a free man and sing the songs of a natural one.”

But there was a “them.” From my window in Stalingrad, the quartier in the north of Paris where I lived from September to Christmas, I watched men in jeans and jackets congregate outside in the early darkness of the winter evenings, lining up in huddled rows on a Friday for weekly prayers. I looked on, curious — what are they doing? — before I understood. This was one year before the Iraq War, which fractured the Arab world, but already and for long years it was not easy to be Muslim in France, even if you were the French-born descendant of those who had come in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the first wave of migrant workers from northern Africa who stayed in search of a better life; even if you identified as both Muslim and French, as really all, or at least so many, of such descendants do, and as French civic society, with its emphasis on the primacy of the citoyen, encourages — in theory anyway. The exclus, they used to call them. The excluded. If I lived in Stalingrad today, the men across the street would no longer be there; in 2011, politicians banned the saying of street prayers in Paris following far-right protests about creeping Islamization. Instead, near the street I lived on, under the bridge where the metro station lay, there would almost certainly be tents and other makeshift shelters constructed by refugees from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, part of a new and different wave of migration that, along with the 2008 economic crisis, has upended all of Europe. In 2002, I also went to Greece on a reporting assignment. There was no graffiti then comparing Angela Merkel to Hitler; today many in the desperately-indebted country view the dominance of German capital as the source of their woes. In Italy, France, Germany, a radicalized electorate now supports nationalist parties, looks at the European Union with deep suspicion. We were never all in this together.

For the moment, I can travel from Ireland to Britain without a passport. For the moment, I can drive from Dublin to Belfast without stopping, as the road melts from the N1 to the A1 and the white and black sign informs me that speed limits are now being monitored in miles rather than kilometers. (How different to John McGahern’s experience in the early 1990s, recounted in the essay “County Leitrim: The Sky Above Us”: “There are ramps and screens and barriers and a tall camouflaged lookout tower,” he said of the border crossing at Swanlinbar in County Cavan. “A line of cars waits behind a red light. A quick change to green signals each single car forward. In the middle of this maze armed soldiers call out the motor vehicle number and driver’s identification to a hidden computer. Only when they are cleared will the cars be waved through. Suspect vehicles are searched. The soldiers are young and courteous and look very professional.”) By the time I will have finished writing this article, British Prime Minister Theresa May will have triggered Article 50, and the movements I have become used to taking between cities and countries will have been thrown into confusion. Since the terrorist attacks of November 2015, France has been in a state of emergency that includes a firm policing of its borders. For more than a year and a half, commuters travelling from Malmö in Sweden to Copenhagen in Denmark had to present their IDs. Temporary border controls have also been introduced by Germany, Austria, and Norway. Merging is dangerous. Those hoping for a united Ireland — and I am surely one — forget this. On his blog, the journalist and Northern analyst Andy Pollak notes that Andrew Crawford, the former special adviser to current Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Arlene Foster, used to go through reports from one North-South body removing the phrase “all-Ireland.” Perhaps the action of deletion helped Crawford forge certainty, was part of an attempt to make sense of how he existed in time and space. Forging certainty helps us all as we construct both story and identity in order to figure out how to live, but certainty, or at least a fixed destination, gets us into trouble too: we blind ourselves to possibilities, to the creative potential that lies outside of the either/or, to what can happen when we follow Arendt, say, or Deleuze, that great demolisher of dualisms, into the space of the non-being, the uncertain, the becoming.

In her photographic series Kinderwunsch, Ana Casas Broda depicts her body in thrall to those of her children, an artist willing to lose herself in conversation with flux, with change, with overwhelm. The photos are intimate and direct. Casas Broda often stares unsmilingly at the camera: a candid, life-worn Olympia, her pregnant body naked and big, uncomfortable-looking with her second child, or scarred and slack following fertility treatment and birth. In one of the images, her children have marked her face and torso with crayon; she both encouraged this and passively accepted the results. “I am their canvas: they play with me and change me,” she said in an interview. Kinderwunsch means “desire to have children,” and Casas Broda submits, it appears to me, to the terror and the unknown of that primal desire. She tumbles downwards, inwards. In the photographs, her children clothe her in tissue paper, they cover her in Play-Doh. “I see their scribbles on my body as a symbol of how motherhood has changed me,” she said. What she is really depicting is dissolution (of a former self), symbiosis — and something else. In some of the images, she and her children appear as one, interwoven, but there are others where she is alone, or they are indifferent to her: a son plays a video game as she lies naked on a couch, in between mother and person, neither here nor there, her body nonetheless relaxed, strangely at ease in the moment.

Around the time I began my Maze project, I was experiencing the greatest disintegration of self I had ever felt. Crossing the border from North to South represented moments of enormous exhilaration and giddy freedom: dazed as I was, when I lay in a border hotel without the baby, who had just turned seven months, I thought that I could see a way back to myself, that the place where I ended and the child began, would somehow become obvious again, clearly defined. I was wrong about that: there was no going backward. There was no going forward either, at least not in the way I wanted or imagined. Since the birth of my daughter, I remain in limbo land, the borders of a self so carefully constructed over nearly four decades now shifting. She arrived and I disappeared, something like that anyway. The categories I had thought surrounded me have dissipated into confusion and nothingness, and that, if I think about it too much, can be terrifying. Did I turn into you, I used to ask her when she was a baby, or have you become me?

