Intertwined Futures in the Face of Unnatural Boundaries
By: Alan Santinele Martino, McMaster University (Theme: Place and Land)
Early last year, my father, who lives in Brazil, had a serious stroke and almost passed away. That life event pushed my family to seriously reflect about the future, especially that of my older brother, Bruno, who is disabled. As a family that deeply cares about one another, what would we do if care relations were to suddenly change? My brother and I often talk about our futures together. In our dreams, we live side by side, visiting each other every day. We support each other as we navigate the most challenging as well as the happiest moments of our lives. We see each other grow older and we continue to create new memories together. We simply desire to be together, as siblings and best friends. The Canadian immigration policies, however, are not on our side. Canada has a long history of exclusion of people with disabilities from immigration (for more information, see El-Lahib and Wehbi 2012; Hanes 2009; Wong 2011).
In this short piece, I use an autoethnographic approach to discuss my desire to bring over and be with my brother in Canada in the face of “unnatural boundaries” (Anzaldúa 2007:25) and ableist immigration policies and practices. In essence, autoethnography is an “approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2010: para. 1).
Among the official guidelines used by immigration officers for determining one’s admissibility to Canada, one criteria states that:
A foreign national is inadmissible on health grounds if their health condition (a) is likely to be a danger to public health; (b) is likely to be a danger to public safety; or (c) might reasonably be expected to cause excessive demand on health or social services (emphasis added, ENF 1 2013:5).
Even though the excessive demands clause does not explicitly state that people with disabilities would not be welcome or be able immigrate to Canada, the common interpretation of this clause makes it almost impossible for disabled people to immigrate (El-Lahib 2015). In such a manner, the only “legitimate” and “admissible” candidates for immigration are the non-disabled. Disabled people are considered to be an “economic burden on the system,” and thus, inadmissible (El-Lahib and Wehbi 2011:96).
Various cases of families with a person with a disability being denied permanent residency in Canada have received public attention lately. For example, Felipe Montoya, a professor at York University and father of a son with Down’s syndrome, and his family were not granted permanent residency on the grounds of excessive financial demands (CBC News 2016). Earlier, in 2012, Jeffrey Niehaus, the father of an autistic son, had also been denied permanent status for having a family member “whose health condition [sic] might reasonably be expected to cause excessive demand on health or social services in Canada” (CTV News 2012).
I still remember the day I had to break down the news to my family and, most importantly, to my brother that the chances of him being able to immigrate to Canada were almost non-existent. Then, a voice in my head[1] reminds me:
I know this memory hurts and haunts you. You wonder, can other people imagine how it feels to tell someone you love and want to share your future with that they simply can’t? You breathe heavily, of both heartache and anger, as the words can’t seem do not want to leave your lips. If only ‘those in power’ understood the pain these policies cause.
The facial expression on my brother’s face had now changed with the sad news. I did not really know what else to say except an unconvincing, “we’ll figure something out.”
I have found myself a home in Canada. As I walk to work, I can’t help but imagine my brother walking right alongside me. In this fantasy in my mind, we joke and tease each other, as we always have. With a smirk, he tells me I must be tired of walking as he uses his power chair without transpiring a single drop of sweat. I then quickly note back, “can you remind me again why we need to buy you new shoes anyway as your feet do not even touch the floor?” Our particular relationship of love, trust and loyalty gives one another the permission to use humor that way. Yet, outside of my reveries of the humor between us, most nights I remain awake – my thoughts burdened by the realities of the future. My heart breaks with a feeling of powerlessness. I just wish this country would welcome my brother the same way it has welcomed me.
Perhaps, as Anzaldúa (as cited in Joysmith and Lomas 2005:102) also notes, while “[w]e are all wounded ... we can connect through the wound that’s alienated us from others. When the wound forms a cicatrize, the scar can become a bridge linking people split apart.” The only thing in excess here is my loyalty and love for my brother. Like Anzaldúa, I too hope for a future with more “bridges.” So, as we plan our undoubtedly intertwined futures, these unnatural boundaries and exclusionary policies, attempt to push us towards separate paths, a long-distance relationship, and different networks of people. As someone who deeply loves his brother and desires the best for him, my love and commitment to my brother will never cease or be fractured by unnatural boundaries.
Short Bio: Alan is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University. His research interest is in the intersection of disabilities and sexualities. His dissertation looks at the romantic and sexual experiences of people labeled having intellectual disabilities in Ontario, Canada.
