North by Brad Kessler REVIEW
“’Sheeko, sheeko,’
Sahro would say when she was ready.
‘Gather here. Listen, I have a story.’
Then Ayaan would respond from the dark.
‘Sheeko xarir.’
‘Make your story smooth as silk.’
Brad Kessler’s novel, North, was chosen as a college-wide staff summer reading selection. I can see why. It is set in Vermont and introduces us to a cast of characters that force the reader to wrestle with the moral implications of immigration policy. Clearly, every citizen and every State in the union will have to declare just what they believe about the rights of documented and undocumented immigrants in the coming years. Vermont will not escape this test as this novel reveals.
Three principle characters in this novel have intersecting story arcs. Sahro is an immigrant who came to the U.S. from Somalia via a long and torturous trek through South and Central America. She is a devout Muslim. Father Christopher is the abbot of a Benedictine monastery in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont who ponders what the purpose of a monastery is in a modern world losing its commitments to religious lifestyles like the one he and his monks have chosen. Teddy is an injured and traumatized Afghan war veteran who serves as the monastery’s groundskeeper.
One late winter evening, Sahro’s accomplice drives Sahro towards the Canadian border after her application for asylum seems about to be rejected under the Trump administration’s stricter enforcement policies. Her car goes off the road where Teddy finds Sahro and takes her to the monastery for sanctuary. Soon, an immigration officer in search of Sahro arrives asking questions and the monks of the monastery have to make a decision. One is reminded of Vermont’s tradition of defying the Fugitive Slave Laws in the decade before the Civil War. What exactly are the relationships between civic duty to obey civil laws and moral and religious arguments requiring that one protect “the stranger”?
Here is how Kessler introduces us to Father Christopher.
“No one wanted to be a monk anymore in the twenty-first century. The long-hoped-for ‘monastic revival’ the Order envisioned never materialized. Even Father Christopher had to admit: their way of life was dying. . . . It seemed the only thing left for the monks to do: watch the world change . . . and pray.”
Here is the author’s introduction to Sahro:
“Gone was her elegant hijab, her olive scarf, the long dirac, replaced with clothes she’d hoped would let her fit in. Yet who was she fooling, she wondered, sitting beside the window for all the world to see? Surely someone would notice she didn’t belong. The Alien, the Undocumented. The names she’d recently learned: Asylee. Terrorist. Haji. Didn’t she wear her unbelonging in her eyes? In her narrow face, her walnut skin? In her accent and overstuffed bag? . . . Strangers, she learned, came in only two forms: those who’d help and those who’d harm—but mostly came the latter. The key was knowing the difference, discerning something deeper than their words, a sensation or feel.”
Here is Kessler’s description of Sahro’s legal jeopardy given the political context in which she has arrived.
“Advice and warnings. Everyone on edge since the American election—everyone’s plans thrown into doubt since talk of a Muslim Ban. Was it better for Sahro to go through a sham hearing in New York City, only to be put on a plane back to Somalia? After all the time and money, the anguish and pain? With only a two-percent outcome, wasn’t it best to just pick up and walk away and disappear? Do what the ancestors always did? Find another pasture, another place farther north? Fartumo and Ahmed knew some Americans who might help. A sanctuary group that sheltered asylees and ferried them across the border to Canada. Yes, it was illegal (the lawyer couldn’t know a thing, and neither should Sahro’s American sponsor). But all the family agreed: Canada was now Sahro’s best option.”
Here is how Kessler describes her decision:
“After everything Sahro had been through—Mexico and Central America, her months in detention—surely she deserved a chance. Hadn’t she been tested over and over? Hadn’t she played by the rules, done all the right things, honestly asked for asylum? Why would they deny her now?”
As the novel progresses, Kessler grants us a detailed story of the causes for Sahro’s decision to leave Mogadishu Somalia and the the arduous and dangerous journey that is required of anyone desperate enough to make the attempt to come to America in search of a better life.
Sahro refers to a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali poet when explaining her decision to risk her life to come to America.
She had to leave, she says, because “the water is safer than the land.” An internet search finds the poem that this line comes from and I reproduce it below in entirety.
Home" by Warsan Shire
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
It becomes clear that as much as Sahro appreciates the Americans who help her along her journey, she would prefer life with family in Somalia if only Somalia was not Somalia. She can only hope that Canada will come closer to being a “home” than America is proving itself to be. Kessler relates her experience in a NJ detention center.