When Colm Tóibín walked the border between North and South in 1987, he bumped into questioning British soldiers; a blown-up bridge on a road that once led from Dublin to Enniskillen; and, in Derry, a march led by former DUP leader Peter Robinson, then in the ascendant. Tóibín feared opening his mouth during the march, lest the crowd (young men in the main, some drunk) spot him as a Southerner. Despite the disappearance of the island’s physical frontier, the hangover from these tensions remains. My friend, a middle-class Northerner from a Catholic background who has lived in Dublin for nearly twenty years, at times employs turns of phrase that leave me reaching for a Cockney rhyming slang dictionary. Yet she and I both use colloquialisms a person born in England will never have heard. Nonetheless, for a long time my friend was lost and lonely in Dublin, reluctant to move back to a society still undercut by a deep lack of trust but without solid ground in the cultural space of the South; she felt different. “I was different,” she told me, as I tried to grasp her feelings of statelessness. It’s not as if we are from different countries, I told myself, not really anyway. But the thing is, we are, both literally and metaphorically. The border has dissolved, but trauma, so deep, so wounding, cuts us off from one another, makes strangers of us in the same land, pulls me one way, pushes her another; trauma turns a society inward, and it has turned Northern Ireland, in the words of retired Oxford professor of Irish history Roy Foster, into more of its own little place than ever. What we have in common is this (and this is easy to write and hard to live): we are more the same than we are different.

The artist Rita Duffy grew up Catholic in a largely Protestant area of Belfast; she is the progeny of a Southern mother and a father whose own father, a Catholic from the Falls Road, died at the Somme. Her two great-uncles on her mother’s side supported and may have been actively involved in the 1916 rebellion, which ultimately led to Irish independence, a civil war, and the fracturing of the island of Ireland. “I was continually fluctuating between nationalities, between identities, curious to know could I somehow land up in the middle somewhere that satisfied me today,” she told a symposium I attended in 2016. In recent years, Duffy has established herself within the space of the liminal: “I crept out to the edges of Ulster and we bought a little piece of the border. We built a house and I now have a studio just a mile and a half on the Southern side, and I live a mile and a half on the Northern side, so I kind of live in neither-here-nor-there land, which is a really interesting place to be as an artist. It’s very confusing and out of that springs the best imaginative possibilities for me.” Out of those imaginative possibilities have arrived big, bold ideas. The Titanic passenger liner was built in Belfast; the tragedy of its unfulfilled promise can be viewed as a metaphor for the long years the North lost to violence. In 2005, Duffy founded Thaw, a company set up to fund the towing of an iceberg from the Arctic to Belfast, where it would be moored outside the city and allowed to melt, in the process encouraging the shrinking of the deep, frozen divisions that still exist within Northern Irish society. Duffy has not yet found the means to drag her iceberg to Belfast, but since 2003 her paintings have been replete with the mythology of those hulking, frozen structures. She has created figurative images that appear trapped, encased in ice: Father Edward Daly, crouching, waving his handkerchief; a close-up of an arm, gesturing, holding a white handkerchief that may itself be an iceberg in miniature; in another painting, there is a Pieta, a mother holding a dying son, both emerging out of the bulk of an ice structure.

Duffy paints these images in greys and yellows, sometimes browns or greens, always muted. But in the middle, or in the distance, there is something, a speck of brightness, a blob, the white-grey of Father Daly’s handkerchief-iceberg, the light that draws your eye and that looks and feels like a breath of gulping air. If you thaw the frozenness, if you let it melt into the Irish Sea, then a space can open up, the iceberg no longer blocks your view and holds you in its frozen time. Behind you lies the city, with its plurality of people, before you the sky and the vastness of the ocean, deep and bold and cerulean blue. Duffy’s iceberg queen, a mammoth, back-turned Victoria, ascends into that blue, the blue of space, the blue of a possibility that allowed for an impossible friendship during the short time that former IRA member Martin McGuinness and the once-trenchant defender of Unionism, Reverend Ian Paisley, worked together in government in Northern Ireland. If you thaw the frozenness, a space opens up, and into that space walked Ian Paisley Jr., son of the good preacher, on various radio stations in January 2017, offering “humble and honest thanks” to Martin McGuinness on the occasion of the latter’s retirement.

In the North Atlantic, the largest iceberg on record was measured at 550 feet above sea level, the same height as a 55-story building; less tremendous ice structures can still reach more than 200 feet high. The Titanic, travelling at top speed on a calm night, crashed into an iceberg that was more than a mile long and 100 feet high and had been growing into its dense mass of packed ice since the time of Tutankhamun, although once such an iceberg drifts from the Arctic to the warmer waters of the North Atlantic, which this one had, it will normally melt in two or three years. To an impatient human eye, this melting will be imperceptible until it is close to completion. My daughter likes to play with ice cubes; she takes them from her glass of water and lays them on the table, where she can contemplate their light, their translucence. When she first started this game, I watched benignly; these days I place a tissue or napkin on the table to soak up the water that spreads out so suddenly as the cube, whole only a moment before, turns liquid before our eyes.

