SCRIPT:

My fellow immigrants,

There is a word for people like us – alien. We are those people birthed under different skies, in places that felt like home, and now we exist somewhere else on this planet, and we try to seed that same feeling here. We are those people who have travelled lightyears. We are time travelers. The years move for us like a pendulum, swinging us in and out of lives here and there, then and now, tomorrow and back to today, and whatever else lies ahead. 

We are those people about whom it will be said, “they came here with so little, you know; they sacrificed so much, you see; they tried to make a good life for us, you hear.” We are those people who will be told “your accent is so interesting” or “your English is so good” or “you have no accent at all” or “you have no English at all.” Some of us shape-shift and bend, and some of us do not, but none of us is rigid ever again. We are the ones who exist as glittering fragments, suspended in the dusty stillness between one home and another, between here and there, then and now, today and tomorrow, between citizen and alien. 

We live with others, sometimes our own children, who can only at times glimpse the vastness of our inner selves that stretches impossibly far and long – an elastic connection across land and ocean, tensing and vibrating, stretching a bit more with every passing year. I know you feel that low hum of separation, the plucked string of a different life, which rumbles unheard just under our skin. I ask you now to harness that elasticity and imagine something other than belonging. 

You may not like that word – alien, it conjures visions of invasions and panics, a War of the Worlds – a palpable threat to a placid human way of life. But I ask you now to embrace it. For we have not been fully human in this land. Our fingers have grown long trying to reach into gaps left unattended, in this nation made up of settlements that desperately mask their own alien past. Do not try to become the same; do not try to belong to the settled culture that marks you as forever unfinished in your transition to a worthwhile humanness. Embrace being Other, for none of us who lives here truly belongs. The only ones that do are those who cannot tell you when they arrived. They are the ones who have been fenced in, removed from view, and confined on land they do not freely choose. And there are those who have no other choice than to claim this country as theirs, those brought here in chains and on whose backs this place was built. The rest of us are merely their guests, so let us act accordingly. To whom do we defer? Who shows us what this home could be? To whom do we pledge allegiance? Our true hosts are the ones who have accents and vernaculars, who live in tenements and on reservations, who grow our food, who protect rivers and forests, who toil in the nooks and crannies of a society that looks and sounds and loves nothing like them, who fight to be seen by a public that demands they remain out of sight. We thrive because and not in spite of them. 

We may never be able to reform an old order that is dying a natural death. But we can make ourselves new in the way we remember our pasts. So let us begin imagining things as they have never been. We are futurists by nature, so let us see with our extraterrestrial perspective, and move into the intersecting orbits around each other’s histories, as we begin to imagine and speak of communal agreements that seem impossible or even terrifying. Let us write new mythologies for this land, and remake the meaning of freedom with fantastical thinking. We are headed towards something we cannot fully imagine right now, but in our process of renewal, let us hold onto a faith in the unimaginable - that in our strangeness we will see each other with blinding clarity. 

So I ask you now, to keep your accents. Do not try to hide the most alien parts of yourself. Do not try to go undetected. Dismantle the rules that falsely promise to make us the same. We live in a country forged in the violence of conquest and tempered in the blood of those who are refused belonging. So let us too, refuse to belong. Let us remain strange as a pledge of allegiance to those from whom a home was taken. So when we are asked – “where are you from?” - like our Native and Black hosts, let none of us have an answer. 

My name is Pavithra Prasad, and I am an artist, educator, and resident alien of the United States.