“They’d let her out of the warehouse under the condition that she wear the thing [ankle bracelet] until her hearing. For the privilege, the family had to pay six hundred dollars a week and she couldn’t travel beyond the borough, and she had to report each evening to an ICE agent. All of which she’d dutifully done for months, the shackle a constant reminder her life was still on hold, that someone might be listening or watching wherever she went, while the GPS sent signals into space and someone read them on a screen, her exact coordinates, down to the degree and second, pinpointing her in place, the same technology the American forces used, Angela Simms once told her, to target bombs.”
“She angled the blades between the plastic band and her shin. Who could intercede in His [Allah’s] presence without His permission? He knows what appears before and after His creatures. His throne extends over the heavens and the earth.”
[She crosses the Rubicon by cutting the tracking device off.]
“She was no longer a flashing dot somewhere on a computer screen but a fugitive now, a flame. . . . And with each mile north the world turned whiter and whiter than Sahro had ever seen.”
The novel leaves the reader with questions about belonging that arise in the lives of migrants, abbots, and Afghan Vets. They all seek a sanctuary where they can feel like they are safe and belong. They all struggle with feelings of dislocation, broken attachment, and the longing for an environment that does not reject them outright.
Each of the main characters wrestles with their life’s decisions and where those decisions have placed them. Numerous connections between Father Christopher and Sahro can be made though they come from very different religious traditions. Both of them define themselves by those traditions. Indeed, religious tradition serves as the central defining source of their identity. Here is what Sahro has to say about the role that religious tradition plays in her self-definition:
“From that day on, her grandmother taught her the names, the long line of ancestors, her father’s lineage. Each afternoon they sat outside the hut and her grandmother recited the names and Sahro repeated them back one at a time, each in order, like beads on a string, until they made a long chain leading back, her ayeeyo said, to the Prophet Himself, Peace Be Upon Him. That lineage, that chain, her ayeeyo said, was the most vital thing she owned: the rope that anchored her to the past and the future. A network of clan and sub-clan, the nomadic vine. If she knew the names, if she could recall them all, she’d never be lost in the world. If she knew where she’d come from, she’d know where she was going. She’d always have the names to hang on to.”
“The constellations were like separate clans,her grandfather told her. Each had their own section of sky and they often fought, but some stars could travel between sections. These stars belonged to many constellations but wholly to none, and in this way they were unusual and unique, like messengers able to travel safely between hostile worlds. Sahro was like those stars, he said. She had that ability too; she’d already shown it. She too could travel between worlds unharmed. It’s what made her special.”
Father Christopher is also marinated in the traditions of his religious order. Indeed, when faced with the decision to comply with ICE and surrender Sahro or help her flee to Canada, he structures his decision within the tradition of Benedictine Christianity. He explains to Sahro that the Holy family was protected from a genocide by their stay in Egypt. When asking his fellow monks for their approval of his decision, he refers to religious traditions going all the way back to the first monks who fled violence under the Roman Emperors for sanctuary in monasteries. “Some of us here in the cloister” he says,
“misuse the idea of fuga mundi—‘flight from the world’—as an excuse to simply evade responsibility and pretend we don’t live in the real world, or to hide in the hold of our ship, like Jonah, and avoid what’s being asked of us. And sometimes the cloister itself becomes the belly of the whale, a warm, comfortable womb sunk beneath the sea, safe from the storms, where we can live in our watery twilight between the living and the dead holed up inside our own leviathan.”
Knowing that a number of the monks will not feel comfortable participating in the civil disobedience required in harboring a fugitive from law enforcement, he prepares a package of materials for them to consider.
“’I put together a packet of readings,’ he announced, ‘in the hopes of clarifying any questions regarding our guest.’”
“He finished handing out the pages and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘Would anyone like to begin?’ No one volunteered right away. The men were shuffling through the stapled pages. Brother Luke lifted a hand and began reading the first lines from Exsul Familia Nazarethana, the 1952 papal decree that established Rome’s stance on immigrants and refugees.”
“’The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth,’ Luke read, ‘fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien, and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil. For the almighty and most merciful God decreed that His only Son, ‘being made like unto men and appearing in the form of a man,’ should, together with His Immaculate Virgin Mother and His holy guardian Joseph, be in this type too of hardship and grief, the firstborn among many brethren, and precede them in it.’”
“Luke continued reading about the church’s motherly solicitude for migrants, how the church must look after them with special care and unremitting aid, that priests in particular were called to carry out this work. He read a long passage about refugees from different parts of the world—Armenia, Mexico, Russia, Poland, Palestine—and how, in each case, regardless of nationality or religion, the church offered safe sanctuary and should continue to show sympathy and every Fatherly regard for pilgrims, aliens, exiles, and migrants of every kind.”
“Luke stopped and looked up and asked if he should go on—there were another few pages. Christopher waved a hand and said, ‘You get the idea.’ They could read the rest later on their own. For now, they should move to the next reading."
"Everyone turned the page. On the next was a passage from The Rule of Saint Benedict. ‘I’m sure,’ Christopher started, ‘you’re all familiar with chapter fifty-three, On the Reception of Guests at the Monastery. Would someone like to read it, please?’”
“Brother Simon raised the page and began to read aloud.”
“’All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me . . . ’ Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received.’”
It may be worth noting here that Brad Kessler has done a little slight of hand here in selectively quoting the passage from the Benedictine Code because when read in full, it suggests that the monks are obligated to be hospitable to all but especially to those who share their faith. Benedict also suggests that his monks should pray with the visitor and going further suggests that Christian scriptures should be read. This of course might be a little complicated if the guest is a Muslim woman who reveres the Qur’an.
Father Christopher continues with his admonitions to the assembled brothers.
“He read a long passage about refugees from different parts of the world—Armenia, Mexico, Russia, Poland, Palestine—and how, in each case, regardless of nationality or religion, the church offered safe sanctuary and should continue to show sympathy and every Fatherly regard for pilgrims, aliens, exiles, and migrants of every kind.”
Brother Christopher reminds his flock of something that Father Edward used to say:
“Everyone arrives at the monastery because of a shipwreck. They crawl out of the sea like Saint Paul and try to find a Malta at the monastery: a rock to take them in. Sometimes a person stays a week or month. Other times they stay the rest of their life.”
What Father Christopher has to say about the monastic life might also be said about Vermont I suppose: “The problem with living inside a bubble was how easily it could be popped. Every outsider was, potentially, a pin,” Father Christopher muses.
At this point in the novel, the author turns his attention to Sahro’s journey (and a harrowing one it is!). Sahro, we may note, sees everything that happens to her through the lens of her Islamic faith. As noted in the following passage:
“Alone, she felt more exposed than ever. No umbrella or tarp or protection, a woman alone. No father or brother or cousin, only herself in the world. She and her God. But Allah had created her and had a plan for her—that much she knew. No matter what was to come, she was in His hands and there was nothing she could do but pray. For He protected the orphan and traveler. The exile and stranger. Hadn’t the Prophet Himself, Peace Be Upon Him, been an orphan, an exile, a fugitive from his own land? She was following in His footsteps, as all her people had in the qurba joog. And even there, in Panama, in her complete undoing, in the depths of despair, her situation—she knew—was no worse than that of others.”
One is justified in empathizing with this young woman in exile. And yet by the same token, in the background of this story of a woman seeking a better place to live is this older story of a prophet who left his home city of Mecca because of persecution and was received by the people of Medina where he eventually organized a movement that would come to dominate his hosts and eventually lead them to war for his God, Allah. Is it a mistake to forget that? I suspect that most people reading this novel will not even consider what the fundamental differences between Muhammad and Thomas Jefferson are and what the implications of inviting millions of people who may revere Muhammad’s own personal undemocratic political beliefs into the body politic of an already tenuous democracy?
As Sahro tells us of her journey, she reminds the reader that her story is not an isolated one. Millions of other people are making the same journey that she is making. Kessler reminds us of this in the following paragraph:
“Having been in the mountains so long, Sahro was amazed by the number of migrants. They’d seen few people in the mountains, and no immigrants, but here they were everywhere. Young men and boys and women. Salvadorans. Guatemalans. Hondurans. Hundreds in the plaza in town, at the freight yard, men and women sleeping on the train tracks with bags and water bottles. Children even younger than Oscar. They formed little gangs unaccompanied by adults. It shocked and saddened Sahro, and for the first time she wondered: Did anyone have a home anymore? Was everyone in the diaspora? Why were so many people on the road?”
We as readers are left to ask the relevant questions on our own. Is the power of Sahro’s story diluted by the understanding that we are talking about millions of people and not just one? Does Sahro’s story justify the bypassing of legal processes for anyone in the world who wants to come to this land of opportunity to receive sanctuary and a chance at a better life? Should the entire country do what the monks of Father Christopher’s monastery decide to do? Set aside the law or rational deliberate processes?
Eventually, Sahro makes it over the border and immediately requests asylum. She is placed in a detention facility to await her hearing. Over months of waiting, she begins to despair that she will be given a chance for asylum. The author records her thinking in the following words:
“Unlike back home in Africa, where anything could be bought with a bribe and the law only served the powerful, in America people honored the law and were known to be fair and honest. At least that’s what she’d grown up believing. But now in detention, seeing how things really worked, she wasn’t so sure. Maybe America was just like every other place—self-serving, dishonest, a sham.”
Sahro is disillusioned because she had been told, back when she set out on her journey, that America promised citizenship to all who came ready to say the “magic words.” Here is how Kessler records the moment when she enters the U.S. and claims her promised acceptance:
“Then she repeated the words she’d practiced for almost a year, first in Xamar with Aunt Waardo and Uncle Cabdi Rashid and then with Dalmar, and then to herself on many sleepless nights on the road. ‘I am asking for asylum in the United States. I come because I fear for my life in Somalia.’”
Does she understand that ten million other people will be doing the same exact thing and that the country that she seeks to enter created the asylum laws for what it thought would be rare exceptions, not for entire populations of other underperforming economies?
Here is how Sahro, the main character, experiences America.
“Back in the scrublands when she was growing up, her grandfather used to talk about a thing called nuuro. Nuuro was a substance that lay in the soil, that only the goats and camels could detect. Nuuro existed in some pastures and not in others, and the only way for humans to find its presence was to follow the animals and watch where they went. Sometimes a piece of land looked promising, filled with thorn bushes and scrub, but the goats remained undernourished or gave no milk or seemed uneasy there. That was a sign that nuuro was lacking in the soil. Yet in other places—drier, less appealing—the animals thrived. Often when an adult goat went wandering, she was actually looking for nuuro.
Ever since Sahro’s arrival in the United States, she wondered to herself if she’d come to a place lacking nuuro. Lush and green and promising on the exterior but missing an important element within. She hadn’t shared this thought with anyone, not even Waardo or Shirin Kishani. But she’d noticed it the minute she crossed the border into Texas. Something fragile and cold in the air despite the hundred-degree heat. Something shapeless and desolate—the lack of people, the big-box stores. The yellow arches everywhere. Perhaps there was sterility in the soil? Or maybe the history of what had happened to the land after the Europeans came—what they did to the place and the people who lived there before. Or perhaps it was the language they brought with them? A language unrelated to the land, taken from an island in the Atlantic, as unmoored as its people? How could English encompass a landscape it never knew? Americans seemed to have everything, Sahro noticed, but not the most essential thing: a tongue of their own. A lineage. A root. A link to their ancestral home. Maybe that’s why Americans always needed more?”
Sahro thinks of a poem by a Somali refugee living in England:
i’ve been praying, and these are what my prayers look like—
dear God
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.
As Father Christopher and Sahro hike their way to the Canadian border, Sahro concludes the novel by wondering just why it is that Americans have no room for immigrants in this place called Vermont:
"Birds on wires. A farmhouse with laundry flapping on a line, yellow flowers dotting the lawn. So much open space, she thought. So much land, she couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let people in, why everyone she knew in detention couldn’t stay. It wasn’t for lack of room; America was so full of room. Just as in Texas, here too—in Vermont—stretched long parcels of unpopulated land. Aside from the abbot and the driver, she hadn’t seen one other person the whole day."
Questions for Comment: Is the question about immigration different when it is asked about single individuals than it is when asked about millions? Or is it the same question? Is the question about immigration different when the immigrant in question plans to come and hold on to all the belief systems that may have contributed to the creation of the circumstances that they are fleeing? Is it wrong for a country to be selective or discriminating about who it does and does not allow into its borders and citizenship?
Comments