John Hood of the Miami Sun Post reviewed Underground America, calling it a “brave and beautiful book.” Read on below.
You Do Have to Live Like a Refugee
… if you’re one of the undocumenteds in Peter Orner’s Underground America
By John Hood
Everybody’s got a story — you, me, everybody. But nobody’s story’s more tragic than that of those who’ve been forced to leave their homes, their lands and their families. I mean, of course, the refugee.
Hearing these stories is another thing entirely, which is why we should be thankful for a storyteller named Peter Orner, whose shorts have been featured everywhere from The Atlantic Monthly andThe Paris Review, to New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.
In other words, Orner knows his tales, and in his edit of Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives (McSweeney’s, $24) he lets them tell for themselves.
And tell they do: Diana, a riverboat casino cleaning woman who not only survived Katrina, but helped to bring Biloxi back to life; Mr. Wei, the Fujian who comes from a place called Long Happiness, and ends up with snakeheads and a meat cleaver; Roberto, the Mexican chef who so much misses his children he sometimes pulls out his daughter’s Speak-and-Spell and sits playing it alone; Olga, the Jalisco woman who loses her transgender daughter to some cold, hard ICE agents; Saleem, the Pakistani who suffers the post-9/11 clampdown on Muslims and gets deported with nothing on his back but “the sugar disease.”
There are more, of course; 24 in all, each as bold and heartbreaking as the one before — and after.
Like Dixie, née Dethze, a Cali-born educator who did whatever it took to put her two children through university, including surviving a bout in Thank God, Guatemala, working at Wendy’s and BK, and suffering years of abuse by her American husband.
And Abel, the Mayan who was burned out of his native Guatemalan home and now is one of thousands who’ve found recluse in sleepy, seaside New Bedford, working the fisheries and dye factories, tending to the yards and the fields whites won’t touch. Abel’s father was a Catechist, and suffered accordingly; Abel doesn’t have it much better. “In the afternoons, we cry,” he says. And you can’t not be stirred by his words.
Then there’s Liso, the devout South African roped into believing she’d be coming to America for missionary work and winds up being a slave, but who still manages to keep her faith, her strength and her humility. She even begins to understand the amak-wer-kwer, which is what South Africans derogatorily call black immigrants. Why? Because she now has become one.
But beyond the subjects of these stories, perhaps the most incomprehensible thing is the way others behave toward the people whose lives these stories reveal. The Houston church lady who basically enslaves a South African; the thieving migrant bosses who take a penny from a poor person; those Cali ICE agents who won’t unchain Vica’s foot so she might die with some dignity, despite the fact that she can barely breathe on her own; the Kentucky kitchen manager who takes a cleaver to gentle Mr. Wei and then summarily disappears.
It’s enough to ask: Jeez, people, are you not at all human?
The folks doing the telling are human, though, and they hope and they fear and they cut and they bleed just like we do. And despite how these people are tagged, the undocumented are far from free of documents. They have “family photos, diplomas, driver’s licenses, love letters, e-mails, credit card bills, homework, child’s drawings….” And now, thanks to Orner and his pals at McSweeney’s, they also have this brave and beautiful book. Read it and bear them all in mind.
June 20th is World Refugee Day. For more information, visit the site of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/events?id=3e7f46e04.
