As fall comes, two things turn my mind towards the idea of immigration. One is a Thanksgiving tradition of my aunt having a few too many glasses of wine and tearfully recounting the story of how my great grandparents ended up in New York from Ireland (if it is as she tells it, it is a good story, with my great grandfather running from the British because he drunkenly signed up for the IRA and being told by my great grandmother that men were after him and he had to flee the country, and then rescuing her when her fiance refused to sponsor her through Ellis Island a year later because he had fallen in love with another woman) while we all nod along. The second is a much less charming reason- fall means elections, and elections mean debates about immigration, especially immigration from countries in South America and the strife our current administration seems to be intent on putting them through, as well as the scare mongering about these same people some political entities drums up for their own gain in election and legislative or monetary support.

With these two things in mind, I spent an afternoon in the New York City Hall of Records, checking out the “We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices” exhibit that they originally premiered at Guttman Community College, put together by the Brooklyn College Listening Project. It was smaller than I had expected, but the information was denser than I had expected as well. The posters generally told either pieces of legislative history of immigration reform or the stories of individual immigrants, and there were QR codes that people could use to listen to full interviews online. There was also a board where you could put pins in a map to show where your family had emigrated from, and what year range they came to America, which was a fun bit of interaction with the visitors. I would love to visit the display closer to the end of it’s run and see what some of the demographics that were visiting the exhibit were, and try and see what information can be found from that. This brought to mind our discussions our class had at the very beginning of the school year, about how people interacting with a text or with a set of information changes the set of information itself. 

Because I went on a weekend and spent a while there listening to the multimedia presentations, I ran into a few more people who were also attending the exhibit. On the whole, most of the people there were not first generation immigrants themselves, which I found interesting. I was not extremely talkative with them (this was not a space conducive to lengthy conversation), but it seemed was primarily a group of people who were curious about hearing others speak (or reading summaries of the stories that other people gave, more on that in a minute) on things they had never experienced. It seems to be reaching a small group of people who are interested in local history and immigrant stories, which is not particularly unsurprising. 

       This exhibit really made me think of both the idea of archiving immigrant experiences and how that is best done, as well as the idea that there is no true neutrality that we have been discussing in class. I thought it was interesting that the main exhibition pieces were 6 foot tall boards with stories printed on them that were not the story of each person’s immigration as they said it. They were instead written in a third person narrative form, each following a fairly clear line and ending with the person living happily in Brooklyn to this day. These posters had some quotes from the interviewees sprinkled in, and they were a purely text based experience unless you went through the extra step of scanning the QR code and listening or visiting the website after the exhibit. This was obviously not done with malice, but I wonder how much that changed the story being told. It is rare that someone’s story is that open and shut or that narratively satisfying, and I wonder how much was left out in order to make the story fit both the narrative and the posterboard. The interviews are short but go into more depth, they feel a little less like a story and a little more real, but again, fewer people are going to go through the extra steps to listen to them. I wonder how much conscious choice went into that, the making of these experiences into neat little written stories. Is it in order to package them for people who are not direct immigrants and who grew up on stories of family histories of moving to America like my family (and many families like us) did? Is there a desire from the people being interviewed themselves to make their own narrative fit into the molds of the accepted immigration stories that are passed down in a lot of european households? Was the purpose of this exhibit simply to document stories, to act as a snapshot of an archive of more recent immigrant experiences? Or was there a political agenda as well. 

There has been much discussion in our class through almost the whole semester about the fact that there is no real neutrality. In archiving, in organizing, in the management of information, there are always biases and there are almost certainly individual or group motivations that are not always stated. The last few posters in this exhibit talked directly about this presidential administrations’ acts against immigrants from South American countries, specifically. In that space, there was no attempt to be neutral or to try and defend the heinous actions of the administration, just a statement of what had been done as facts and what the consequences of those legislative moves have been for immigrants and migrants (and some US citizens who have been detained or threatened). The lack of an attempt at neutrality here, I think, is both the greatest strength of the exhibit while also being what will keep many people away. Stating the facts here is not neutral, putting a face to and humanizing what some are calling the “migrant threat” in order to justify what is happening to them is not neutral, but it is something that needs to be done. Not many people know about this project, it is not particularly well advertised. Those who may need to see it are in some ways the least likely to go to see it, precisely because it is not interested in playing both sides and maintaining an idea of neutrality by masking facts. 