In Bosnia, where I’ve been doing research, the iceberg is still solid, a mountainous whole that blocks ethnicities from seeing across to each other. The Bosnian peace deal of 1995 somehow managed to avoid the formation of literal borders; instead, the populace has retreated into different enclaves across the country, Muslims stick with Muslims, Serbs with Serbs, and so forth. The saddest example of this is Sarajevo, which now sits within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of two political entities that compose Bosnia. Sarajevo’s population is now almost 90 percent Muslim, many of them newcomers since the ending of the war; former residents, most of whom will never go back, mourn the city that was once multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan. Everything has changed, they will tell you, shaking their heads; the city is totally different. There is still separatist agitation, particularly in the Republika Srpska, the political entity that sits closest to Serbia proper, whose nationalist leaders threaten to form their own tiny state, but the frozen iceberg contains more than that: it holds the pain of deceit, of mistrust, of horrors, of loss, of history and geography, of denial and defense. Most of my time in Bosnia was spent in the Republika Srpska, in the east of the country, where I found myself crossing and recrossing the border with Serbia. At each crossing, I encountered the checkpoints: the wait, the documents handed over, the computer clearance, the questions on occasion, the stamps. My husband, a photographer, made the crossing alone once and was held for two hours while guards went through his equipment, his backpack, his wallet. The determined absorption of different religions and cultures into the shape of a single Yugoslavia after the First and Second World Wars had its problems too, but those Bosnians old enough to remember the time when the many amalgamated into the one speak of it wistfully, softly, as if it were a fairy tale they used to tell themselves as children. Their iceberg was waiting, biding its time out at sea, before it floated inland to lodge itself forcibly among them. The disappearance of the border between North and South Ireland has not sunk our icebergs. But over the past sixteen years, until the schism that was June 23, 2016, we had found ways to float one with the other, moored and not, comfortable and not, settled and not.

Is it possible to hold two contrary ideas at the same time: that sense that merging is both terrifying and monumental, the knowledge that we are all different, but that we live within a common world, that we can choose to be something and not? Although Alice Notley wrote that the birth of her child had left her “undone” — “feel as if I will / never be, was never born” — she could still see the other side: “Of two poems one sentimental and one not / I choose both / of his birth and my painful unbirth I choose both.” She hung in the balance, remained midway, gave herself over to not settling in. The child that was a baby when I began my Maze project recently turned ten and is in process, in transition. She is a self that I am not, although that self, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is only “a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.” Her identity is no more fixed than mine is, than mine ever was, for all that I have scrambled to chase it. “What is real,” write the philosophers, “is the becoming itself. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.” There is confusion, and much relief, in such malleable thinking.

I was wrong, of course, in the assumptions I made about the Maze story. After the initial openness that followed the prison’s closure in 2000, when the paramilitary prisoners were let out and the public allowed in, political wrangling slowly strangled the goodwill until the great gates swung shut again; they have stayed shut, more or less, ever since. When I talked to people in and around the prison about politics and the peace, they felt bitter and hurt and sad, and that was not easy to hear. But any hard edges of fear and certainty seemed also to have blurred into a resignation that meant we could at least stand outside of compartmentalizations and inside the fuzzy space that doubt tends to uncover.

It was almost always cold at the Maze; even during summer, the fog hung heavy over its vast flatness. When I was in need of warming, I would retreat to the small security hut at the entrance to the site, where a handful of guards took phone calls and processed visitors. What I recollect about these visits are the moments of recognition. One of the men, a gentle soul, English-accented, who had lost his wife too early and now lived a simple life of work and extended family, was the chatty type. I still remember how he once articulated my fear. “You dip your finger in a pool of water, swirl it about for a while, and when you take it out, the water will return to the way it was. Then it will be as if you never were.”

***

This essay first appeared in Brick, the biannual print journal of nonfiction based in Canada and read throughout the world. Our thanks to Rachel Andrews and the staff at Brick for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

 

Behind The Writing: On Interviewing

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | July 2018 | 18 minutes (4,817 words)

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that for a long time I thought of writing in its strictest, most cinematic sense: as the act of sitting before the proverbial blank screen and conjuring meaning word by word, occasionally pounding a fist on the desk for emphasis or stretching to pet the cat. In grad school, I took the maxim that She Who Wrote the Most Became the Best Writer very literally, churning out pages upon pages that yellowed and blew around my apartment. I remember sitting down with one of my advisors for a thesis meeting and expressing some frustration about how research or the logic puzzle of structuring was eating into my writing time. He looked at me a little like how everyone in the Amelia Bedelia books always looked at Amelia. “But that is writing,” he said. I was flummoxed. “It is?” That seemed like cheating. Writing in my mind was only a mystical, pure struggle of sentence-conjuring; everything else was superfluous, a stretch before the race.

As my career has advanced and I’ve published an actual book and written for various magazines and cobbled together a living as a freelancer, my notion of writing has finally expanded to encompass my professor’s definition. In nonfiction, I’ve come to see writing as the whole process of bringing a piece to life and all of its component parts: the interview preparation, the interviews themselves, the transcriptions, the reinterviews, the careful chiseling and combining and rearranging of all this material. Writing is the broad research and the winnowing of broad research into narrower channels and tangents; the notes scribbled in reporting; the random quotes encountered in poetry or everyday life; the highlighting and mapping and organizing; then, finally, the actual word-by-word construction of sentences into story, which is more akin to building a nest from a thousand disparate twigs than conjuring a vision straight from one’s genius literary brain. It is all, in summary, much more humbling than it seemed at the outset.

