How did you get here?
We all have a migration story. Maybe recent, maybe ancient (maybe both). Maybe remembered, maybe long forgotten.
Though you may not remember, your migration story is a story of laws. Laws patiently endured. Laws suffered. Laws ignored. The enforcers had different faces: ICE, anti-emigration bureaus, Indian raids. The laws are intertwined with your story.
We talk about immigration stories. We talk about immigration laws. We rarely talk about immigration laws as stories too, stories told in a special technocratic language by the cultures that made them.
And immigration laws themselves have stories. Stories of alliances and enmities, of aspirations and animosities. How We Got Here was created as a lens to see the immigration laws as human stories.
“There Is a Portal”
This week, Emmy-award winning writer, performer, and cultural activist Kayhan Irani presented her new project, “There Is a Portal,” at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in Chicago, which I’ve been attending. (I’ve been blogging every day about some of my takeaways about immigration law and where the profession is going, and you can read that here.)
Outside the exhibit hall at the conference, I noticed an unusual, black-veiled booth. Outside was a placard. “There Is a Portal,” it read. The placard announced an unusual lunchtime event, exploring the process of “making home.” All were invited.
At the event, hosted by the American Immigration Council, Irani introduced her new project, an interactive video exploration of the ways we make home. The work explores multiple facets of the migration experience: Loss, hate, regret, connection.
The goal, Irani said, is pedagogical as well as expressive; in the workshop and video (and a special installation experience behind that black veil in the lobby), she invites the participant to explore these facets in their own migration story, sharing crystallized and universalizable memories of her own.
“There Is a Portal” offers the kind of multidimensional perspective necessary to transcend polarization and partisanship. The segment on “Hate,” for example, includes hostile voices uttering racial slurs, but also Irani recalling that she became such a bully as a child that other kids nicknamed her “Barbarian.” She wore the name proudly, she owns, a shield covering her own pain and fear.
“Do you remember the first time you destroyed something – and it felt good?” she asks.
In the complexity and paradox of story, we co-create our own identity: agent, victim, perpetrator, human. The Persian language, her father pronounces, is the sweetest of languages, a language that can convey the human heart. “It’s the sweetness exchanged by strangers that makes a strange place home … From one heart to another, there is a portal … From my heart to yours, there is a portal ….”
Enter the Portal
But don’t let me detain you further. Click here and begin your own journey.