One Sunday evening last month, my husband and I sat in a side balcony in the Concert Hall at the Kennedy Center, waiting for the music to begin. We looked down at the stage, where National Symphony Orchestra musicians in tuxes and glittering...
Dispatches
Facing an Uncertain Future, a DACA Recipient Dreams of the Past
As an honors student at a prestigious East Coast University, Marisela Vasquez* felt forced to lie about why she did not study abroad. “That was the hardest conversation to have junior year–I would say that with my two majors and a minor...
Where You Belong: Reflections of a Naturalized Citizen, After Charlottesville
If you were a young woman newly arrived in America from India, you likely had no memory of persecution or war. You did not flee in fear of torture, dictators, or imprisonment. Perhaps you had a fear of gossiping neighbors, interfering aunts...
Street Smarts: On Confronting Poetry and Language in a Mississippi Classroom
After living in Washington, DC for more than thirty years, I like to think that I’ve acquired some street smarts. When in unfamiliar territory, I keep my guard up and sublimate the trusting Mississippi country boy side of me, a part of my...
Factory Men: Migrants in Patras, Greece
In Patras, Greece, I met Taimor, a 17-year-old Afghan migrant camped out in an abandoned furniture factory. The boy already had the beginnings of a beard and, as the mother of a 17-year-old myself, I must have looked surprised when I heard...
Sanctuary, City
A “new” Lotería card appears spray-painted on a viaduct in Chicago’s near Southwest Side. While reading Night with high school freshmen on Chicago’s largely Latino Southwest Side, I often had to explain new vocabulary like...
My Trip to Greece
Written by Mostafa Fadi, with an introduction by Dana Sachs I go to Greece regularly with a small aid team, Humanity Now, and on Lesvos Island I met Mostafa Fadi, a 26-year-old refugee from Syria. At the PIKPA Camp, which shelters 85 people, Mostafa...
London’s Calling
Preparing a lamb curry wrap, Borough Market, May 5 I walked around the Borough Market exactly a month ago, reveling in how the South Bank has become a favorite part of the city. The market is a great place to grab a bite to eat or just watch...
Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt
Say I tell you a story about a girl who’s afraid of money. From a young age, she learned that there didn’t seem to be much of it and that hard work didn’t mean one would ever have much of it. She knew this from her dad’s dark tan in the...
Dispatch from Mexico City: On the Relación of Cabeza De Vaca, from Coyoacán, 2017
Such is my axis in the Theater of Space-Time: On this mid-January day of 2017, Donald J. Trump has just been sworn in as the 45th President of United States, to the uneasy consternation of every Mexican I know, whether they consider themselves on...
Holding the Blue Line: Dispatches from a Swing State
Roanoke. Population approximately one hundred thousand. A small city nestled at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. An island of blue in an angry sea of red. The Democratic Party of Virginia’s headquarters here is a prime example of the...
The Trumpbox
The Trumpbox is 12 3/16 tall and 15 7/8 wide. It can hold quite a lot; according to the label, its “capacity gallon” is 14. It is made of Polyethylene, which I cannot say I really know much about, but I can promise you this, it’s strong. If...
“Like the Back of My Hand” (from the series)
My hands are not like most people’s. They are double-jointed, and, due to an autoimmune condition, they swell and contract, resulting in squishiness and more wrinkles than is fair for my age. For decades, I’ve been ashamed of my hands...
My Mother’s Pilgrimage
In September 2015—the year a crane collapse in Mecca killed 111 people, followed by the deaths of another 2000 in a stampede—my mother returned from the Hajj with flu and was immediately quarantined in a hospital in Indianapolis. It took her...
April 3, 2017: Two Tragedies Occurred in Russia
One was a shrapnel-bomb blast on a subway train in St. Petersburg: eleven people killed, as of this writing; dozens severely injured. This happened in the very heart of the city’s subway system: there is hardly a Petersburger who wouldn’t have...
Because They Could: How We Are Not Russia
On February 27, 2015, a stone’s throw away from the ominous fishbone of the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower, they killed the charismatic and universally beloved leader of the Russian political opposition, the former Russian First Deputy Prime...
A Prescriptive Identity? Not My Birthright.
Identity. I searched for it my entire life. When I thought I had it in my clutches, the slippery creature learned how to evade me; my identity changed directions, it multiplied, it forced me to look inwards and decide—is this who I want to be...
Listening in a Post-Brexit (Post-Election) World
John Berger died on January 2 at age 90. An art critic, novelist, and left-leaning thinker, he’s loved by me also for Photocopies, a book of short portraits that are like sketches in words: informal, partial, seemingly off-hand. In the...
Not Breathing Yet: In Response to the Election
I am eighteen years old, lying on my bed doing my homework, when my two-year-old nephew begins his seizure. He came into my room an hour before, fussy and red-faced, and fell asleep behind me, pressed tight against me for comfort. The heat emanating...
Note from a Mother
My middle child is fascinated by his ethnicity. He looks the most Ecuadorian with his dark almond eyes and wide nose. He stretches his arm next to mine to see the contrast of his brown skin against my white. He teaches his younger brother to say...
Disappointment
Remember, remember, the eighth of November; of gunpowder, treason and plot.[1] Benjamin, do you recall sixteen years ago how we sat all night before the black-and-white Great Wall television set (with its hues of light green on a warped electronic...
Depending on How You Look at It
In the weeks before Donald Trump became president of the United States, I travelled to Greece to volunteer and distribute some $35,000 in donations that a group of us from North Carolina had collected for humanitarian relief for refugees. These...