Last year, I embarked on a project of new depth and scope: a book which entails a great deal of research and interviewing, and whose backbone is reconstructed narrative. As I delved full-time into the work, I realized I was as interested in the particular skills and techniques required to get and shape the material as I was in the material itself. I had focused for so long on the importance of the meaning of the sentence that I hadn’t thought about the art behind the rest of nonfiction writing. Part of the goal of this column, then, is to shine a light on some of those aspects of writing — interviewing, research, structuring, and more — that could be defined as “craft” and are often hidden behind the actual prose.

To tackle this column, I took the standard approach I’ve developed over my early career as a writer: look to the women. Women writers still face entrenched stereotypes and biases, underrepresentation in reviews, and a significant byline gap in publishing. I have found that one silver lining to this discrimination can be women writers’ commitment to helping one another out, supporting one another’s work, and navigating what often feels like an inscrutable insiders’ network together. With that spirit in mind, for this first column on the subject of interviewing, I looked to three women writers whose work I deeply admire: Lauren Markham, Sarah Smarsh, and Jennifer Percy. I read and reread their remarkable books, then spoke with each of them about the skill, art, and technique of the interview.


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One reason I chose these three women’s work was because each of their books leans heavily on reconstructed narrative: scenes from characters’ pasts that the writer didn’t witness and that need to be put together in vivid detail from interviews. Much of my work as a journalist has relied on reconstructed narrative, and I am fascinated by the puzzle of interviewing the same subject over and over again in order to flesh out the shape and texture of their life. It is not a linear process. It does not proceed like: Tell me about the day you did X. How did that feel? What did it look like? What happened next? Now tell me about the day you did Y. For me, it often involves getting a big gush of information in the first interview, then going through it to highlight areas of particular interest or ambiguity, then going back and asking more about those areas, then repeating this process ad infinitum until the information becomes a story.

Lauren Markham spent two years reporting The Far Away Brothers, a beautiful, devastating nonfiction epic that follows twin brothers Ernesto and Raul Flores (not their real names: Markham used pseudonyms to protect their identities) from El Salvador as they embark on a perilous journey across Central America and Mexico to the United States, fight their way through immigration limbo, and struggle to build a new life for themselves so far from home. Markham described her interviewing process as “entering through the side door.” She gave an example from the powerful opening scene in her book: her main characters, the young Salvadoran twin brothers, are in a car en route to a court appointment in downtown San Francisco. They are late, and they are stressed: If they miss this court date they could ultimately be deported. They are driving around in circles with their older brother. First Markham got the information about the times, the streets, the weather, the basics of how they were feeling. But the details that give the scene the poignancy necessary to open a book about American immigration came through the side door: Long after her initial interviews for the car scene, she and the twins were chatting about something else when one mentioned casually that he’d always thought of the United States as a land of skyscrapers, these big beautiful buildings, but once he was here, he realized it wasn’t really like that. Markham asked him how he felt under the skyscrapers in San Francisco that morning, and out of that conversation arose this passage:

At seventeen, the twins have never been to a city before — unless you count San Salvador, which they’d been to only a few times to visit relatives, or Mexico City, where they were practically shackled to their coyote, hunkered down in the spectral underbelly of the pass-throughs. San Francisco looms like no other place they’ve ever seen. Raul used to picture these buildings in the quiet night back home, rising upward like ladders, like possibilities. But now that he’s under them, they’re just endless, indistinguishable boxes. They make him feel, as most things in the United States of America so far do, small and out of place.

These moments, Markham suggests, are not ones you can necessarily ask about directly. “If you say to any of us,” she told me, “‘What are some of the most foundational memories from your childhood?’ we’re like, ‘wahhhhh?’” But if you’re willing to make the investment of time, you eventually find a way in through the side door.

Another day, Markham went on a bike ride with the twins and they told her a story about how when they were little in El Salvador they’d stolen corn and used it to buy a bike; it was such a perfect memory to encapsulate their childhood. To elicit this type of early experience in particular, Markham relied much more on the coefficient of time spent with her subjects than on the expertly crafted interview question. She told me, “I think building real, honest, genuine relationships from your heart with whomever you’re interviewing makes for better journalism and more humane journalism. And of course there have to be boundaries and there has to be the clarity of OK we’re not friends and I’m still a journalist, but you can still be operating from a place of deep compassion and connection with someone.”

Writing about immigrants who attended the high school where Markham works in Oakland, California, posed an ethical dilemma that terrified her initially. She did not want the twins to feel obligated to participate in her project; she did not want to seem like she was taking advantage of her position; she didn’t want to blend her role coordinating services and programs at the school with her role as a journalist. She agonized over this with her boss at work until finally she told her, “Listen, we let journalists in here all the time to connect with immigrant communities, and we are constantly making a calculation of do we feel this person is trustworthy and do we feel that we trust them enough to connect them with students or families. Of all the people I’d want to write this story, it’d be you.” Markham was still uncertain about putting an undue burden on the twins until finally, she told me, she realized, “I was so freaked out about these young people’s ‘inability’ to make a decision and understand the kind of nuances of my dual role, that in fact I was infantilizing them. They walked from El Salvador to the United States, and I was sort of projecting on them this inability for them to understand or to make a decision on their own.” She sat down with them, explained her project, and told them they didn’t have to make a decision right away. By this point, they were no longer students and were 18 years old. She was surprised when they immediately agreed. They wanted to tell their stories. They wanted to be heard.

