panopticon

Kathleen Hellen:

I believe in the “poetry of witness.” In Carolyn Forché. In the “outcry of the soul” that arises from personal experience.

Only five months into a second term, the Trump Administration had declared a national border emergency, and deportations surged, including the arrest and detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man living in my state of Maryland. Without due process, he was deported to CECOT, a notorious prison in El Salvador, and I was shocked. The senator from my district pressed for his release but was refused, even though Garcia’s case had been determined “an administrative error.” I was alarmed. I joined the millions here and nationwide who showed up at the rally. As we marched through city streets from the hilltop at Patterson Park, helicopters buzzing overhead, surveilling, I saw him standing at the wall, a toddler on his shoulders. The immigrant. The alien. The stranger in a strange land.

Gracias, he said, as I nodded, passing by, and suddenly I saw in him my mother, who had fled Tokyo in ruin, ravaged by the firebombing, who would play over and over on the stereo, in the dark, as if dreaming, Dvořák’s No. 9 from the New World. I saw my father’s father, who had fled, my father said, the Austrian conscription. Saw, too, the many many others who had fled and dreamed and risked it all so I could have this life.