Tell Me How It Ends

" Telling stories doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t reassemble broken lives. But perhaps it is a way to understand the unthinkable. "

Tell Me How It Ends is a 100-page essay structured around forty questions. It was born after the so-called 2014 immigration crisis, when a sudden surge of children had arrived alone, without parents or any other adults to the United States, seeking asylum. Although the children had been coming from all around Central America, most of them were from three countries Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican author that lives in the New York, began volunteering as an interpreter for the children, many of whom speak no English. Her task was to interview the children using an intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants and then translate their stories from Spanish into English to be used in the federal immigration court in New York City.

The questionnaire seems banal and simple, the questions, if you don’t give them enough thought, are plain and ordinary. And yet, these questions provoke personal stories that are often complex and upsetting. There is trauma and distress, grief and anger, but also fear and distrust. Luiselli approaches the children and their stories with sensitivity, she tries to gain their trust and help the children with their asylum cases.

This questionnaire is the only route for these children to achieve some form of immigration relief. It is not always possible, especially when the children are very young, as the two girls in one of Louselli’s cases. They are too young to be articulate and tell their stories or to understand that what they have been through is a form of abuse.

The title refers to the way Luiselli’s young daughter reacts whenever her mother tells her a story about a child she worked with. But it is also a call, a provocation. Luiselli tries, and succeed, to turn her feeling, all that emotional capital she has accumulated from her time with the migrant children into political capital, by writing something that could make a small change. Tell me how it ends, asks Valeria Luiselli all the governments involved.

The roots of the current situation branch our across hemispheres and form a complex and vast global network. This is a “hemispheric war” that begins in the “Great Lakes of the Northern United States and ends in the mountains of Celaque in southern Honduras.” The governments involved need to officially acknowledge the “connection between such phenomena as the drug wars, gangs in Central America and the United States, the trafficking of arms from the United States, the consumption of drugs, and the massive migration of children for the Northern Triangle to the United States through Mexico. No one, or almost no one, from producers to consumers, is willing to accept their role in the great theatre of devastation of these children’s lives.”

There are a lot of voices and books around that argue that the world has become a better place. It is true, in objective terms, that the human condition has never been better, but for these children, these “illegal aliens,” the world is still a dark place.

link: my review