Throughout the entire writing process Markham was hyper-aware of the clichés inherent in writing about immigrants: painting them as the perfect, sad heroes, as one-dimensional victims. She wanted to include all the complications of their lives, their shitty decisions, their adolescence. They were teenagers, after all, living by themselves in a foreign country. “Showing them in their roundness was a way to crack open the trope of immigration,” she told me.

Her commitment to showing her characters’ full, complex humanity comes through in so many details of daily life and personality: the way the twins’ faces form “matching masks of dread” when they are late for an appointment; the bright red the Mexican snack food Takis stains their lips; the comfort they feel as they cuddle in a pilled blanket with their brother’s girlfriend’s chihuahua; the movies they watch (Finding Nemo) contrasted with their Facebook posts (tough-guy proclamations and shirtless pics); the way each holds a baby (Ernesto, “cautiously, like a bowl filled with water,” and Raul comfortably, “his face soften[ing] into an old expression something like innocence or wonder”). The most potent information, Markham said, came from just talking to and observing them, but it should also be said that her interview process was extensive and methodical. She had a regular interview schedule with the twins and over the course of years developed a “crazy mosaic” of information: details related to the car and the court date, to the journey northward from El Salvador, to the desert, to their time in an immigrant detention center. She knew that the power of the narrative would ride on detail, and whatever she didn’t glean from observation over time, she tried to ask about: What color was the sofa? What about so-and-so’s shirt? Maybe they didn’t remember the sofa or the shirt, but they did recall the wallpaper, and she’d write that down.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this. “We already told you!” the twins would say, but they would tell it again, and when a detail changed she’d ask about it. She learned this in a workshop with Rebecca Skloot, who said that if you only have the testimony of one person and can’t corroborate, interview that person over and over and see where there are discrepancies. These discrepancies, Markham told me, are often “portals into more complex questions and realities of the story.”

Jennifer Percy also relied on this technique during the three years she spent reporting and writing Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, the harrowing story of a soldier who, after a traumatic event in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of his best friend, returns home to the United States with PTSD and attempts to cure himself and other suffering vets using exorcism in small town Georgia. Percy found herself asking for the same story over and over, trying to break down the heroic version she initially heard. She needed to get through that stiffness of the rehearsed narrative to something rougher and more authentic. She was not after the same kind of authenticity as Markham; where Markham wanted to convey in precise detail the nature of her subjects’ journey northward, Percy wanted to illustrate the emotional and psychological power of war stories, the way they are constructed, the way they can be unreliable, the complex questions that unreliability poses.

Percy was heavily influenced by James Agee’s Let Us All Praise Famous Men and by the notion that nonfiction will always operate with limitations and will never be able to represent the world as it is. These limitations are some of the central tensions of her book; she portrays herself as the writer, the interviewer, struggling to understand across a gulf that is also the gulf between the average American and the soldier returning from war with PTSD. In the parts of the book in which she herself is present as a character, actually depicted interviewing on the page, the reader interviews through her in a way, struggling to make sense of experiences that in the end are impossible to untangle by everyday reasoning. “I asked him all those questions you’re not supposed to ask, about how many you killed, and death and destruction, and I asked him about morals,” she writes. The sense of the terrifying foreignness of both the questions and the answers is palpable. Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through. “It didn’t really feel like I was trying to be an expert on the subject,” she told me, “but rather going into it as a question, with questions. That was what was driving the book.” Here the awkwardness of the interview is the story itself: How does someone who has never been to war understand war, and how does someone who has been to war make it comprehensible?

Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through.

Percy obtained many concrete details — the height the aircraft at the heart of the narrative was flying when it crashed, its position, its specs — from sources other than her main subject, Caleb. With him, she focused predominantly on how he was struggling to make sense of an extremely traumatic experience.

This meant learning when to stay silent and when to push back. At first, she told me, her tendency was to react to these stories of trauma in the way she would react to a friend who was grieving: to respond empathetically, to ask sensitive questions, to tread very carefully, until she realized that this wasn’t actually what her subjects needed. They wanted her to listen, so she grew quiet and listened.

She eventually became less nervous about asking difficult questions, and as her relationship with Caleb evolved over years and he increasingly insisted on bringing her in line with his vision of the world, she pushed back a little harder against it. This delicate line in interviewing between privileging a subject’s view of the world, trying to comprehend it with as much nuance as possible, and challenging some of the improbable or biased or ethically dubious aspects of that view is one that Percy navigates masterfully. The narrative is tense with interactions like the following, in which Percy gestures to the gulf between her experience and her narrator’s, and to her own doubt, and at the same time gives credence to the necessity and fullness of his convictions. In this scene, she challenges Caleb and he challenges her back, and in the interplay between them lies the trauma.

“I tell him gently how sometimes when people convert to new religions they project their faith backward, using religion to explain difficult situations.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Caleb says,” but I have no doubt that this thing has been after me my whole life. I know you think this all sounds crazy, and don’t get me wrong, so do I.”

He crosses his arms and presses his lips together like a beak.

“What exactly would be the point of me going through deliverance?” I ask. He keeps telling me to consider it.

