In Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli scrutinizes the complexity and nuances of the immigrant narrative. Tasked with interviewing child migrants about their arrivals in the United States, she tries to make sense of their fractured stories, which often have “no beginning, no middle, and no end.” The careful consideration she places on the children’s words soon becomes a broader examination of language, as Luiselli interrogates the terms and phrases people use to refer to immigrants and to the United States’ “immigration crisis.” Believing that the way people use words and tell stories ultimately affects reality, she stresses the importance not only of employing precise language, but also of paying attention to the ways in which certain narratives work their way through the United States, coloring the way people view migration and asylum. At its core, Tell Me How It Ends encourages readers to reevaluate the broader discourse surrounding immigration, an act that Luiselli believes will help Americans better understand one of the country’s most complicated issues.
It is through her work volunteering for a nonprofit organization that matches child migrants with lawyers that Luiselli begins her exploration of language’s consequences. Her job there is to ask children questions about their personal histories. “Why did you come to the United States?” she asks. The answers to this question, she says, are never “simple.” “I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives,” she writes, highlighting the non-sequential, fractured way that young people string together stories. Of course, it’s not just because these children are so young that their stories are “complex.” It’s also because they have experienced hardship and fear, and now they suddenly find themselves facing a stranger who asks them oddly official questions. To make matters worse, Luiselli is forced to “transform” their stories into “succinct sentences” and “barren terms” that will make sense on the forms she’s required to fill out. Luiselli’s work with these children shows how the country’s immigration system doesn’t accommodate the complexity that often comes along with a migrant’s personal history. “Stories often become generalized, distorted, appear out of focus,” Luiselli notes, emphasizing the extent to which the process is impersonal and limiting. In turn, these narrative simplifications make it that much easier for people to dismiss the dire stakes that these child migrants face.
Unlike the immigration system and the interview process, Luiselli herself is closely attuned the nuances of language. This is especially true when it comes to the terms people use when discussing the country’s “immigration crisis.” “In the media and much of the official political discourse, the word ‘illegal’ prevails over ‘undocumented’ and the term ‘immigrant’ over ‘refugee,’” she writes. This, she argues, affects the way migrants view their own situations. For instance, two of the interview questions Luiselli is supposed to ask are, “Are you happy here?” and “Do you feel safe?” Considering the negative connotations that the public “discourse” forces upon migrants, Luiselli can’t help but feel that these are absurd questions. “How would anyone who is stigmatized as an ‘illegal immigrant’ feel ‘safe’ and ‘happy’?” she wonders. Through Luiselli’s experiences, readers see that the immigration system is not only incapable of grasping the complexity of the immigrant narrative, but it also actively uses problematic language that only further stigmatizes a group of people who are already disenfranchised both in their own countries and in the United States.
It might seem trivial to pay such close attention to language, but Luiselli demonstrates that linguistic precision can affect a child’s legal status in the United States. Indeed, the way children answer the questions Luiselli asks them largely determines whether or not lawyers will choose to work on their cases. “If the child answers the questionnaire ‘correctly,’ he or she is more likely to have a case strong enough to increase its chances of being placed with a pro bono attorney,” she explains. “An answer is ‘correct’ if it strengthens the child’s case and provides a potential avenue of relief.” Simply put, lawyers are more likely to advocate for a child if he or she says something in the interview that could be useful in court. For instance, the chance of a lawyer taking on a case increases if the child has an abusive parent or if he or she has become the target of gangs. “When children don’t have enough battle wounds to show, they may not have any way to successfully defend their cases and will most likely be ‘removed’ back to their home country, often without a trial,” Luiselli notes.
