Years ago, when Obama was still president, I awoke in my Chicago studio with a feather-brained realization: I was a day trip away from Canada. Depending on the lake whose edge you hugged, it was between a five- to nine-hour drive. With a GPS to guide me, I’d make it to some city, spend some hours sightseeing, and drive back home to avoid the expense of a hotel. There is no plot twist—I’ll dispense, here, with the illusions of tension. My girlfriend and I were denied entry. I returned home with nothing lost but gas money. We hadn’t entered Canada, except to turn the car around.
• •
On the first page of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine recalls as a child seeing her mother leave for the hospital pregnant and return without a baby:
“Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug.”
Sometimes when leading creative nonfiction workshops, I ask young students to reflect on the kinds of essays they have written in the past. To remember what we’ve been told we’re allowed to do and what we are disallowed from saying if we want to “succeed.” Though rhetoric is hardly taught directly—not as a field of study—we live in the shadow of it: we learn, for instance, to appeal to the audience with our authority by never admitting we might not know everything. We are told directly never to use (what business culture calls) “weak” or “undermining” language. Never “I think” or “from what I understand.” Always present your understandings as facts.
We could ask if Rankine’s poetry is therefore primarily making an emotional appeal. Or, instead, we could posit this: an admission of fallibility might be a kind of ethical authority.
There seems to me less and less room in the air for this. We are shown, over and over, that we should never wonder. We should know.
• •
It wasn’t a great plan. But it didn’t feel stupid, or rather, it felt fine in my late twenties and feels stupid in my thirties, like staying all the way until the very end of a just-OK concert. I asked my girlfriend at the time if she would take the trip with me, and early that morning we drove the shortest distance my GPS could find. Would you believe I don’t remember which way we went? I only know it was long and dead-winter-boring. There were no world’s-largest-pencils, no giant Jesus statues (like in Kentucky, where I grew up). I was driving a blue-gray Buick Sunk Cost Fallacy. The longer I drove us forward, the more ridiculous it felt to turn around.
• •
I have poured over the e-mails, Google chats, and Facebook posts from that day in 2014. I write a poem each day—a kind of journaling—and I’ve searched for the terms “Canada,” “denied,” “passport.” Nothing.
I’ve found nothing but this—the only written record I have of that day, an e-mail I sent to an employer. It begins:
“I had a pretty rough day, which may be (sic) an e-mail from border patrol already indicates.”
• •
We found ourselves on a small ferry, then in the hatched gray light of a chain-linked security point. It was like the outside of a prison, if the prison were an entire country. The people in our line of cars didn’t look like us: they were white (not racially ambiguous) and everyone seemed dressed for work. A uniformed man asked to see my passport, asked why I was entering Canada. I told him: I was in grad school and just coming up to visit. He seemed mildly surprised (there were some trees, and little else—this was not, I realized, a place people came to hang out).
He looked around my car, which had in it little more than my backpack, and seemed ready to let us go (though who knows?) when another officer, wearing the metallic shades that every officer in the world wears, returned from break and asked him what was up. He told her I was in college, and visiting. From that point on, the woman took over.
• •
Durga Chew-Bose writes in “Heart Museum”: “I am—if it’s not already clear—disinterested in actually remembering, since I last learned in school, how the heart does what it does . . .to do so would render obsolete all those microscopic people who live inside my heart . . .,” by which she means dozens of things at least, but one of my favorites is I think she means that often there is necessarily a conflict between the empirical and the experiential. Between the documentation and the people.
And the two are necessarily in conflict, because you, as a person, pass through time. You can be undermined. You’re mutable, contain multitudes and refutations and negations even on the best of days. What you are fits or doesn’t fit. What you think or feel. I believe that when Chew-Bose admits she is uncertain, or seems disinterested in fact, she is admitting the limitations of pronouncements. That any authority that chooses to hide uncertainty is not convincing but obfuscating, to some degree, the consequences of inevitable faults.
It’s a classic dilemma in nonfiction (or a classic recent dilemma—not every writer wishes to speak about truth beyond the fact that what they have written is not a lie). Nonfiction strives at the least toward truth, but, in fact, the commitment to any expression is highly fraught. And to be clear: I am not making here the postmodern claim that everything is unbound and subjective and there are only points of view. I mean that even in a world of total objective truth, any statement is a narrowing of consideration. It is at play with what we have just said, what we say after it, and sometimes makes loud what we have chosen not to say at all.
It is one reason why MAGA subsumes the seemingly simple fact that “black lives matter” with the more general “all lives matter”: the former makes a promise that white supremacy cannot abide. Or so it has seemed to me, who hopes to matter outside of an interrogation.
• •
I hope to be careful. I freely admit how much I don’t remember. I had silly motivations for traveling, which were patently suspicious. The officers surely knew the names of everyone who entered that checkpoint each day. I have tried not to exaggerate: I wasn’t physically harmed. I had my passport, and though I was questioned, I was released.
Language is messy. It came from us, what else could it be? And written language is authoritative. This is authoritative. Even as I say it again. Language is messy. Legal language demands, even pretends, that it not be. But it is. All the time.
I drove home that night. And I slept. I believe if I were someone else, I would not have slept.
• •
I was separated from my girlfriend. She was questioned in another room. I won’t speak for her beyond saying she was questioned for around half an hour, mostly about why I had told her we were going to Canada, and that she told me she was afraid. I remain so sorry for this.
