‘Sometimes and Across’: Exploring the Power of Words in the Midst of Child Detention with Valeria Luiselli

On Oct. 2 in the Barker Center’s Thompson Room, Valeria Luiselli presented the lecture “Sometimes and Across: Notes on Writing Under Surveillance.” The audience was mesmerized by her storytelling, which transported them into the inner world of detention centers for immigrant children, where reading and writing became a medium for identity reclamation.

Namwali Serpell, a Professor of English at Harvard, started the event by introducing Luiselli as an award-winning Mexican author. She emphasized the relevance of Luiselli’s five published fiction and nonfiction books, describing her work as the pleasure of having “a word on the tip of your tongue.”

Following Serpell’s introduction, Luiselli began the reading of her unfinished “Sometimes and Across,” a description of the experience of conducting a writing workshop in New York for immigrant girls who had crossed the border without a visa. They were kept in detainment at centers where they were, like many others, separated from their families.

“I think the idea of sharing work in progress is also really important,” Glenda R. Carpio, Professor of English and of African American Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Harvard said. “It allows for her to think out loud, which I for one think is intellectually vibrant and not something that we see as often.”

At the podium, Luiselli shared the first exercise that the girls in her workshop participated in: writing five sentences beginning with “a veces,” meaning “sometimes” — an invitation to focus on mundane events that may go unnoticed, and a way to understand writing that would allow them to experience time in a different sense.

Due to the restrictions that the detention center imposed upon these activities — not a single piece of writing could leave the room, Luiselli and her colleagues could not suggest any exercises that would prompt the girls to write about their migration journeys, and the sessions had to take place in a cabin in the woods, surveilled by cameras — the workshop transformed into a journey for these children to use words as a medium through which they could safely explore their emotions, their experiences, and themselves. Luiselli finally achieved this, after various failed attempts, through a system in which each girl chose a name for herself — “huracán,” “cascada,” “mar” — and a code language for their surroundings. Together, they constructed a zine full of their own stories, ambitions, and intellectual inquiries, which they dedicated to the next generation of girls that would arrive at the detention center.

“I loved the part when they were trying to invent a system, a type of code for the girls to be able to talk freely, because they are always under surveillance,” Bill Yang ’27, who attended the event, said. “I loved the truthfulness and honesty with that part.”

Luiselli ended her reading with a quote from one of the girls, “Terremoto”: “A veces estoy triste, y a través de triste, estoy feliz.” This translates to “Sometimes I am sad, and across sad, I am happy.”

Luiselli’s emotion when she read the zine’s prologue, written by the girls, was shared by the audience as she described how the lives of these children often get completely forgotten. Equally striking was her conclusion that being undocumented is a process through which someone’s words “have been disappeared,” making a strong emphasis on her own choice of grammatical tense — the words, as their owners, do not disappear by themselves, but instead are forced to.

As Luiselli spoke her last words, the audience erupted into applause, visibly pleased not only with the content of the talk itself, but also with the level of imagery in her storytelling and lighthearted jokes in the midst of a heavy topic.

That night, the audience left the Barker Center with both an empowering sense of the freedom that words can provide and the notion that liberty cannot be taken for granted. Writing under surveillance became the way for these girls to truly exist — not as immigrants, criminals, cases, or numbers, but as girls. Yet it remains a question whether they, and many others, will ever be granted the freedom and dignity they deserve beyond their hidden words.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to omit a quote from a student who did not consent to be identified by their full name.