Correspondents

by Tim Murphy

“Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, and Iraq reads.”

“But family is a hard thing to rise above.”

“Freedom without safety is not really being free,” said the other.

Briefly, he flipped through the pages of the Gibran. His eyes caught the words, “Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.”

Amid his anxiety and a gutted, elegiac feeling as the car sped out of the city, he also felt something new. He felt that he’d stepped up to play for his own team.

So this was the new world. He thought he’d already found it, but it turned out that there was a world beyond that world, and then another beyond that, and even then at least the creator’s intimation of other worlds. They unfolded eternally, as in a hall of black mirrors in which only the crystalline image of himself, running hard for his very life, was the constant, the bridge that lifted him from one world to the next, at once less and more of himself than he’d been a world before.

Iraqi refugees in the United States were coping with the jarring transition to American life after undergoing stress and upheaval in Iraq. Her nonprofit licensetofreedom.org does amazing, crucial work helping people make this adjustment,

As I write this, that aspect of American greatness faces, not for the first time, severe challenges. My final acknowledgment in these vexed times is to everyone—U.S. born or immigrant, documented or not, finely skilled or with nothing to offer but industry and optimism—who continues to fight for this expansive vision of the troubled, divided country that I still dearly love.