“Let’s say you did. What do you think it might have?”

I don’t say anything.

Then a few breaths later in that same scene, Percy asks:

“Did you feel anything after deliverance?”

“White noise,” he says. “All this white noise. I didn’t even know it was there and suddenly it was gone.”

In the first third of Demon Camp, which is written like fiction — a lyrical, haunting story of a vet growing up, going to war, and experiencing its horrors — Percy wanted to convey Caleb’s point of view. She taped many conversations and appropriated his language and rhythms directly from those transcripts. She also prepared him for interviews by saying, “I’m going to ask a lot of questions that seem really irrelevant. Can you spend a lot more time talking about this random object in the corner of the room?” She would tell him, “Slow time down to where you’re going to take me an hour to describe ten minutes.” What emerges from this is an almost embodied nonfiction, where Percy is in a way channeling her character. Of the night Caleb lost his virginity, Percy writes, “She showed him what to do in the way a mother might show her child how to fold a napkin.” Of his eagerness to believe in deliverance at a conference in Rhode Island where people came to be rid of PTSD, she writes, “He was born into a family who spoke of God at warm meals.” Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person. She does, however, attribute the particularly lyric style of Demon Camp to the fact that it was her first experience of reporting, and she came into it “without any baggage in that realm.” I, too, feel that I now have too much baggage as a reporter to write as freely as I want, and I find Demon Camp exciting in how it breaks convention with much of standard literary journalism. It illustrates the possibility of being rigorous with interviewing and reporting while still writing a haunting, transporting work, harking back to the writing of earlier literary journalists like Didion and Wolfe.

Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person.

In her highly anticipated debut, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, Sarah Smarsh also wanted to illustrate the imperfections and limitations of nonfiction, and the fact that the stories she is telling are not the ultimate, absolute truth but rather the subjective recollections of individual human beings. She wanted to emphasize the wit, insight, and personality of her characters — her family, blue collar workers who have so often been depicted mainly in demeaning stereotypes, or denied a voice at all in American culture. At first, Smarsh intended to immerse the reader in a narrative that read like fiction, a seamless recounting that made her interviewing invisible. But then, she told me, she realized that “for me, the family members who I was interviewing, who are dynamic characters in the book, are so original and funny and vibrant in their own words that I found however much I honed a narrative based on the things they told me, it was leaving one of the greatest strengths of the story on the table if I didn’t let them do some speaking for themselves.” This was also, she explained, “a subtle way of reminding the reader … (a) I’m not making this shit up, and (b) it’s not all about me. I’m building this from hopefully empathic conversations with people whose stories go back further from my own.” This tactic of forgoing the unbroken enchantment of a narrative that reads like fiction for a sense of real people telling stories allows Smarsh to pull off a remarkable feat: Although her book is a memoir, her voice and presence feel secondary to that of her family, and her consciousness, though it is actually writing and constructing the story, does not feel as though it is what drives the book.

Take, for example, Smarsh’s description of her grandmother Betty’s move from Wichita to Smarsh’s grandfather Arnie’s wheat farm:

Betty peeled untold pounds of potatoes, baked pies, fried meat, and stewed vegetables that grew outside the front door. She learned the isolation of rural life through a batch of cookies — she had everything she needed but the brown sugar. What was she supposed to do, drive ten miles west to Kingman just to get one damn ingredient?

“It wasn’t like when you lived in town, you’d bebop down to the QuikTrip,” she told me years later.

She learned to keep the basement overstocked with discount canned food, the deep-freeze packed with every cut of meat, the cupboards filled with double-coupon deals.

Heartland is driven by Smarsh’s memories and framed by her childhood, but in the end the book is not really so much about her — that is, her interior self and struggle — nor is it propelled by her voice in the MFA-ish sense of “voice.” I was amazed by this when I read the book, and it speaks in large part to the power of her interviewing. In an author’s note that prefaces the book, Smarsh notes that she researched and wrote the book over the course of 15 years, conducting “uncounted hours of interviews.” The resulting narrative demonstrates not only the extent of these interviews, but also Smarsh’s particular understanding of this world and these people and the empathy she has for them. While much of the uniqueness and insight of Percy’s book came from positioning herself as an outsider, trying to figure this world out — she told me that she doesn’t think the book would have had the same resonance had she come into it as a seasoned war reporter — Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place. Much of the narrative, and of the conversations in the book, revolve around the tangibles of places, houses, jobs: the emotion is implied and pulses subtly and largely unstated beneath these facts. She was not asking her grandmother, “What did you feel? What did you think?”

Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place.

When your own society hasn’t cared about you for decades, she told me, “those truths are experienced at some strata that is below words and articulation.” The lack of articulation of these truths in fact drove her to become a journalist in an attempt to articulate them. What makes her book so singular is the fact that she is able to convey this repressed or buried emotion in the language and the worldview of her characters. She doesn’t try to speak for them in what she calls “fancy English.” (She told me she speaks two forms of English: country and fancy.) She uses her understanding of this place and this worldview not to translate it but to convey it, with the skills and ethics of what she describes as “an old-fashioned hard-ass twentieth-century newspaper training.” We chatted briefly about Katherine Boo, whose work shares much in common with hers, and she remarked that Boo’s writing is exceptional because Boo doesn’t impose “her own inevitably socialized way of seeing reality” onto the people she’s writing about. The same could be said of Smarsh.

