I receive the email when I'm already in Colombia, at the Bogotá Book Fair. In a couple of days, I'm leaving for New York to attend the World Voices Festival, the city's international literary festival. PEN International, the event's organizer, is the sender. Attached is a document titled "Traveling to the United States." I open it in the hotel lobby. The header, in bold, says: "Please be aware that this information should not be construed as legal advice."
The document then lists the organization's recommendations to make it easier to cross the border: delete WhatsApp, Signal, and instant messaging apps from your cell phone; "sanitize" social media if you've been critical of the Trump administration, the United States, or Israel (they warn that, despite deleting posts and tweets, there's no guarantee they won't find them); set your own cell phone password and don't dictate it in case they ask you to access it; prepare food and water in case you end up being detained; share your flight details with an emergency contact and with the organization itself (if the PEN doesn't hear from you two hours after landing, they will locate your emergency contact to inform them of the situation). And lastly: if you are detained, you'll only be able to make one call. "Before anyone else, call your lawyer." I look up from my phone, check the hall from the hotel: what lawyer?
Hours later, at dinner with authors, we discuss the move. A Colombian novelist with whom I'll be speaking at the New York festival says she won't be bringing her computer and will delete all the content on her phone. She tells me that a Mexican writer flying in from Paris has already asked her agent for contacts of lawyers specializing in immigration controls. What should I do? I think, and it makes me think, that if I didn't fly from Colombia, I'd have an easier time. I silently rehearse what I'll say if they question me: Is it a good idea to explain that I'm a writer, or is it better to just make up the fact that I'm here for doctoral reasons? I look at myself from the outside and feel a little sorry for myself, ridiculous: when would that white European kid have thought he'd have to suffer to enter the United States?
In Cruel optimismLauren Berlant wrote many years ago that state structures (and, among them, migration policies) disrupt the dreams of well-being even of privileged people. Now I'm a white European boy whose aspirations for mobility are thwarted. My passport takes nothing for granted. "Being in crisis isn't having the privilege of what is taken for granted," Berlant writes, "it's bearing a burden of vulnerability for an indeterminate period." What if that burden of vulnerability has come to me too?
Upon returning to Barcelona from my trip to New York, I fill out the application form for the visa that the United Kingdom has recently required. A new wall. In a couple of weeks, I'm heading back to a writing residency. At one point on the form, the question appears: "Have you ever received a criminal conviction?" And they add, in small print: "You do not need to list convictions for activities that are legal in the United Kingdom, such as, for example, same-sex sexual relations." I don't know whether to appreciate the clarification. I'm unsure whether it's a clarification or a threat, as if they're saying that still It is not necessary to record this information. Yet. As when, before April 16 and the Supreme Court ruling, transgender people still had rights in the United Kingdom.
It's not just that the vulnerability Berlant speaks of returns in times of crisis for everyone (or, rather, for many who didn't believe they were touched by the fragility of uncertain times), it's that every battle won in the past now becomes, like us, vulnerable, defenseless, and weak. First they came for the communists, then the social democrats, then the trade unionists, then the Jews, wrote Martin Niemöller, and when they came for you, there was no one left to defend you. And when they come for me, for you, who will then be left to defend us?