Works Cited:
CBC News. 2016. “York University prof denied permanent residency over son's Down syndrome.” Retrieved from: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/programs/metromorning/costa-rica-down-syndrome-1.3489120
CTV News. 2012. “Son’s Autism Forces Family to Leave Canada.” Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMyXDSuee6k
Ellis, Carolyn. 2009. Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work. London and New York: Routledge.
Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. 2010. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum of Qualitative Social Research 12(1). Retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095
El-Lahib, Yahya. 2015. “The Inadmissible “Other”: Discourses of Ableism and Colonialism in Canadian Immigration. Journal of Progressive Human Services 26: 209-228.
El-Lahib, Yahya and Samantha Wehbi. 2012. “Immigration and disability: Ableism in the policies of the Canadian state.” International Social Work 55(1): 95–108.
ENF 1. 2013. Retrieved from: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/manuals/enf/enf01-eng.pdf
Hanes, Roy. 2009. “None is still too many: An historical exploration of Canadian immigration legislation as it pertains to people with disabilities.” Development Disabilities Bulletin 37(1): 91–126.
Joysmith, Claire, and Clara Lomas. 2005. One wound for another = Una herida por otra: Testimonios de latin@s in the U.S. through cyberspace (11 de septiembre de 2001 - 11 de marzo de 2002). México, D.F: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte.
Wong, Edward Hon-Sing. 2011. “Not welcome: A critical analysis of ableism in Canadian immigration policies from 1869–2011.” Critical Disability Discourses 4:1–27.
[1] Inspired by Ellis’s (2009) work, I too engage with a second, reflexive, voice as a part of my autoethnographic writing.
Spring is Coming!
Spring is coming! And with it springs forth a flood of creative, critical, and timely posts from our wonderful guest bloggers here at the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal. Over the next few months, we will be rolling out refreshing interventions and insightful submissions that speak to the following themes:
1. What’s in a Name?
Names. We all have one, some of us have more. There are names that we grow into, and ones that we grow out of. Some names are desired, others disavowed. Names can rally communities into action (#SayHerName). Names can mean survival, survivance, and insurgence. Some names encounter persecution and suspicion. Some names carry with them the hope of your ancestors for the future. Some names are imposed to deny a future. Names have histories, futurities, and presences. In this theme, contributers share writings and other creative works lovingly crafted around thier thoughts and experiences around Names and Naming. What’s in your name or the names you could have had? Questions include, but are not limited to:
What historicity lies behind the names attached to or detached from you? What meanings does this hold for you and/or the work that you do? How have your ancestors dreamed you into being through names?
How have settler-colonialism, colonialism, and slavery affected your name or what it might have been?
How have you grown into, or grown out of names? What meanings does that choice hold for you? What spaces and places have you traveled through with your name? What has your name taught you about those places and spaces?
How have names and Naming served as, or has inspired creative resistances or insurgencies in your life and or work? What strategies of resistance have you practiced through your name?
What struggles have you encountered through your name? What critical lessons have you learned from those struggles?
Can you even begin to know the name you might have been given by your ancestors? If not, then what does it mean to not-knowing the name that might have been?
2. On Tumultuous Arrivals: Relationship Making and Creative Resistances across Place(s) and Lands
Contributors writing to this theme centers on relationships to place and Lands. It is a timely theme considering Standing Rock, Climate Change, water protection & resistance (Standing Rock; Grassy Meadow River Run; Flint City Michigan) . This includes, but is not limited to, thinking about arrivals into disciplines, into research, into education places, activism, creative resistances, nations, borders, carceral spaces, boundaries, identity.
How have arrivals taught you about your relationships to organization of place (ie. classrooms, conferences, institutions, governing spaces, places of activism) and relationships to lands? How have thinking through arrivals taught you about your ancestors or future descendants' relations to land? How have they taught you about relations to land and/or place that you are able to have?
What did you learn from arrivals into, or out of disciplines? How have you arrived at land-based or place based research, and how have you arrived at the place in which you practice these? What have you learnt from your arrivals?
How have you arrived at particular resistances? How have you creatively arrived at strategies of resistances and healings? Who creates with you?
Who has arrived with you? How do your ancestors arrive with you in your practices on self-same land?
