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TORCH: My American Playground
I was born in England, but my earliest memory is of America. My mother had taken me to a playground at the crest of a low grassy hill. The sun was shining and I was hanging from a purple, spiral-shaped...
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TORCH: My Father’s Mansion
My dad speaks perfect English with a Greek accent. He emigrated to the United States in 1952, leaving behind a Greece annihilated both by World War II and a subsequent civil war. Dad was only seventeen...
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TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
ARN/2017 Everybody is arguing whether or not it is a BAN. Call it what you want, it is about keeping bad people (with bad intentions) out of country! (February 1, 2017) Stockholm’s Arlanda airport is...
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TORCH: Goga
Mama pulled me out of school a month before finishing fourth grade, in fear that I would be beaten up by someone who found out that we were defecting. It was hard to tell if there was real danger....
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TORCH: Over the Borderline
In the desert of Nogales, Arizona, two girls jump on a trampoline under the swell of limitless sky. The younger one is Mexican-American and the older one is white. The smaller girl’s feet push hard to...
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TORCH: Movement, Its Depictions, and Two-Way Tickets
When I traveled to Paris in 2012 for an academic conference, my host, a professor at Sorbonne University, asked me where home is, and I said immediately, “Amherst, Massachusetts.” My response surprised...
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TORCH: Twitch
You are in America now, six years old, in second grade at Sacred Heart, and you’ve managed to wheedle not one, but two pets. A cat, Cocoa, and a gerbil, Catherine, named after your teacher, a nun....
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TORCH: The American Girl at the Temple
There is an American girl sitting outside an ornate Hindu temple in Mumbai, India. It is 1985, she is fifteen years old, and her parents have brought her to the country to visit their family. They’ve...
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TORCH: The Reunion
My half-brother was two years old when he was kidnapped by his father and taken to the US from Guatemala. I wouldn’t be born until three years later. The loss would nestle itself at the cellular level...
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TORCH: Haiti, Crossing Borders of the Mind
The skin of the earth is seamless The sea cannot be fenced. El mar does not stop at the borders. – Gloria Anzaldua 1. Once I saw a photograph of an arm lying on the ground. It was disconnected from its...
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