On Sunday, President Donald Trump tweeted that four American freshmen Congresswomen should “go back” to the “broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has used racist and divisive tactics to vilify and intimidate the opposition, but this offense hit particularly hard. Whether due to my shared identity as a racial, religious, and ethnic minority in America, the increasing threat of deportation amid the latest wave of ICE raids, or my admiration for his targets—Ilhan Omar (MN); Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (NY); Ayanna Pressley (MA), and Rashida Tlaib (MI)—I felt (as one does as an artist on the margins of an unjust society) compelled to share that this experience reinforces the importance that our stories be told in our own voices.
I recognize the oddity of posting about the news in a blog meant to discuss the writing process, but (whether I want it or not) I’ve learned that my writing is political. Not only do President Trump’s words on Sunday suggest dissenting voices do not have a right to exist in America, they also rewrite the facts. To him, it doesn’t matter that three of the four congresswomen were born in the United States; or that 5% of Congress members are foreign-born Americans (29 in the House and Senate). He paints the lives of women and people of color with broad strokes of stereotyping, diluting our experiences down to that of “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists” and “nasty” or “crooked.”
He would, if we were to stay silent, rewrite our stories and the facts. I learned this lesson the hard way almost a decade ago. My first week as a college freshman, I lost a group of friends because I frowned when a stranger said he would hunt and shoot Obama down like an animal if he had the chance. I had just moved to Rexburg to attend Brigham Young University-Idaho, and I was shook. Not outwardly or bravely outraged, but definitively stunned by the cavalier threat of violence uttered from someone with whom I shared a spiritual identity. It was clear from the bravado of his tone that he didn’t expect anyone in the car to disagree.
I was sitting in the backseat of a pickup truck with two students I had met at orientation and who lived down the hall from me. One of them spoke a little bit of Spanish and the other knew someone who had served a Mormon mission in an unknown and ambiguously Latin American country they couldn’t identify. I am Brazilian-American and had lived most of my life in Boston, but they didn’t ask and I didn’t correct them when they assumed I spoke Spanish. In that way, they wrote a part of my story for me. These neighbors invited me to go off-roading around the sand dunes; and I (eager to make friends) readily accepted.
On our way back to campus, the driver started on his tirade. I saw him take note of my scrunched eyebrows from his rearview mirror and tried to avert my eyes. I think that’s when we both realized that I was the only person of color around.
“Oh, are you Mexican or something? I guess you probably voted for Obama.” I hadn’t. But the facts didn’t matter to him. And I didn’t feel empowered to engage. To be honest, I was scared. His words registered as an accusation; and I was painfully aware that I was in the back of a truck in an unknown location a couple thousand miles away from home. My silence was used to discredit me and his version of the truth was the only one that received an audience that day.
That threat still exists today. Following the President’s remarks earlier this week, Kellyanne Conway added, “Forget these four. They represent a dark underbelly of people in this country.”
These four Congresswomen are an inspiration to me, but if Conway’s perspective is the only one told, we might believe that they are worthy of being discarded and ignored. There is an abundance of harmful narratives out there about minorities in America; and they are often used to take away agency, intimidate, and vilified those on the margins. But our voices and our stories are not one. They are diverse and complicated; and hearing our stories told by our own community matters.
I first felt seen in literature reading Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner in high school. I am not Afghan-American, or a cis man, or the child of a diplomat. Still, I relate to Amir’s experience as an hyphenated American: of seeing your parents swallow their pride and exhaustion to make ends meet in an unfamiliar country; of having core parts of your self split in half; of feeling simultaneously disconnected from and starved for both halves.
Hosseini painted a Kabul unlike the one I saw in the news. The image of a friendship flourishing and withering away beneath a pomegranate tree remained beyond the narrative of violence and destruction that dominated the news. In writing about his home, Hosseini showed readers that Kabul is not one. It is not the diluted image of a war torn capital, but something alive and ever evolving — with the capacity to hold nuance: beauty and trauma.
President Trump might try to distill the experiences of people of color and of immigrants into the capitalist and white supremacist notion that all countries that are not America are broken, but we who hail from foreign lands know our origins best.
In 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie urged us to beware of the danger of the single story. She reminds us of how impressionable and vulnerable we are to the stories told by those in power. It is easy to become convinced that Trump’s America is the only one. To be fooled into believing diminutive conclusions about immigrants, women, or people of color. And, if we aren’t careful, to believe these lies about ourselves.
Regardless of whether our experiences are validated or appreciated, they exist. An essential part of our duty and calling as writers is to bear witness. Like Ilhan Omar, I cannot separate my identity as an immigrant from my American citizenship. I cannot disaggregate two interlaced parts of my self; and I will not leave this country or any part of myself behind to comply with someone else’s vision for me.
I often stall my own writing process and cut creativity at the root when I try to explain nuances a general audience wouldn’t understand. It’s hard not to feel weighed down by others’ opinions of people like me, or conversely by the weight of being seen as a representative of the identities I hold. I wonder, what does my reader need to know about Mormons; and how will the world see Brazilians or LGBTQ people if I write about this situation? I want to tell my stories but there is such a shortage of these narratives (or a lack of accessibility to them) that it can feel overwhelming to start and keep at it — especially when our political climate regularly reminds me of how little our nation knows about people like me and how hostile we can be to outsiders. As I processed this latest controversy, a colleague at the Boston Immigrant Writer Salon shared that July is the month of Minority Mental Health Awareness. I am grateful to her. To other minorities writers, I hope you will read this and find solidarity in our shared exhaustion and hope for the future. I hope you know I’m riding this wave with you and that your art matters to me.
Please care for your mind and heart. Know that you belong. In the words of Ayanna Pressley, “Our squad is big. Our squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and just world. And that is the work that we want to get back to. And given the size of this squad and this great nation, we cannot, we will not, be silenced.”
Handwritten on a yellow sheet of paper on one of the cubicle walls of the Writers’ Room of Boston is pinned a Grace Paley quote. It reads, “let us go forth with fear and courage and rage.” Paley’s words reminds me that our insecurities and anger can fuel great art. And regardless of the president’s intention to divide, words have the power to rally us together.
By Jéssica Oliveira, 2019 Gish Jen Fellow
