Humanizing The 'Other'

"Kindred Spirits"

You're the strangest person I ever met, she said
& I said
You too
& we decided we'd know each other a long time

-Brian Andreas, Story People

This drawing is hanging on the wall of the bathroom in my children's pediatrician's office on the back of the toilet.

I love it.

I love it because: 

A. I am strange myself, and more importantly, 

B. We are actually all “Kindred Spirits” when we humanize the “other.”

I've been thinking about the drawing as I have followed the news of the Caravan of Central American Migrants who have traveled together from the southern border of Mexico to seek asylum in The United States.

Yesterday I saw these photos by journalist Meghan Dhaliwal on The New York Times website that tells the most recent part of the story.

I have long been interested in the geographical and cultural space that is the US-Mexico border, but as a Caucasian New Englander who lives thousands of miles away I’m not exactly sure why.

It may have started when I first visited Mexico for the day by walking across the border when I was 13 years-old.  First in Texas, and then in California.  I was with my family, and these were the kinds of things we did on summer vacations.  

Both crossings made a vivid impression on me, and later when I was an undergraduate in college, I decided to do study abroad in Mexico where I lived with a Mexican family.

After study abroad in Mexico, I came upon a book called Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) by gay, Chicana author and activist Gloria Anzaldua, and this book set me on a journey (that became my Undergraduate Thesis Paper) to understand and unpack how the US-Mexico border itself came to be, and how our American perception of both Mexicans and the US-Mexico border came to be.

Ms. Anzaldua writes:

From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological crosspollenization, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making- a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia demujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.

Writing like this, and this year-long investigation consumed me.

It was the second time in my short life that I found myself more actively and more formally seeking answers to the questions: Why am I here and you there? And, Where do I end and you begin?

(The first time was in high school when I was looking at defacto racial segregation in school systems.)

I had been reminded again of this deep dive into my study of what creates a perception of “other”-- that began almost 2 decades ago--with all of the more recent news headlines that include these two words: "The Russians."  

How many times have we heard these two words in our American News Media in the past year and a half? And how negative does the the portrayal of Russia always seem to be?

It makes you almost forget that we are actually talking about 144 million people; 144 million people who have sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, mothers and fathers.

People, or “Kindred Spirits” if you will, just like us.

In the winter time I encountered this book at my local library: 

The Human Experience: Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry (1989).  Ironically, it was placed on the shelf for discarded books- perhaps the library hierarchy decided the book had become less relevant.

If only...

The book caught my eye for two reasons that feel both intimate and personal.

One, is my grandfather was a Russian immigrant.

And two, in 1993, when I was 15 years-old, I traveled to Russia to participate in an exchange program in which I stayed with a Russian family for 10 days, and then Olga, the 15 year-old girl in their family, traveled to the United States to stay with my family for 10 days.

As you might guess based on the book title, the mission of the book could be interpreted to be: 

1.)    Humanizing the “other,” 

2.)    Challenging  the concept of separation, and 

3.)    Possibly finding common ground between what it means to be American and what it means to be Russian.

Sound familiar?

I have included two selections from the book below: one, a poem called “To a Siberian Woodsman” by Wendell Berry, and the other “Borders” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Though on the longer side, since they are both so timely yet again (almost 3 decades later), I thought you might find it useful to read, or re-read as the case may be, these poems in the context of our current world of “Kindred Spirits.”

Oh, and by the way, I have still been asking that same question of the cosmos: Where do I end and you begin?

And to the Caravan of Migrants…

May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.

To A Siberian Woodsman

(after looking at some pictures in a magazine)

-Wendell Berry

1. You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper, listening to your daughter play the accordion. You smile with the pleasure of a man confident in his hands, resting after a day of long labor in the forest, the cry of the saw in your head, and the vision of coming home to rest. Your daughter’s face is clear in the joy of hearing her own music. Her fingers live on the keys like people familiar with the land they were born in. 

You sit at the dinner table late into the night with your son, tying the bright flies that will lead you along the forest streams. Over you, as your hands work, is the dream of still pools. Over you is the dream of your silence while the east brightens, birds waking close by you in the trees.