Of course, the vast majority of these children do have terrifying stories about their pasts, but they don’t always feel comfortable answering Luiselli’s questions. This is rather unsurprising, considering that they have been stigmatized as “illegal immigrants.” Migrant children are unlikely to share intimate details with a stranger if they think that stranger represents the country’s scorn for immigrants (which Luiselli doesn’t, though the children don’t always know or understand that). Afraid to speak the truth, then, many children don’t give “correct answers” to Luiselli’s questions and are thus deported without a trial, a fact that illustrates the extent to which language and storytelling directly affect their lives.
Having shown the power of language to influence immigration proceedings, Luiselli suggests that open communication and accurate storytelling will help both Americans and new immigrants navigate the complicated situation taking place in the United States today. It is, she admits, a multilayered issue that is difficult to understand, one that will perhaps only make sense “retrospectively.” “In the meantime,” she writes, “while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops […]. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times […].” In other words, it will be difficult to find a solution to this problem, so it’s vital that people listen to the stories coming from the immigrant community. Only by engaging in a robust discourse, Luiselli argues, will Americans and immigrants alike find a way to address this otherwise unapproachable challenge.
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Language and Storytelling Quotes in Tell Me How It Ends
I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.
The green card application is nothing like the intake questionnaire for undocumented minors. When you apply for a green card you have to answer things like “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” and “Have you ever knowingly committed a crime of moral turpitude?” And although nothing can or should be taken lightly when you are in the fragile situation of asking for permission to live in a country that is not your own, there is something almost innocent in the green card application’s preoccupations with and visions of the future and its possible threats: polyamorous debauchery, communism, weak morals! […] The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hands, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality.
We wonder if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breeds and nationalities. Would they be treated more like people? More like children? We read the papers, listen to the radio, see photographs, and wonder.
It’s curious, or perhaps just sinister, that the word “removal’ is still used to refer to the deportation of “illegal” immigrants—those bronzed barbarians who threaten the white peace and superior values of the “Land of the Free.”
So when I have to ask children that seventh question—“Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?”—all I want to do is cover my face and my ears and disappear. But I know better, or try to. I remind myself to swallow the rage, grief, and shame; remind myself to just sit still and listen closely, in case a child does happen to reveal a particular detail that can end up being key to his or her defense against deportation.
Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken. And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.
From the beginning, the crisis was viewed as an institutional hindrance, a problem that Homeland Security was “suffering” and that Congress and immigration judges had to solve. Few narratives have made the effort to turn things around and understand the crisis from the point of view of the children involved. 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?
In the media and much of the official political discourse, the word “illegal” prevails over “undocumented” and the term “immigrant” over “refugee.” How would anyone who is stigmatized as an “illegal immigrant” feel “safe” and “happy”?
If the child answers the questionnaire “correctly,” he or she is more likely to have a case strong enough to increase its chances of being placed with a pro bono attorney. An answer is ‘correct’ if it strengthens the child’s case and provides a potential avenue of relief. So, in the warped world of immigration, a correct answer is when, for example, a girl reveals that her father is an alcoholic who physically or sexually abused her, or when a boy reports that he received death threats or that he was beaten repeatedly by several gang members after refusing to acquiesce to recruitment at school and has the physical injuries to prove it.
If the children are very young, in addition to translating from one language to another, the interpreters have to reconfigure the questions, shift them from the language of adults to the language of children.
Between Hempstead and Tegucigalpa there is a long chain of causes and effects. Both cities can be drawn on the same map: the map of violence related to drug trafficking. This fact is ignored, however, by almost all of the official reports. The media wouldn’t put Hempstead, a city in New York, on the same plane as one in Honduras. What a scandal! Official accounts in the United States—what circulates in the newspaper or on the radio, the message from Washington, and public opinion in general—almost always locate the dividing line between “civilization” and “barbarity” just below the Río Grande.
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 transnational 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 the problem.
The belief that the migration of all those children is “their” (the southern barbarians’) problem is often so deeply ingrained that “we” (the northern civilization) feel exempt from offering any solution. The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American “gang violence” problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.
There are things that can only be understood retrospectively, when many years have passed and the story has ended. In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds.
