Dear Maine

Adult nonfiction 

     "Knowing he was next, Prosper jumped up and ran away, zigzagging to avoid the gunshots.  As he ran, he could hear his little cousin crying.  And then he couldn't.

     They shot her too."

     At this time in his life, dodging bullets as his grandfather and cousin were slain in cold blood,  Prosper Ishimwe was eight years old.  His family was scattered in a brutal civil war.  He would never see his mother again.

     I met Prosper years later when he was a grad student at University of Maine.  We moved in the same circles.  He was candid about his early experiences, but not retributive.  He wanted listeners to understand the complexities of his native Rwanda, of the battling groups, and of human nature.  He carried himself with grace, mature, and a rare dignity that simultaneously valued self and other.

     As too often happens, we lost touch after he graduated.  Years later when I was flipping through Morgan Rielly and Reza Jalali's Dear Maine I saw a very familiar face.  Of course I had to borrow the book.

     In this nation where, other than the Indigenous Peoples, our families are all from away, we are betraying our own Statue of Liberty and all she stands for.  Our debates on immigration have devolved into memes, tropes, stereotypes, and slogans.  The Muslims are jihadists looking to enter an after death paradise or terrorists who hate our way of life.  People from Mexico and Central America are drug pushers and rapists.  We're to protect ourselves by banning all but the waspiest of potential immigrants and building a wall.

     Rielly and Jalali interviewed over twenty new Mainers from eighteen countries in five continents, portraying them in their full humanity.  Many of them were trapped in  peril, seeing loved ones killed or knowing they've gone missing, possibly never to return.  Abject poverty at a level most of us can't imagine is another factor.  And of course many families fled so the children wouldn't have to suffer as the parents had.  You get to see their subjects as complex, fallible humans like any of us.

     But this isn't just about victimhood.  The people you meet in the book are survivors and so much more.  They have faith and hope even after some of them basically went through hell on Earth.  They have ideas and initiatives.  They have a vitality much needed in the state that's beat out Florida as the nation's oldest.  

     This is a good book to read if you only have small bits of reading time here and there.  The stories are short and highly engaging.  And each offers up much food for thought.  

Jules Hathaway 

     

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