Come to Matamoros 1/9/20
By Josh Rubin
We come as pilgrims to the shores, by the waters of Babylon, by the waters of the Rio Grande, por los aguas del Río Bravo. Across the river, along its banks, in rough encampments are the pilgrims we have come to join. They have made a long journey here, on foot, on train, by hook and by crook. Most of us, on this side, come in cars, along highways, on planes.
We come to meet our fellow pilgrims, gathered on the banks. We have this in common with those who stand on the opposite banks: We are strangers in a strange land. They are estranged from their lands, forced migrants, forced by poverty, forced by violence, forced by the drug wars, forced by the relentless insistence in their breasts that compels them to live, to struggle against the cold and powerful tide that pulls toward death, in a world that seems to want to shed itself of them.
And we, on the opposite shore, have heard remnants and scraps of their anguish, it somehow reaches us, and we are drawn into the liminal world of the borderlands, where the abyss that human imagination has built throws up a wall even where there is no wall, a wall of pain and suffering, a vortex that removes the light from the sky, the sound from the air. And we stand on our bank and they on theirs and we are strangers together.
There is the kind of hope that is called optimism. It is an adopted belief that things can be good, and it is often praised as a weapon against the despair brought about by misery. It uses arguments from righteousness. It decries the wrongness of injustice, and assumes that justice is the more natural state. It may argue with legal terms, point out, for instance, that humans should not be poor, should have the right to migrate to save themselves, to ask for something called asylum, and seems to view the denial of such obvious goodness as an unnatural state, waiting to be reversed after some episodic evil, like the reign of the right wing, to end. It is the kind of hope that believes that good is normal.
There is another kind, and it has nothing to do with belief. It is the demand made by our bodies and our natures that we survive, that we resist the fatal force that would have its way with us, and with our children, that would shorten our tenure in this vale of tears, that has no expectation of justice, but simply demands, in a voice nearly without words, to live.
It is this kind of hope that brings the strangers to the banks of the river, and the guttural subsonic echoes that draw us to meet them on the opposite shore, to help them across the bridge. They need no arguments to justify their journey. And we need none to feel the sympathetic vibration set up in our own breasts by their nearly soundless cry.