We immigrate in order to find a better life-hoping to find greater financial success or educational, creative, personal opportunity, perhaps, or attempting to escape war, crime, famine, invasion, prejudice. In other words, we are affected by the great grandmothers and fathers whether or not we know anything about them, and our own farewells will have ripples beyond what we know. When we allow ourselves to acknowledge consequences that need not be at the expense of reasons, we can appreciate more fully not only the power of our own farewells but the power of others’ departures-even for daughters and sons several generations after the leave-taking. Suzi Tucker: Leaving one’s homeland is perhaps more complex than we commonly understand. And even if regular visits to my place of origin were to happen, or if a return for good were to occur, neither I, nor the place I left behind are really the same to each other. There are the latent histories and stories that were truncated before they could be weaved, written, lived or told because of the goodbyes. There are those who stayed behind and those who left. Yet looking carefully at this transition now, I have become aware of the ruptures that it produced. At a young age, leaving home represented for me the prospect of expansion at all levels, creatively, culturally, emotionally, and financially.
It was not until recently that I was faced with the deep implications of my departure from the Dominican Republic to New York City almost 30 years ago. Nicolás Dumit Estévez: I am drawn to make immigration our first point of reflection in this conversation, not only because of its centrality to One Person at Time, the life and art experience that this publication documents, but also because of the panoply of reactions that the move to leave one’s homeland unfolds for those involved in it directly or indirectly.
0 kommentar(er)
