FARRAH KARAPETIAN

Sample Questions to guide your story:

 

Where are you from? What do you remember about it?

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Where do you live now?

 

Can you tell me about when you came to the new country? What is your memory of the event? (Did you come alone? Was it at night/day? Car, walking? What senses do you remember?)

 

Why did you come? (Did it make sense to you that you had to leave? Do you still think it made sense to come?)

 

Do you remember a wall or a barrier of some kind? What was that like? 

 

What do you think now about the border? (Not just conceptually, but actually - have you seen it again since you crossed? Is it a real thing to you? Would a different kind of barrier stopped you from coming? What were the real barriers in your life that made you cross the one you did? Have those changed?)

 

Does living in a new country, even without documentation, make you feel as if you are the nationality of the new country? What does nationality mean? Is it portable? 

 

What does language, food, or other parts of your original nation's culture have to do with how you feel about who you are?

 

Has their been an adjustment period or periods for you? 

 

Many current governments, especially America's, have clearly increased the rhetoric on the border, but there were also many deportations during the prior administration. What are your feelings, when you hear about changes in policy or shifts in the attitudes of the public? Has their been an increase in insecurity? Do you have any stories about things that have happened to you as these attitudes have shifted?

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What would make you feel most human, most empowered, most able to empower others, most protected, most normal, most safe... right now?

 

What can we do differently to demarcate national borders? Do we need to mark them at all? Or is the trouble now less about the border and more about how we treat people who need to move over them? 

 

People move - one way or another, regardless of what governments say or do. Will you move again?