Читать онлайн «Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions»

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

Copyright © Valeria Luiselli 2017

Introduction © 2017 by Jon Lee Anderson

Selected translations from the Spanish edition © 2017 by Lizzie Davis

Book design by Connie Kuhnz

Valeria Luiselli asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A shorter version of this essay was originally written in English and appeared in Freeman’s in 2016. The author then rewrote the essay in Spanish and, while doing so, expanded upon it. That version was published as Los niños perdidos (Un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas) by Sexto Piso in 2016. The new sections of the essay were translated into English by Lizzie Davis, in consultation with the author.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008271923

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008271930

Version: 2017-08-14

Contents

Introduction

In Tell Me How It Ends there are no answers, only more questions. In this urgent, haunting, exquisitely written little book, the questions asked by Valeria Luiselli are her own, her children’s, and those she finds on the questionnaire drawn up by immigration attorneys for the tens of thousands of Central American children who arrive in the United States each year after being smuggled across Mexico to the U. S. border.

As a Mexican woman living in the United States, facing her own travails with the immigration service for a green card that would grant her U. S. residency and permission to work, Luiselli became transfixed by the surge of child refugees during the summer of 2014. She began working as an interpreter with an immigration court in New York City, where she was given the task of assisting the children with the intake questionnaire, asking its questions of them in Spanish and then translating their answers. Depending on those answers, they might or might not be granted legal sanctuary of some sort—and thus a future—in the United States. Luiselli soon realized it was impossible to fit the children’s lives neatly into the boxes provided, observing, “The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end. ”