3. Re-writing Futurities: Race, Sci-Fi & Fandom
Toni Morrison unsettled the thin boundary between fiction and “fact” when she remarking that the latter “seems to us only trustworthy when the events of fiction can be traced to some publicly verifiable fact” (93:1995). In doing so, Morrison points out a key theme to our methodological choice, namely that credibility has a lineage. It has an epistemology. It has a historicity. And most of all, it requires power to maintain its credibility. One of the ways that critical creators have reimagined and resisted the lines between what counts as, and what could be imagined as fact or fiction, is through Sci-Fi, fantasy, and fan creations. Works of black feminist sci-fi writers such as Octavia Butler has inspired creative undertaking of social justice issues. Contributors writing to this theme explore critical questions through interconnected works around race, sci-fi, & fandom. These include, but are not limited:
Imagining (or problematizing the imaginaries of) dystopian and utopian futures?
Time travel: How did your ancestors dream you into being? What might those dreams of your ancestors been? Who might you dream into being for the future?
Re-imagining fantastical schools and education (ie. Harry Potter)
Re-imagining bodies and relationships (ie. zombies, aliens, x-men, possession, spirits, ghosts and hauntings)
Letters from the future (100 years from now)
Paradoxes and alter-verses
fantastical and sci-fi imaginaries of race, colonialism, relationships
New book series: Critical Insurgencies: A Book Series of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association
Published by Northwestern University Press-- click here for press webpage
Critical Insurgencies: A Book Series of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association brings an interdisciplinary community of activists, academics, artists, independent scholars, and media makers together to forge new theoretical and political practices to—unsettle the nation state, neoliberalism, carcerality, settler colonialism, western hegemony, legacies of slavery, colonial racial formations and gender binaries, ableism, and challenge all forms of oppression and state violence—for generative future imaginings.
This series seeks to interrogate what it means to do critical ethnic studies work within, outside, and across a variety of locations, such as in education and the academy, community organizing, the arts and media, mass movements, intimate spaces, and more. Since theory and practice reside in multiple geographies and through multiple genres of work, Critical Insurgencies will engage diverse readerships and generate conversations that resist the ways that ethnic studies work can be limited by the historic separation between academic writing and popular texts.
The series invites monographs, field guides, keyword texts, anthologies, contributed volumes, and hybrid and experimental formats that take the intersection of academic / activist / artistic praxis as a key site of interrogation, transformation, and insurgency. Submissions that consider what ethnic studies looks like beyond the United States are strongly encouraged.
Key themes of the series:
Settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, and immigration
Feminist of color, indigenous, and queer and trans of color methodologies and practices
Academic and nonprofit industrial complexes, grassroots organizing, social movements, resistance, and protest
Critical disability epistemologies
Activist and radical pedagogies
Policing, criminalization, and carcerality
Neoliberalism, privatization, critiques of development, precarity of labor, extraction, exploitation, and environmental violence
Anti-black violence, anti-Muslim racism, xenophobia, and indigenous erasure
Gender and sexual violence, heteropatriarchy, and reproductive regulation
Land rights, housing, sovereignty, landlessness, and complex relationships to land and home sustainable development
Displacement, dispossession, gentrification, and forced migration
Diasporic and transnational organizing
Decolonization, autonomy, sovereignty, and indigenous political thought
Proposals and inquiries can be sent to Gianna Mosser, Acquisitions Editor, Northwestern University Press,g-barbera@northwestern.edu.
About the Editors
Michelle M. Wright is Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University where she focuses on Black European and diaspora studies. Her previous publications include Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015) and Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004).
Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois. Her focus is on indigenous studies, indigenous and postcolonial literatures, and critical technology studies. Her previous publications have appeared in journals such as Settler Colonial Studies, American Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and her monograph, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, was published in 2011.
About CESA
The Critical Ethnic Studies Association is a transnational, interdisciplinary, and un-disciplinary association of scholars, activists, students, artists, media makers, educators, and others who are directly concerned with interrogating the limitations of Ethnic Studies in order to better engage the historical stakes of the field and the development of community-based knowledges and radical resistances. CESA organizes projects and programs to reimagine Ethnic Studies and its futures through new theoretical interventions—both within the university and the multiple activist formations outside it. CESA aims to develop an approach to scholarship, institution building, community-building, and activism animated by the spirit of the decolonial, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and other global liberationist movements that enabled the creation of Ethnic Studies and which continues to inform its political and intellectual projects.