WEBVTT

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Oh, I'm not done.

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I think we're good on time.

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Yeah, I timed this.

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I'll allow you a minute to
check in with yourselves

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and how you're feeling.

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Yeah.

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We belong to each other, folks.

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And when we experience
that as a truth,

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and we experience that as
something that is fragile,

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usually the sites of that
fragility and its truthfulness

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is around immigration policy.

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This question around belonging
and kinship and kithship.

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When I came to this country,
in 2001, September 2001,

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which is a very awkward
time to be a Brown person.

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I'll just say I
don't recommend it.

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I could have chosen that better.

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One of the first
acts of collaboration

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that my parents and I undertook,
and my grandmother and I

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undertook, was to fill out
forms, immigration forms,

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in our dining table in Glen
Burnie, Maryland, which

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is where I was going to school.

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I was going to
school in Baltimore.

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And we would clear the
table of all the dishes

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and wipe away the rice and
the water, water stains

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and we would get
out our paperwork,

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and we would fill out the forms.

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And I think that work of
collaborating together

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on the story of who we
are, why we are here,

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why we wish to stay here,
has held us together

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for all these years.

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And I find it really
important to return

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to some of these
documents and to tell

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the story of these documents.

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So I want to read from a
segment called petitions,

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in which you'll hear
some of the language

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from a form, an immigration
form called the form I-130.

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It is the petition
for an alien relative.

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So if ET is your
relative, you can

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petition for that little guy.

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It is the petition that you use
when your beloved is very far

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away and you want to hold them.

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So you get to beg
someone you have never

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seen to allow you the right
to feel someone's skin again

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before you die.

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And this petition, the
form I-130 petition

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comes with a warning, which is
the epigraph to this segment.

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And the warning is
actually-- it's a beseeching

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appeal from the US government.

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Please do not include
graphic photos

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of childbirth or
intimate relations

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as evidence for a
relationship or a marriage.

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Please.

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I just love imagining
that all of us immigrants

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are just sending porn their way.

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[LAUGHTER]

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So there are several petitions
and I will read them all.

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First petition.

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It is a Thursday and no
one out on this long street

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looks like your mother.

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So you go home, wrap
yourself in form I-130.

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Knit a nest with
a ballpoint pen,

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limn your kin
inside a placeholder

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smooth your limbs
into a square to beg

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for a place for
your first space.

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Her.

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Write her name into the petition
in thin, improbable syllables.

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No one calls her by this name in
the elsewhere because they know

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her fish market haggle
purse tucked at the waist,

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sari pleats pulsing
like flushed gills.

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No one except the
men who will ask her.

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Ma'am, can you name
two national holidays?

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And ma'am, who lived in America
before the Europeans arrived?

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So you plan it out.

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Letter by letter in letters.

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Your mouth cupped
to her cataracts.

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Ma, just listen and
answer the men who

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ask how she came to know you.

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If she intends to remain here?

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And, sir, for how long have
you known that ma was a ball

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made for two?

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Brimming beyond any border,
red as the arrival of her face

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seven years later,
a paper apparition

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drawn closer and
closer to you by a cue

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unknotting at a frayed
horizon in an airport.

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When it is a Thursday,
and suddenly she

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walks through the
passport photograph

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you once stapled at
the edge of a petition

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to anchor her womb to
your migrating heart.

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