2. I have thought of you stepping out of your doorway at dawn, your son in your tracks. You go in under the overarching green branches of the forest whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound of your own voice or the silence that lies around you now that you have ceased to speak, and soon the voice of the stream rises ahead of you, and you take the path beside it. I have thought of the sun breaking pale through the mists over you as you come to the pool where you will fish, and of the mist drifting over the water, and of the cast fly resting light on the face of the pool. 

3. And I am here in Kentucky in the place I have made myself in the world. I sit on my porch above the river that flows muddy and slow along the feet of the trees. I hear the voices of the wren and the yellow-throated warbler whose songs pass near the windows and over the roof. In my house my daughter learns the womanhood of her mother. My son is at play, pretending to be the man he believes I am. I am the outbreathing of this ground. My words are its words as the wren’s song is its song. 

4. Who has invented our enmity? Who has prescribed us hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger that I should desire the burning of your house or the destruction of your children? Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the thought that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and rivers, and the silence of the birds? Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange to you, and the voices of your land strange to me? 

Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to destroy you, or that I could improve myself by destroying you? Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you, or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with you in the forest? And now one of the ideas of my place will be that you would gladly talk and visit and work with me. 

5. I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in. As they are native I am native, and I hold to this place as carefully as they hold to it. I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the sycamore, or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the walnut, nor has the elm bowed before any monuments or sworn the oath of allegiance. They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome. 

6. In the thought of you I imagine myself free of the weapons and the official hates that I have borne on my back like a hump, and in the thought of myself I imagine you free of weapons and official hates, so that if we should meet we would not go by each other looking at the ground like slaves sullen under their burdens, but would stand clear in the gaze of each other. 

7. There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence besides the forest pool. There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys. There is no national glory so comely as my daughter who dances and sings and is the brightness of my house. There is no government so worthy as my son who laughs, as he comes up the path from the river in the evening, for joy.

(from “Openings,” 1968)

Borders

By Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In every border post

there’s something insecure.

Each one of them

is longing for leaves and for flowers

They say

the greatest punishment for a tree

is to become a border post.

The birds that pause to rest

on border posts

can’t figure out

what kind of tree they’ve landed on.

I suppose

that at first, it was people who invented borders,

and then borders

started to invent people.

It was borders who invented police,

armies, and border guards.

It was borders who invented

Customs-men, passports, and other shit.

Thank God,

We have invisible threads and threadlets,

Born of the threads of blood

From the nails in the palms of

Christ.

These threads struggle through,

Tearing apart the barbed wire

Leading love to join love

And anguish to unit with anguish.

And a tear,

Which evaporated somewhere in Paraguay,

Will fall as a snowflake

Onto the frozen cheek of an Eskimo.

And a hulking New York skyscraper

With bruises of neon,

Mourning the forgotten smell of plowlands,

Dreams only of embracing a lonely Kremlin tower,

But sadly that is not allowed.

The Iron Curtain,

Unhappily squeaking her rusty brains,

Probably thinks:

"Oh, if I were not a border,

If jolly hands would pull me apart

And build from my bloody remains

Carousels, kindergartens, and

Schools.”

In my darkest dreams I see

My prehistoric ancestor:

He collected skulls like trophies

In the somber vaults of his

Cave,

And with the bloodied point of a stone spearhead

He marked out the first-ever border

On the face of the earth.

That was a hill of skulls.

Now it is grown into an Everest.

The earth was transformed

And became a giant burial place.

While borders still stand

We are all in prehistory.

Real history will start

When borders are gone.

The earth is still scarred,

Mutilated with the scars of wars.

Now killing has become an art,

When once it was merely a

Trade:

From all those thousands of borders

We have lost only the human one

-

The border between good and evil.

But while we still have invisible threads

Joining each self

With millions of selves,

There are no real superpower states.

Any fragile soul on this earth

Is the real superpower.

My government

Is the whole family of man, all at once.

Every beggar is my marshal,

Giving me orders.

I am a racist,

I recognize only one race-

The race of all races.

How foreign is the word foreigner!

I have four and a half billion leaders.

And I dance my Russian,

My death-defying dance

On the invisible threads

That connect the hearts of people.

While borders still stand

we are all in prehistory.

Real history will start

when all borders are gone.