They took me to a holding area, lit by a huge window with open blinds. It probably wasn’t actually frightening. I don’t remember many of the details, but:
- I was there for hours.
- They searched my car, emptied my backpack.
- I was told I didn’t have enough money to stay (this was true), and I didn’t have a place to stay (also true).
- I was asked the same few questions dozens of times.
- I remember trying to convince myself they couldn’t keep me here, or if they did, they’d have to tell my family. I don’t actually know if this is true. I never actually asked to make a call.
- I was accused of lying. Many times. I was told that they knew I was lying, and why did I want to make things worse for myself? I was told that I would go to jail longer if I didn’t admit the truth.
- My laptop was opened, and my e-mails read. I didn’t understand why this wasn’t enough: it was obvious I was a graduate student, an artist, that I had people who loved me and who I loved in America (this was one of the things I was accused of lying about).
- Whatever I actually want, now that I have written this account, all of it is official.
- I was told my employer was being e-mailed.
- I was told that if I got hurt, I would never leave. I said that no, I would call my parents. This was one of the scenarios that always ended in my being called a liar.
- I was told they had evidence I had secured an under-the-table job already on the other side of the border. This was impossible.
- I was told my girlfriend had told them everything.
- My ex surely remembers all this differently.
- I have apologized to her but have always been too ashamed to ask her to ever again repeat what happened after that first time we spoke again later that day. Sometimes I think this is selfish, and other times, I think it would be more selfish to make her relive it for my edification.
- I was told that my passport had been marked so I couldn’t enter Canada. (I have never tried since, and, in fact, I have never left the country since. The thought of being pulled aside by TSA to explain what happened, especially when I don’t exactly know what happened, terrifies me.)
• •
Years later, I tried telling a twenty-second version of this story to a group of writers at a party. A white woman’s response was that she had once gotten through security at the airport without her ID. I thought I had misheard her. But no, she had forgotten her driver’s license, and after seeing the panic on her face, security had just trusted her. They let her through.
She said it as a kind of outrage—that I should also have been let through. But our stories are similar in a different way: both of us ended up fine. I don’t know, I never fully know, if any of the many times I have been accused of crimes I didn’t commit were based on my skin color. But whatever the case, my racial ambiguity, my brownness, does not actually prevent my citizenship. Not legally. Not today.
Our news cycle is frenzied to the point that even profoundly terrible policies often seem rational when compared to their alternatives (emergency states that lead to military-funded walls, for instance). But even bipartisan agreements can be frenzies dressed in fine suits. The “subject” of subjectivity is an individual human being. That is, when I tell you this story, it is with my subjectivity front and center, my foolishness and selfishness, and when one commits to the objectivity of the language of law, what is presented to us as precise and sound and authoritative can still be a base set of prejudices with its human face scrubbed away. Even if laws were objective, if they were not merely acting in the way rhetoric acts but could truly remove themselves from the biases of its creators, humans still wield them. Any policy is a single hammer designed for a particular problematic nail (sometimes only a theoretical one). And once it has been made, it is free to be wielded: by any number of fallible humans who often convince themselves that because the law is clear, so are their intentions.
For what it’s worth, in this moment, I have documents that protect me. I was born in this country (though birthright citizenship is being questioned) and my parents were born in this country (though the Dred Scott decision stripped that from my ancestors once as well). What the writer at that party was telling me was a version of what I want to say here: I recognize that who I am has protected me. I have the right papers, ones that ought to soundly prove my citizenship and allow me to go about my day, the way I did when, finally, the officers at the border told me to very slowly drive my car just past the gate, make a sharp U-turn, and take the ferry back to the United States with my new papers.
Laws are articulate the way good essays are—they mask everything we will not admit we do not know. I don’t merely caution against the hasty targeting of particular people with the intention of solving complicated economic and political problems only because the hammer of law swung too close to my face. What I mean to say is that within the spectrum that starts at the “average” laid-off American citizen and moves past fearful news reports, to political speeches and rallies and the formation of task forces, and ends perhaps with the writing of a definitive law, a much-too-significant measure of humanity is lost. It is like passing a bucket of water along a thousand people to put out a fire, only to be surprised to find the bucket dry. There are many to whom I can never convince, because their priorities are with themselves only, their tribe, and they know that many people will have to fall for the path they choose to walk for their bread. But there are also those who truly believe that so long as their laws target certain classes of people, “criminals,” for instance, there is no sin to risk committing. They all eat the same bread, drink the same water, hold the same hammer.
The officers photocopied a form informing me that my entry into Canada was rejected. That’s it. That is all I suffered. But I didn’t write about it then. I wrote about a frozen bird I saw stuck to the sidewalk. About missing lost people, and depression, and comic books and Greek myths. It is a much harder thing to write about your foolishness. To write about your shame. There is no document I own that is harder to look at or rid myself of. Its words have solidified something that might otherwise have remained in the air. When I open the folder it sits in, it seems to overbear my body. It has nothing to do with my entry into any country but everything to do with denial.
• •
I remain inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks—her commitment to her community and people, her teaching, and, of course. her perfectly named collection of poetry, Blacks. In particular, when I read “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” I hold to the possibility that even now, people’s deep investment into the establishment of themselves as heroes—to their family, to their people, to their communities—can catch fire. If what it took to put bacon on your family’s table is to disenfranchise, or turn your back upon, or violently harm someone outside of your family, may you be incapable of eating it. That if you do, it should leave the bitterest taste in your mouth.
