I Will Hold You
Recommended Listening: To the Hands by Caroline Shaw
In a moment of nostalgia, I found myself (re)listening to my college choir’s rendition of Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands, a six-chorale suite detailing the experience of European immigrants to the United States in the early 20th century. The hopeful mourning that Shaw evokes resonates within my ribcage every time I hear it, the haunting melodies a tribute to my own ancestors, Jewish immigrants who sailed into the New York Harbor to escape persecution.
The third movement is a response to Emma Lazarus’ 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” famous for its engraving at the base of the Statue of Liberty, describing the spirit of freedom as she reaches out her hands for those seeking hope.
Her beacon hand beckons: give.
Give to me
Give to me those yearning to breathe free
Tempest tossed they cannot see
What lies beyond the olive tree
Whose branch was lost amid the please for mercy
Give
Give to me
Your tired fighters fleeing flying from the
From the
From
Let them
I will be your refuge
I will be your refuge
I will be
I will be
We will be
We will
Watching ruth weiss, the beat goddess documentary, I connected with ruth’s story of her trip across the Atlantic at only ten years old. A child, running from gunfire, spirited across borders on the last train, huddled against the porthole window, whose only concern was the broken doll on the steamship’s floor. My own great-great grandmother would tell her children about the journey, bemoaning the loss of her favorite dress when some of her baggage was misplaced somewhere between Austria and New York. These specifics are what fill the gaps of our collective memories – she didn’t recount stories of the soldiers, the barbed wire, the rough seas, but instead: her initials embroidered on the inside of her gloves, the pin in her mother’s hair, the big, bushy mustache of the immigration officer.
To the Hands’ fourth movement echoes these details:
ever ever ever
in the window sills or
the beveled edges of
the aging wooden frames that hold old photographs
hands folded
folded
gently in her lap
ever ever in the crevices
the never-ending efforts of
the grandmother's tendons tending to her bread and empty chairs
left for Elijahs
where are they now
When I hear ruth’s story, I think about how many histories are just like hers. ruth grew into a woman dedicated to herself and to the beat of life, able to forge her own path in the United States that blazed from the East Coast to the West Coast, carved into American history with a switchblade. Without her talent, her drive, her good fortune, ruth may have been swallowed alongside millions of other immigrants, absorbed into the mural-like so many brushstrokes. Even then, her colors would have mixed and mingled with the rest to create an image like never before, an America defined and redefined by the stories of its people.
But our country is constantly negotiating our margins, deciding who belongs and who is Other. Great-great-grandchildren of immigrants turn away the refugees at their door, rounding up and driving them off the land in trucks, refusing to make room in this wide expanse of country we share.
This is not a new story, not a new song. Individuals struggling to justify their existence to those that do not want them there; millions like ruth, like my great-great-grandmother, like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Victoria Santa Cruz, Ruth Westheimer, Yoko Ono, Claudia Jones, Ana Mendieta… the list goes on. The life of an immigrant forces us to ask hard questions of our species and of our nation. Kacy Jung, a Taiwanese-American artist, asks these questions in her own art: “What makes humanity distorted? What causes us pain?”
“What is the American Dream?”
