Who are Dreamers....?
"The DREAM Act (short for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act) was a bill in Congress that would have granted legal status to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and went to school here."
No one is illegal
1
Hands cuffed, body strapped, lips taped the thrust drives thoughts I know are clear but cannot hear
through the porthole bone-white concrete cracks snaking the land columns of rocket smoke streaking the sky like reeds in a winter pond
deportation drones expulsion by propulsion
swirling past at a distance the face of the woman I love with a black and white star printed on her forehead
as blue fades into black my flattened face stares back inside the star the letters ILLEGAL ALIEN
then a sudden lightness, a sudden silence, the splitting of my heart the only sound,
then a burst of sunlight that singes my eyes till I awake to find the world red, till I awake to find myself dead.
2
The sunrays piercing through the window find me in fetal position.
The woman I love sleeps soundly, her breath ebbing and flowing like the waves over the rocks of my faraway village.
Emigrating out of bed, the cool floor welcomes my feet and becalms my heart.
I encounter no border guards on the way to the kitchen. I let the coffee journey through my veins and spurt slowly into my thoughts. At what time of day do I become a citizen?
I search for the weather map in the newspaper to recover my bearings. Clouds straddle land borders, raindrops fall either side. What hue of blue is my spirit, having lived so long away from the sea?
The headlines speak of “spy leaks”, “unmanned drones”, “illegal immigrants”. Is the nightmare that just shook me stored in your state security database? Can your drones detect the salt-blue atoms within my DNA? At what shade of pink or brown does an expat become an immigrant? If you were to play the musical notation in my fingerprint, would it be compatible with the national anthem? Which subparagraph of which article of which implementing regulation gives me permission to take a deep breath, to stretch out and yawn, and to heave a sigh of relief?
3
I shut my eyes. There they are, in the redness, ink-dripping words floating through the air like hungry mosquitoes. With each swat of the newspaper, the louder their buzz in the ears.
undocumented ausländer non-native klandestin blood-sucking sans-papiers gypsy parasite taco-munching wetback anchor baby intruder forastero illegal immigrant
STOP!
No one is legal or illegal! No paper, no ink, no dirty bureaucratic stamp can codify the depths of the soul, the hopes and dreams of the migrant heart!
My family, made up of seven accidental nationalities, charts its journey through a maze of 49 borders with an invisible thread of blood that no customs officer can cut.
Listen. Do you hear the cracking? The Great Rift Valley continues to widen. Should we ever return en masse, there may soon be room for us all.
stateless itinerant étranger non-citizen non-villager asylturist boat person boat non-person barrani beachcomber ħarraġa irregular migrant
STOP!
Wait a minute. Who wants to be ‘regular’ ? Perfectly symmetrical, perfectly integrated, perfectly robot, a regular polyhedron, not a single wild hair, mole, or beauty spot rising above the skin? The woman I love, born in Luxembourg to Argentinian parents of Turkish-Puglian-Guaraní descent, has a small toe resting upon the toe next to it, and I adore the irregularity.
If you believe in the gates of heaven, pray that you will find them unscrewed from the jambs.
economic refugiado savage barbarian extra-communautaire benefits-scrounging gasterarbeiter vagabond stranġier asylum shopper illegal alien
STOP! STOP! STOP this collective hallucination!
Alien? From which exo-planet? Are they creatures spawned by another god, or spurted on an opposite side of the big bang? Are we in danger of extinction? Do they breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, or are these monsters messing with the chemical balance of our air?
4
The scent of alien chemicals penetrating our paper-thin atmosphere has spun my head beyond its axis.
The newspaper thrown for recycling, I walk through the forest to feel the cool air caress my skin and cleanse my ears. My eyes migrate through the foliage, my thoughts into and out of myself.
Birds have flown into my heart with offerings in return for warmth, and have taken off again as free as they were when they came.
My beard has welcomed tufts of pollen and I have overflown with contentment in carrying such fertility, occasionally stroking them off, occasionally blowing them on their way.
The drizzle that softens my head and trickles down my neck, I sometimes like to catch on my tongue. Through these same droplets, microplankton have risen at night toward the surface of the sea, and multicoloured fish have spawned.
The winds are more than four but move as one. I thirst for the winds to fill my lungs, I crave they bring salt to my lips.
5
Human once more, I deport myself softly back to bed. The woman I love sleeps in fetal position. Migrating into dreamland, I see the island of Pangaea rising above the ocean. People of all colours, each of them perfectly irregular in shape, are drafting a planetary constitution. And I am one of the civil servants, translating into one of over 6,000 official languages: Article 1 – No human being is illegal, and it is illegal to illegalise a people.
