Ahmad Dohra - The Penguin book of migration literature: departures, arrivals, generations, returns

One of my earliest childhood memories is of being torn away from my mother. I was four years old and she was leaving Haiti for the United States to join my father, whod emigrated two years earlier, to escape both a dictatorship and poverty. My mother was entrusting my younger brother and me to the care of my uncle and his wife, who would look after us until our parents could establish permanent residencythey had both traveled on tourist visasin the United States.

On the day my mother left, I wrapped my arms around her legs before she headed for the plane. She leaned down and tearfully unballed my fists so that my uncle could peel me off her. As my brother dropped to the floor, bawling, my mother hurried away, her tear-soaked face buried in her hands. She couldnt bear to look back.

Even the type of carefully planned separation that my parents chose tore their hearts out. Whenever they were eating, my mother used to say, they wondered whether my brother and I were eating, too. When they went to bed at night, they wondered if my brother and I were sleeping. Even though we spoke to them on a scheduled call once a week, they never stopped worrying and longing for us.

It is perhaps that ache and longing that made my parents take me to visit Haitian refugees and asylum seekers who were being held at a detention center near the Brooklyn Navy Yard when our family was reunited in New York, in the early 1980s. I have continued to visit detention facilities over the years, including ones where children are held, either alone or with their parents. At a childrens facility in Cutler Bay, Florida, most of the boys and girls had been detained for so long that theyd transitioned from childhood to adolescence behind those walls. Then there were the Miami hotels turned detention centers, where women and children were being held for weeks or months at a time. Up to six women spent twenty-four hours a day in one room, often with crying babies and toddlers, while armed guards patrolled the halls.

One of the most distressing aspects of migration, for both adults and children, is how invisible the migrant can become, even when being detained, or imprisoned, in our proverbial backyards. When vulnerable populations are kept hidden, or are forced into hidingwhich is the daily reality of so many undocumented migrants, immigrants, and refugeesthey not only live in the shadows; they become slowly erased and their voices become muffled or go unheard.

Thats why its so illuminating to have a book like this at this particular time, an indispensable anthology full of intimate and deeply moving poems, short stories, novels, and memoirs about what its like to live on the margins of borders today. This book dares to ask what departures, arrivals, and returns are like, what being in motion means at a time when, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 68.5 million of our fellow human beings are coming and going because of war or economic, environmental, or political instability.

The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns also explores what home is and can become. Is home the place where we are born, where, as we say in Haiti, our umbilical cords are buried? Or is home the place we die, where we are buried? Or is home the place where we toil in between? The place to which weve sacrificed our youth, our strength, the place to which we have given the best years of our lives? Some of us are born speaking one language and will die speaking another. We are seeds in one soil and weeds in another.