Perhaps America was always a great escape, maybe that is what so many people are hoping and fighting for it to be that again. There are people who believe in magic, and people who don’t. In all the world there is no one like the refugee, there is no experience like his or hers.
I was talking to a refugee father last week, his name was Raffat and is from Iraq, he said it was not really possible for him to describe the experience of the refugee. Mostly, he said it was about loss. And escape.
I told him I knew something of it, my grandparents sometimes talked of it in soft and very sad voices. They described it as crossing from one space to another, from a world that is familiar to a world that is utterly alien different, and would never be the same thing as home, no matter how long you live. You leave everything you know, my grandmother said, and live your life in the in-between, trapped between one space or another.
But at least you live.
America, they told me, was the great escape. In the old country they lost one friend and family member to another to one thing or another. Their heads were always filled with dreams and memories. But America was always about hope, it was almost a faith.
You realize one day, said Raffat, that you can no longer protect the people and things you love the most, one by one they are taken away, or disappear, or die. He knew nothing of Russian Jews or their life as refugees, but it sounded familiar to him, his heart broke for every refugee, because you could never replace what was lost, what could never again be reclaimed. His brother, he said, once a much loved and respected high school principal. He was grateful in America to get a job tending to the produce in Wal-Mart. He understood that he would never teach again, his life had lost its purpose, but his children would live to live their own lives.
The refugee, he said, could never go back. There was no place to return to.
I was enchanted by the idea of the Great Escape, it felt close to me, it was my own idea of America. My grandmother always kept the photographs of the brothers and sisters and mother and father and cousins and nephews and neighbors who did not make it in a scrapbook and she looked at them almost every day to remind her that she would ever be grateful and give thanks to God for her great escape to America, her mother stuffed her in a big vat of chocolate and said goodbye and shipped her over the border to save her life. You are going to get to America, she said, we can’t go.
When she got to America, she fell to her knees and wept, she would never see her mother or hear from her again. And that’s how it is with empathy, really, you either feel it or you don’t feel it, and no amount of argument can put empathy in a heart that has turned to stone.
This idea of the Great Escape came to me last week when I was at RISSE, the Refugee and Immigrant Support Center in Albany, N..Y, and my friend Amjad Abdall Mohammed (he is called “Ali”) and he and I were sitting on a bench talking surrounded by refugee children, racing in circles, riding on swings, climbing ladders. Ali is one of those people children love, they hang off of him like twisting vines on a bush.
He told me about his long efforts to get some of the refugee children to a Lake George amusement park called “The Great Escape.”
This Great Escape is about an hour and a half away from our farm, it is a uniquely American kind of place, a vast amusement park with all kinds of roller coasters, thrill rides, water slides, music and astoundingly appealing junk food. There is Alpine Bobsled, the Comet roller coaster speeding on 4,200 feet of track, Speedway Go Carts, the Drop of Doom Virtual Reality Ride, the high-speed, spinning Condor, the upside down Greezed Lightning coaster, giant water slides and ferris wheels and motor boat races.
The refugee children have never seen anything like it, there is nothing like it in the countries they came from. It is purely American. It will delight them, open their eyes, welcome them. These children came to Albany from their different countries, most of them have never yet been outside of the city. Imagine them coming into the Great Escape.
I guess that’s why they call it the Great Escape, it is an escape for one day from the realities of life, and children love great escapes, the refugee children need to escape the challenge and reality of being who they are.
Ali was not able to navigate the trip with the first people he spoke with at the Great Escape, he couldn’t work out a discount and didn’t have the money. He would dearly love to get some of those kids there, he said.
How many kids do you want to take?, I asked. “Sixteen,” he said. That was as many as they could supervise.
I wrote about it on the blog, and a wonderful person named Kimberly – she lives in Minnesota – e-mailed me and said she was touched by the story and offered to pay for the 16 refugee children and Ali. She wanted no credit, didn’t want her full name used. She is one of those rare people who exude selflessness.
I called the Great Escape and began negotiating, and it turns out there was a substantial discount available and we piled on some extras – a chicken/hot dog/french fries catered meal, a big souvenir cup to take home, photos of kids on the rides to keep.
It all came to $890. Kimberly sent the money to my Paypal account, I sent it to the Great Escape. And I’m going also, along with Maria. Someone wrote me and said I was an activist to be a part of this, and I said, no, I was not an activist, Kimberly was perhaps an activist. Someone sent me a quote from the author Eve Ensler about activists:
“An activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something. That person is not usually motivated by a need for power, or money, or fame; but in fact driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness – So much so that he or she is compelled by some internal moral engine to act to make it better.”
I guess from that definition I might be an activist now, I owe it to my grandmother, I think, she risked everything so that I would have a chance to live. The refugees are a powerful cause.
Ali surely is an activist. He is devoting his life to helping these refugee children. America is better than this, he told me. This very ugly assault on the refugees in America does drive me slightly mad, I can see that and feel that, it is unjust, cruel and unfair.
The idea of the great escape is about humanity, I think, and our individual and very different ideas about what it means to be a human being. The question now for me and for them is what is the real America.
The refugee, writes novelist Mohsin Hamid, is touched by a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another…
I thank that is true for the people whose hearts have been turned to stone by fear and anger and suffering. They have lost touch with the refugee, perhaps with my grandmother’s idea of America.
I see that many people are willing to fight for the idea of America as the Great Escape, including the Army of Good that has formed around my blog. You can think of escape in many different ways. In July, me, Ali and some refugee children are setting out in search of the real America.
