BRIClab Essays:

The Gap

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The years spent apart
Things left unsaid
The gap
A chasm
The middle space
In between
So full of why’s and how’s and when’s
Where questions take up landing space and love awaits an arrival
Who are you?
And yet, I want her to know
I see her
I see her despite the blinding distance
No land mass or deep sea can separate
What spirit has connected
In the soul plane is where we meet
In dreams and reveries
Imagining tomorrows
I’ve seen you abuela
I’ve seen you mama
I have your eyes
So in the mirror I stand
And I see you looking back at me
Your love is in the schoolbooks
And the good cooked food
I felt your embrace in the warmth of new blankets
And heard your footsteps as I walked in shoes you sent to me
I have seen you in all the ways one sees without eyes
Knowing you have loved me in all the ways one loves without touch
Together
we filled the gaps

What happens to the time between the departure and the arrival or reunion so many hope and plan for after migrating to a new place? How are relationships affected and how do we nurture connections across borders beyond the politically drawn boundaries of nations that keep us separated? Migrating people and those left in waiting must continue to build lives in the spaces of our hearts and minds where imagination creates unions in the here, now, and tomorrow. It is the active process of hope and radical imagining that weave the threads between people that maintain relationships through distance, but it is not without an undercurrent of complex emotionality that these relations must survive in waiting for reunion. Children left in the care of grandparents or other family may wonder if life would be so different had their parent remained. Holding both gratitude and deep pain from that sacrifice is part of the unspoken familial negotiations created by the circumstances of forced migration and family separation. In the waiting, in the gap, in the space between today and tomorrow, we hold testimonies of a complex love beyond borders that is a key to our healing.

Testimony

But she never told her story
Delayed memories
Tell me how you remember me
I was angry
But I had a reason to be angry
Understanding was lacking
But I want her to know
that
My back is a bridge between generations
My tongue testifies
My words help people find the words for their experience
They fill the gaps of unspoken truths
And memories in waiting
Seeking the arrival of healing
from old wounds
Still fresh from
Her departure

Each of us bears an untold story within. When I was four, I migrated to the United States with my mother as did millions of others from Central America at the height of a thirty-year civil war. I didn’t know it then, but that was the last time we both would see my mother’s mother, my grandmother alive. I can only imagine the emotional weight my mother carries in her spirit. Thirty years later and she has yet to tell me her story of surviving through that separation and death. My experience of migration and family separation has sparked a lifelong journey to reclaim the missed memories and lost lullabies my grandmother would have shared with me. Through storytelling in poetry or prose, I have found my healing. As a scholar of migration I tell the stories of structural and state violence that create the conditions for forced migration and family separation. And while it isn’t my right to tell other’s stories, through the telling of my personal life experiences and the witnessing I’ve been allowed to participate in as others share their stories, I’ve found the words to fill the gaps of separation by imbuing my scholarship with political testimonies of shared experiences. Perhaps through the telling of our stories, the bearing of our testimonies, and only when we are ready to do so, may others find a healing tongue and the courage to speak their own truths.