The following reflection was written by Ashley Gagne, director of the Mennonite Central Committee’s UN office in New York City. We offer it today in commemoration of International Migrants Day, December 18.
By Ashley Gagne
Mennonite Central Committee, UN Office
In places of metal gates and barbed wire, I prefer broken glass crowning a wall, the humblest form of defense. I like how it catches the light, possessing whole sunrises and sets; the semblance of holy scenes reserved for stained glass windows.
I say this hailing from a fortress so large or at least so far removed from harm that I never saw the key to my childhood home. Except for an ancient skeleton key to the front door, which I could lodge in the hole but not turn. It was more a charming artifact than shield. My family neither locked nor unlocked the doors, for they were always open. The car keys similarly, were left dangling from the ignition, ready for anyone to start.
When I went away to college, it took me some time to get in the habit of locking my room, to close the door even. Such was the effect of my childhood fortress, which was a small town on a small peninsula on the coast of Maine. A slip of land wedged between mountain and sea where the Wabanaki once lived, but not anymore, because the Forefathers killed them or drove them all away. So there, where the Wabanaki lived and died, I cultivated an understanding of beauty which, by the time I left, was fully fleshed without my knowing it. It is for this reason that I prefer glass shards to metal gates in barricaded places.
But my preference is misguided in its allusion to disparity: Only those who perceive their valued lives as threatened, who can afford protective measures, take them. My preference for beauty feels perverse in its suggestion of violence: As I write this, triple strand concertina razor wire separates a sea of migrants from a line of Texas National Guardsmen along the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso border. The troops unfurled it like a serpent to say don’t come here. To say, come here and you’ll bleed. But the migrants are already bleeding. Those who came from as far as Pakistan and Cameroon crossed the Darien Gap, a jungled strand of lawless land linking the Americas, for which there is no map. Promising hunger and threatening death, it is roadless save a trail of skulls, the remains of those who crawled to their end still dreaming.
I write this because the migrants are my here and now. I live far from the border, but I feel them trying to cross. Their desire to survive and live well upon surviving is on my mind. Some have lost limbs to the Beast, the freight train that runs between Mexico and the United States. If deported, many would climb and jump it again despite the odds. To slumber atop it is to risk not waking, but nowhere else is there to sleep. A man bears crutches to fill the space below his knee. One-legged, he watches the sun fall on El Paso, a city of dreams to some. To others, just another city.
Unlike the troops, the migrants have no weapons. Just small necessities – toothbrushes, combs, withered Bibles, whatever clothes fit in a backpack, unless these were confiscated by smugglers desperate for money too. In the shirts of lone children is sometimes stitched the name and phone number of a relative in the United States. Such clothing, a mother hopes remains secure on the body. “See, little one, this is who will find and love you when I can’t because I’ll be dead or just hanging on past the desert you’ll cross. Go, love, make a better life,” she might think, threading the needle. If her child reaches the border, they’ll see the razor wire and relent. After scaling mountains and waters the width of countries, they’ll learn that their brown body, slack with exhaustion, is not valued. Is despised in a promised land.
Living well, I find, is subjective to some degree. It has nothing and everything to do with money, one’s access to it, or lack thereof. One’s chances of living well may be complicated by birth in the southern hemisphere, or somewhere near it. On world maps, continents there appear shrunken in relation to those northern. The map makers enlarged the north to convey dominance, and this misrepresentation bears consequences.
Many people believe that migrants deserve a good life. They say this with their words but not their lives. Giving money doesn’t count, not here, unless it is so much that those giving it surrender their position of being able to in the first place. In this way, the maps would be put right. The continents would shift to their true and relative scale. But maybe I’m wrong, because living well has everything but nothing to do with money. For we all emerge from our mothers and into this world seeking refuge. And that is how we leave it.
Top photo: Liz Sullivan, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons