Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times

by Carolina De Robertis

So when people ask you where you’re from, you won’t have a one-word answer for them. Some people, the kind who use cosmopolitan and migrant as insults, will call you rootless. They will call you inauthentic. They will tell you that you lack some important anchor to the earth, that your loves and attachments have less force than theirs because of all the journeys in our family’s past. When they say such things, remind yourself that they, too, are migrants, even if they’ve forgotten it. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors had sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting. Place is not nothing, and you need to understand that many families have histories that are unlike ours. There is something noble about staying put and building, something worthy of respect. But there is also something noble about the nomad who carries a whole world in a suitcase. You were born here in New York, in the middle of a February snowstorm, and so this city will always be yours. Perhaps, if we move again to one of the other places whose names your mother and I have murmured to each other across the kitchen table, you may not grow up thinking of it as home. I’m writing to tell you that you don’t need to worry about this. It’s not a loss or a lack. Your experience is no more or less authentic or beautiful than a person who lives on lan...