I cannot speak of voting without speaking of citizenship—the goal of many immigrants like me escaping home countries where they face persecution and death. Citizenship, for me, is a moving target. I’ve lived significant amounts of time in three different countries. I was born in Sri Lanka, lived most of my life in the US, and currently reside in Canada. Where many view citizenship as a fixed, stable connection, I see it as ever-shifting. I have little patience for nationalism or patriotic pride, and little faith in the stability of governments, no matter their power.
In Sri Lanka, I was born Tamil during a civil war where the Sinhalese-controlled government sought to dominate Tamils who wanted a separate state. And if domination wasn’t possible, then eradication. I spent my early childhood without wealth in cities on the borderlands between government and rebel control. I carry those memories of war with me as an artist and as a citizen. I’ve seen first-hand how gerrymandering and voter suppression can completely change the political landscape of a country. I witnessed how fast a peaceful state can backslide into genocide. And I hold the truth deep inside me that this political dystopia can all happen anywhere, to anyone, at any time—and yet no one ever thinks it will happen here, to us, right now, and that denial is what allows these very changes to take place.
It’s bizarre to me that many Americans believe US citizenship is easy to attain. From those who think immigrants are freeloaders to those who say they’re moving to Canada whenever an election doesn’t go their way—they all think of citizenship as an easy goalpost, one that can be had whenever one wants. It took me fourteen years to attain US citizenship, an average amount of time if your parents or spouse are not already citizens. When I finally took the citizenship test in 2009, I choked up at the ceremony, not because I loved the US, but because I was finally renouncing my Sri Lankan citizenship—a bittersweet moment of discarding my affiliation with a country that never seemed to want me.
The vote in the US wasn’t given to me by birthright. I never had an awakening where I realized the power of my vote. I knew from an early age, watching elections in Sri Lanka, that voting is a right easily taken away or suppressed, precisely because it can be so powerful, because it can change the world.
I attended my first US school as a third grader. In my first few months, our teacher taught us about the genocide of Indigenous people for the development of the US. She taught us about the smallpox blankets handed out by General Jeffrey Amherst, the man for whom our town was named. She taught us about apartheid, which had just ended a year prior in South Africa. Some people would say we were indoctrinated. I say we were awakened and trusted to know complicated truths about the world.
Unlike my friends, I didn’t vote in the first Obama election in 2008, though I was of age. I wasn’t yet a citizen. So instead, I canvassed door to door for the Obama campaign and the movement against an abortion ban in South Dakota.
But the election cycle I remember most vividly is Bush vs. Gore in 2000. I was in eighth grade, newly moved to a conservative part of Massachusetts where my earlier education made me incredulous at what I perceived to be a selective and patriotic teaching of American and world history. I watched the news every night with my parents. I’d been an avid recycler for years at that point, devoted to stopping climate change. Bush’s rhetoric reminded me too much of the silver-spoon leaders of Sri Lanka’s government. Before the results were announced, I firmly believed the US to be a more stable country than my home, one where elections could not be stolen. Since then, I’ve lived in utter bafflement at Americans’ false sense of security—which has lasted, for some, even through the disastrous Trump years.
I’m indebted to the privilege of my education for cultivating in me my progressive views. I learned so much from reading queer and trans writers as a university student. Before taking Gay and Lesbian Literature with Dr. Amelia Montes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I knew little about Stonewall or the AIDS crisis. Reading Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, Audre Lorde’s Zami, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera taught me indirectly about voting—namely, that I want to use my vote to better the lives of others. Through these writers, I’ve become quite rigid in my belief that if you fail to stand on the side of human rights, you fail morally and ethically as a human.
Now, as a professor myself, I strive to teach my own students about the power of voting—but indirectly, through literature and the practice of empathy. I love teaching Octavia Butler’s Kindred, because it brings together a progressive modern perspective on race in America with the absolute horror of slavery, reminding us that we are never free from the sins of our nation’s forefathers. And I haven’t gotten to teach this next book yet, but I can’t wait to—Sharon Bala’s The Boat People, which highlights the plight of refugees in our contemporary citizenship processes. To me, this is my responsibility in this world: to pass on the kind of education I received, to create not just better citizens in the US and Canada, but to help people see that citizenship is global, and that our responsibility, first and finally, is to each other and to the world.