Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

I recently read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli.

The book is an intimate look at the child refugee crisis as framed through the 40 questions posed to these children upon their arrival in the United States.  It is not a whitepaper or book of detached logic.  It doesn’t present the problems and then propose clearly achievable solutions.  So my intent here is not to ‘review’ this heart-wrenching, desperate book.  This situation is a nightmare, and the author practically begs for the underlying issue to be seen and acknowledged.  That the author does not know how this story ends is simultaneously a call to action and a sobering fact.

A few quotes from the book:

"It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born."

"In varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts."

"No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that."

"The political response to the crisis, therefore, has always centered on one question, which is more or less: What do we do with all these children now? Or, in blunter terms: How do we get rid of them or dissuade them from coming?"

"How would anyone who is stigmatized as an “illegal immigrant” feel “safe” and “happy”?"

"No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a trans national problem that includes the United States—not as a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem."

"To refer to the situation as a hemispheric war would be a step forward because it would oblige us to rethink the very language surrounding the problem and, in doing so, imagine potential directions for combined policies."