Like Percy, Smarsh emphasized the importance of being comfortable with silence. She described the interview as a forced, staged, artificial reproduction of what we do every day: talk to people and elicit interesting stories and information. “It’s sort of like if someone is just naturally hilarious and whenever you sit around and drink beers they crack everybody up, but if you put a microphone in front of that person and you’re like, ‘Be funny!’ they kind of shut down,” she said. This is the awkwardness the interview can generate for writers.

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I asked Smarsh about how interviewing family differed for her from interviewing strangers and if she employed any unique techniques. Her response was that actually approaching family interviews as a journalist — a professional working in a field with specific demands and protocols — made it easier for them to tell her their stories. This approach, she told me, “allowed my family to say, This is just work. I’m a journalist, I’m just doing my job, and if there’s anything my family respects, it’s someone just doing their damn work.” The interviews were not a touchy-feely let’s-all-understand-one-another session or, as Smarsh put it, her family saying in gushing tones, “Let’s support darling Sarah’s work!” Rather, she said, they were “basically the writing version of sharpening some tools in the shed.”

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I, too, have played this I’m-the-journalist role with my family: in particular, with my younger brother, when he went on a soul-searching road trip one summer and I begged to accompany him, as if he were the budding musician and I the rookie reporter for Rolling Stone. I have found it fascinating how much I could not know — and could come to understand — about someone I’ve known my whole life. The space that opens up between family members with that journalistic distance, with the curiosity and novelty of that role, can reveal objects hidden in plain sight. Smarsh describes writing about her family in this way, as a journalist, as “the most transformative process I’ve had as a human being”; in understanding the social, cultural, ground-level factors that made her mother in particular who she was, Smarsh was able to forgive her.

Smarsh described herself at one point as a “journalist of everyday life,” a phrase that seems at once intuitive and uncanny. I’ve come to latch onto it as a guiding principle; I love both its sweep and its specificity. In many ways, the art of interviewing, and of reconstructing the narratives of “regular” people — that is, not celebrities or public figures — is the art of making everyday life exceptional and fascinating, of seeing what we either take for granted, miss, or cast only a passing glance at in our narrow worlds. In the case of all three of these writers, everyday life contained significant traumas that would be foreign to many readers, but it also contained infinite small moments of tenderness, heartbreak, and connection, and the brilliance of their work is the ability to convey both: to map out the forces that shape a life and also all the quirks of individual strength and personality that define it.

The interview can feel like an act of transgression or, at worst, of violation, and at the same time like the ultimate veneration, a low bow before the infinitely layered experience of another human being. It is a unique intimacy, uncomfortable and pleasurable, awkward and at times transcendent, a spark of meaning that flashes between two often very different people. As Smarsh put it, “You are being given a gift.” And as with any gift, the giving and the receiving are complicated: How to reciprocate? How to honor? How to achieve balance? And is that even possible, or the point?

To look at the interview is to understand writing not as the solitary endeavor of the genius performing her sorcery but as relationship, as negotiation, in which a writer is trying to simultaneously remove herself entirely from a story — to in fact scribble out her assumptions and readings — and to purposefully tell that story with all her skill, will, and vision. The interview acts as a prism illuming the ultimate goal of any writing: to use one’s language and self and brain as a way of getting beyond self and language and brain into a larger realm, a shared one, a more universal one built of the most microscopic blocks: And what did the river feel like? Tell me about the wallpaper.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm (Pantheon, 2017), which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her second book, about an epidemic of anxiety in American motherhood, is forthcoming from Pantheon. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, Oxford American, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross
Fact checker: Matt Giles

Peterson’s Complaint

CSA Images

Laurie Penny | Longreads | July 2018 | 20 minutes (5,191 words)

“Incredible! One of the worst performances of my career, and they
never doubted it for a second!”
– Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“Now that’s a scientific fact. There’s no real evidence
for it, but it is scientific fact.”
Brass Eye, “Paedogeddon” episode

“The eternal dragon is always giving our fallen down castles
a rough time.”
Jordan Peterson, “Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority”

***

“We have this tree, and we have this strange serpent. That’s a dragon-like form, there—a sphinx-like form that’s associated with the tree… And so the snake has been associated with the tree for a very, very long time. The lesson the snake tells people is, you bloody better well wake up, or something you don’t like will get you. And who’s going to be most susceptible to paying attention to the snake? That’s going to be Eve.”

That’s Professor Jordan Peterson, offering the “realistic and demanding practical wisdom” endorsed by David Brooks in the New York Times.

“The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and his authority — people worshipped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast.”

That’s the Book of Revelation.

“I could not understand why there was a half-man half-chicken statue outside. I spent the next six hours screaming. Non-stop screaming as loud as I could. I’d become convinced I was a dead body lying in a forest. I was in the afterlife, and more than that, I was in hell.”

And that’s a man from Vancouver describing a mishap with magic mushrooms in Vice. Of the three excerpts, it’s the only one that can convincingly claim to be non-fiction.