The person is Neil Gaiman. My favorite author going back almost a decade and a half, someone who wrote (and still writes) fiction that felt truer than life to me. He showed me the importance of stories, how they shape us and the world around us. He writes for both children and adults, so there was a feeling of him growing up with me (even though I was reading his books out of order of publication). I have always been a sucker for thematic cohesion, and his books had themes that appealed to me when I was young and continue to appeal to me today. Things like the importance of stories, finding truth when things seem dark, and the idea that even when things seem hopeless there is always something that can be done. Cleverness, compassion and luck seemed to be the three traits one needed to succeed in Gaiman’s world, and those were the traits I aspired to. When I knew little of him as a person and only knew him as an author, I still felt a connection, which proved to be a good instinct. I learned that Gaiman is an advocate for truth and the accessibility of information, he championed libraries in a way that resonated with me, a young woman who spent more time in a library than almost any other place.  While I was reading a recent collection of his nonfiction writing, The View from the Cheap Seats, I realized just how much his writing had shaped my mindset and how much that meant to me. Even the way I write tends to be influenced by him, with many parenthetical asides (though one could cite Lewis’s influence on him becoming his influence on me for that) and a strong voice that may sometimes border on rambling being associated with him as a narrator, as well as being hallmarks of my own writing, though I have much less honed skill than Mr. Gaiman does. His use of language and clear love of words is what drew me to him all those years ago, and what keeps me coming back to him. To this day, if he releases a new book or even recommends one, it immediately goes to the top of my To Read Next list, and his books are among the first I recommend to people who are looking for something a little unusual.

The place is always the Brooklyn Public library. Generally, it’s the King’s Highway branch but I’m not exclusive. I’m sure that it’s not a shock that someone whose goal is to be a librarian is choosing the library, but it was the place I grew into my own. I have been a part of the BPL system as a patron for the majority of my life, and living walking distance from a branch gave me much needed space in my angsty tween to teen years. I attended children’s shows there when I was very young, brought myself to poetry clubs and craft clubs when I was older, and on the days in between I stayed comfortably at a table between the YA and Graphic Novel section. I settled into a rhythm of arriving home, having a snack of some sort, and heading to the library until it closed every day after school from 7th-12th grade. Summers it was common for me to spend the whole day there several days in a row. Some of this was because we had no internet at my house until May of this year (2019), but even now, when I need to spend time working on homework and not getting distracted by my cats or chores that somehow get more appealing when I sit down to work on assignments, I pack up my backpack with my laptop and a pair of headphones and trek the three blocks to get some focus. It would be hard to overstate how much the Brooklyn Public Library shaped me growing up. When I had very little disposable income, I didn’t have to spend it on books, those were accessible to me for free (the benefit of going to the library almost every day is that it is very hard to end up with high late fees). I was able to experiment with the books I wanted to read without any financial investment, so there was no shame if I did not finish a book. This, I think, is the main strength of a library to help people become readers. There is no up front cost, there is no monetary risk or expectation, there are just stories here that want you to find them and people here who want to help you look. These long days spent wandering shelves, asking librarians questions (generally questions of what to read next) and learning how to share space for long periods of time with many people are what made me consider a career in libraries. It started as a desire just to want to be around books, but it became more than that. People refer to the library as a sacred space, but I disagree. It is the place where we are the most human, the most communal. The unique way that the library fosters both solitude (in allowing for a space where focused work to get done or self discovery to take place) and community (a shared space where everyone’s needs must be navigated) is what draws me to them now, and what inspires me to be a part of that space as a librarian.

My thing is a little more abstract, old game consoles. In my who, I talked about the importance of stories to me, and I found those stories not just in books but in video games as well. The stories in games are often well crafted and told beautifully with art, music, and interactive elements highlighting their plots, characters, and themes. I was lucky enough to either receive or save up to buy many consoles through my life, and I’ve held on to all of them and have worked hard to keep them in working condition. Why? Well, games are a quickly evolving medium. Console generations last about 7 years on average, and when a company shifts to a new console hundreds of games get left behind. If you get rid of your old console, all those games become unplayable unless the company decided to reboot or remaster them. This was what caused my first realization that conservation of art is not guaranteed. Games could be considered classics and yet still be left unplayable for the rest of time, and unlike other media like books or films, the vast majority of games would suffer this fate. Some people (I sometimes like to refer to them as unlicensed game archivists) created emulators and ways for the games to be made playable on computers so that they can be accessed by those who don’t have these old consoles, but those are often shut down by game companies who worry that these will cannibalize their profits. Until there is a better solution to all of this, I will just have to hold onto my old consoles (though even those are slowly becoming technologically obsolete due to a move to HD televisions). They are like small time machines or even tiny archives of their own, and those that own them are small scale archivists for themselves, deciding what games from the past they wanted to be able to pull out one day to play and refer to.