The Immigrant’s Choice

Jennie Cooley, "Border Crossing"

Jennie Cooley, "Border Crossing"*

Census figures indicate that the United States is steadily moving towards becoming a country with no majority race or ethnicity as the Hispanic population continues to grow.  Some of the anti-immigrant sentiment (and the weird hysteria in some quarters about sharia law being established in the U.S.) may stem from white panic over this development.

Recently I wrote about the 1976 Italian film Bread and Chocolate and wondered whether the self-hatred evinced by the protagonist is common amongst immigrants.

Novelist Rachel Kranz, in a response, noted that similar themes appear in the short stories of Anzia Yezierska, an eastern European Jewish writer who wrote in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Rachel writes,

Throughout her work is the ambivalence about whether she should celebrate or despise the culture she comes from–as she is working as hard as she can to escape it. How can she celebrate it if it is despised by Americans? How can she escape it if she doesn’t really belong in the WASP world? In the end, she writes movingly about the dilemma of not belonging anywhere, which is as much a class issue as a cultural one: one brilliant story portrays an immigrant mother whose children “make it,” and who feels at home neither within the filthy, uncomfortable poverty she used to know nor inside the sterile life of “Riverside Drive” where she lives with her nouveau riche daughter.

Rachel adds that her own parents were first-generation Americans (which is to say, born in America) and that “the question of whether or not we were ‘real’ Americans was very much part of my own childhood.”

Adrienne Rich has a well-known poem about immigrants that is powerful in large part because of its apparent simplicity.  Rich depicts immigration as a stark choice—either one goes through the door or one doesn’t.  The decision has immense ramifications, both positive and negative.

For instance, if you go through the door, Rich says, “there is always the risk of remembering your name.” Also, in the way described by Rachel above, things will “look at you doubly.”

Rich notes that one does not need to go through the door to “live worthily.”  It is possible “to stay at home/ and to maintain your attitudes.”  But Rich also knows that immigrants are often driven by extreme duress (by Guatemalan death squads in the 1990’s, for instance).  Therefore she must also add that it is possible “to die bravely.”

The door itself, she says, offers no promises.

Here’s the poem:

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

By Adrienne Rich

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

 

*The artist Jennie Cooley’s website may be found here.

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