The first time I waded through the collected polemics and YouTube punditry of Professor Jordan Peterson — the unthinking man’s televangelist, inflated to the status of serious truth-seeker by respectable newspapers around the world — I was expecting to be at least slightly dazzled by his rhetoric. But no matter how long I stared at the magic-eye picture of jumbled platitudes, masturbatory nightmares about being devoured by an all-consuming mother figure, and occasional sensible tips about making your bed, it failed to resolve into a work of epoch-defining insight. Instead, it reads as if St. John the Divine of Patmos settled down and got a job selling insurance but occasionally had flashbacks to when he used to lick blue fungus off cave walls and babble about the Great Dragon. 

If every generation gets the intellectuals it deserves, we’re in serious trouble.

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Letters from Trenton

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Thomas Swick | Longreads | July 2018 | 19 minutes (4,829 words)

 

In the fall of 1976 I returned home to New Jersey after a year in France. I had been pursuing my dream of becoming a travel writer by studying French in Aix-en-Provence and working on a farm in Kutzenhausen, Alsace. Now I needed a byline, preferably a steady one. Making the rounds of newspaper offices, I stopped one day at the two-story brick building of the Trenton Times. I wasn’t allowed to see anyone. This was the state capital’s leading newspaper, after all, and I was simply handed a job application. There seemed little reason to play it straight.

What was your last employment?

“Working on a farm.”

What were your duties?

“Picking cherries, baling hay, milking cows.”

Why did you leave your last employment?

“I got tired of stepping in cow shit.”

May we contact your last employer?

“Sure, if you speak Alsatian.”

A few days later I got a call from the features editor asking me to come in for an interview — my reward for being original, and knowing my audience, or at least guessing at it correctly.

I drove the river road south from Phillipsburg, where I was then living with my parents, back to Trenton. The features editor looked like a young Virginia Woolf in tortoiseshell glasses. She told me the paper was owned by the Washington Post and that one of her writers, a young man by the name of Blaine Harden, was exceptionally talented. The gist of the interview was that the editor — who, I later learned, had posted my job application on a wall in the newsroom — could not hire someone with no experience, as everyone else had come to the Times from other newspapers. But they would give me a three-month trial writing feature stories.

This suited me fine for, without a place in the newsroom, I was able to conceal the fact that I still wrote in longhand. I was possibly the last American journalist to do so. I knew how to type, but the typewriter was not a friend to the undecided. It was good for deletions — a quick, brash row of superimposed x’s — but for additions, I had to scribble with my pencil between immovable lines and on virgin margins.

In the evening, back home in Phillipsburg, I would write my stories. Then in the morning I’d get in my mother’s car and drive the river road through Milford and Frenchtown (whose bridges I’d worked on during summers in college), Stockton and Lambertville, the docile Delaware often visible through the leafless trees. The scenery was not as dramatic as in Provence, and the towns were not as picturesque as in Alsace, but there was a quiet, unassuming beauty to the place that suited my temperament, no doubt because it had helped shape it.

Once in the newsroom, I’d borrow a desk and type from my half-hidden handwritten pages.

After I was hired full-time, I bought my first car, a sea-green Datsun, and rented a studio apartment in Trenton. Most of the people at the paper lived in the more attractive surrounding towns like Yardley, Lawrenceville, and Princeton. Daisy Fitch, a fellow feature writer, had grown up next door to Albert Einstein. She was one of a dwindling minority of locals at the paper, as it was increasingly being written by out-of-staters who swooped in for a spell, then left to careers at the Post or someplace equally grand. Many were Ivy Leaguers — this was a few years after Woodward and Bernstein made journalism as sexy as it was ever going to get — and some, like Daisy, had interesting backstories. Celestine Bohlen, a young reporter, was the daughter of Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who had served as the American ambassador to the Soviet Union in the ’50s. Mark Jaffe, a former fencer at Columbia, was living with the daughter of Lyle Stuart, the publisher made rich and famous for putting out the 1969 handbook for women’s sexual pleasure The Sensuous Woman. David Maraniss, who exuded a kind of drowsy gravitas, and for whom everyone predicted glory, was the product of a marriage of editors: mother, books; father, newspaper. I was told that I had just missed the Mercer County careers of John Katzenbach, soon-to-be crime novelist and son of the former U.S. Attorney General, and his wife, Madeleine Blais, both of whose auras still flickered in the brick building on Perry Street.

It was astonishing to find this assembly of near and future luminaries in Trenton, a city I had associated mainly with Champale, whose brewery we used to pass on family drives to the shore. Add the fact that everyone had previous newspaper experience and you can understand if I say I felt a bit out of place. All I brought to the party was an irreverent job application.

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Private Telegram, Public Strife

Telegram App, Wikimedia Commons

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | July 2018 | 10 minutes (2,418 words)

Telegram, a messaging app with more than 200 million users, is a company known for its rakish independence. Pavel Durov, who created the app with his brother, Nikolai, is a 33-year old from St. Petersburg, Russia, with a taste for dark suits and tax-free municipalities. In 2006, he founded VKontakte (VK), Russia’s answer to Facebook, which quickly became the country’s largest social network and a target of its security services. Durov, who identifies as a “part-time troll” in his Twitter bio, earned a reputation as a sort of maverick entrepreneur, a persona that has come with both free-speech absolutism and immature antics. His most notorious stunt took place in May 2012, when he stood at his office window and tossed paper airplanes made of rubles down onto the street below. He later explained that he had been talking to a vice president at his company who had been awarded a large bonus, and when the VP said that he didn’t care about money, the two decided to throw cash out the window—until bystanders started fighting over the windfall.

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