On Magic: In My Reality, There Are No Border Patrol Agents at the Border
by Dure Ahmed
I wish I had known before what I now know about magic and reality. The day I got Susan Briante’s email that I would be getting the chance to be a Southwest Field Studies Fellow, I thought, “Oh my God. I will get to meet my nemesis.” By “my nemesis” I meant the border wall. As a resident of the U.S. who is still mired in immigration processes, I’m affected every day by the existence of the border, its assertion of America, and its violent project. But I never had to see the border. I came to the U.S. on an airplane that landed in New York City. Living in Tucson, I never ventured to border towns on my own, scared as a recent immigrant. However, I thought that seeing the border would make “real” the struggle of submitting documents to a faceless immigration system. If I saw the border, I’d know what I was up against, tangibly.
This obsession with tangibles is a side-effect of the immigration process. Three years ago, my immigration lawyer said it would be “no biggie” for me to get my marriage-based green card, “You’ll just need to assure them that you’re in a bona fide marriage, and that’s it.”
“What’s their definition of bona fide?” I asked.
He said, with a flop of his shoulders, “real.”
It seemed so simple and straightforward, but how could I express that reality had always haunted and eluded me? That I was intimidated and disconcerted by “real”? That “real” had often been weaponized against me, and it was my belief in magic and dreams that had always carried me.
I was sitting in his office because I had defied many versions of reality. I remember crying in my high school common room in Pakistan when I dared to imagine I could leave the country but without much hope. Around half a dozen girls in my grade had recently gotten married or engaged, in matches arranged by parents who saw a high school education as more than enough for a girl. As my anxiety about hearing back from American colleges mounted, I was surrounded by messages about reality that my parents and I should have heeded before. I could only afford to go to college if I was offered significant financial aid, and it was becoming clear to my parents and me that the chances of that as an international student were lottery-ticket low. If my parents had saved for dowries instead of spending all they had on education, they could have been happily marrying me off instead of worrying about my odds of getting into college and application submission fees. When people chided them, they were quiet, unsure if they had made the right choice so far. When I did hear back from a liberal arts college that offered a high financial aid award, I felt like I was touched by magic and could defy “real.” I learned to bristle at the idea of “real” because it seemed that people only used it to limit and silence me. I have spent my life thinking of myself as an anomaly, living above reality, coasting on a different plane.
The other lawyer in the practice joked about my husband and me, “Look at you, always touching each other,” and I thought of all the realities that I had floated above to be in a relationship that wasn’t weighed down by the roles that our parents’ generation had thought were written in stone. Roles of deference and servitude that people still teach women. My reality was this magic: my hand on my husband’s knee, an arm always hooked through his, his skin always very warm. I wondered if the immigration interviewers would interpret the displays of affection as proof of a ‘real marriage’ or overcompensation for a fake one.
I was content with my status as a charmed being who could daydream and flit in and out of reality but started getting invested in reality because of America. My partner and I had to be married and had to prove our union legible to the state so that we could stay together in one place because the country would not recognize us as real lovers if we weren’t married and would kick me out. To be married is already conceding to the state: we went to New York City to get our license to be married, signed papers, exchanged rings, and I keep the marriage certificate in an album file in a folder on my desk. The ongoing project of proving the reality of my marriage has stretched my concession to the state into many years of work. I have now become obsessed. I need to know all markers of “real” relationships under this capitalist state, to keep proving the reality of my existence, my marriage, and my impending citizenship.
*
I got my “conditional green card” within a year of the meeting with my lawyer. At the interview, I wore a red dress and we confirmed the dates and details a normal couple could easily have forgotten to keep track of. At one point, the interviewer pointed at a picture in our wedding album and asked me, “Who are these people?” I was prepared: I listed off the names of my husband’s cousin’s children in the photo. Now, two years later, the deadline to file for “Removal of Conditions” is coming up, which, if successful, will give me a “permanent green card.” The conditions are that I can prove my marriage is still real, a big part of which is that my husband and I are still together, three years after I first filed. To prove my marriage is real, I am collecting documents: photographs from anniversaries, celebrations with each other’s friends and families, tax returns filed jointly, apartment lease documents that list us both as occupants, plane tickets for vacations we took together, receipts of us paying rent, renter’s insurance, electric bills, Wi-fi bills, gas bills...an archive of realness.
*
It's very clear that this reality is intertwined with capitalism. The overwhelming majority of the proof required by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is in the form of financial documents. A love letter counts less, of course, than a lease document stating both parties as residents. A photograph of a happy couple counts less than a tax return. For the state, this is what a “real” relationship is: a couple who is married, who do their taxes together, live together, take vacations together, love each other’s families and spend holidays with them, have dinners with each other’s friends. And of course, all this only becomes readable and witnessable through documentation. A real relationship is one in which steps are taken all the time to document its existence and validity. On our first wedding anniversary, we didn’t take any photos. It looks like we didn’t celebrate it, didn’t do the real couple things of dinner at an Italian place in Tucson, and gifts. I remember laughing at each other’s jokes. In 2020, we visited very few family members and friends. That year we also didn’t file our taxes and have no tax return. I don’t even remember why- we’d just moved across the country in a pandemic and now there’s an empty space in the archive that I dread having to explain.
In my situation, I don’t even need to get into the more harmful repercussions of this demand for documentation under the pretense of reality. There’s a section on the forms for people who were divorced during the 2-year period between getting a ‘conditional green card’ and filing for a permanent one. You still need proof that the marriage was entered in good faith, and if applicable, proof of being battered. I’m not sure how people deal with the weight of proving “good faith” for a marriage that ended. Or what kinds of evidence are deemed “real” proof of domestic abuse? Domestic violence victims often cannot provide documentation as evidence of the abuse. “Real” is hence not neutral, and in this country represents a very specifically white and patriarchal reality.
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To create this state, white reality asserted its violence to oppress the original occupants of the land, and created a privileged notion of white reality. Deeds for land ownership are at the center of white reality, unleashed on the Native American tribes that took care of the land for centuries. When modern archaeologists discovered that many of the agaves all over the Sonoran Desert were clones growing too far apart to have propagated naturally, they realized that it must have been people, Native American people, who traveled throughout the desert and grew the agaves for centuries, sustaining their species all over the region. White logic does not understand this. They pose questions such as why the agaves were not cultivated, and why they were not “used.” All the while, people who love the land and tend to environmental conservation often make the mistake of thinking of humans as the problem. When Francesca Cantu, the Program Manager of the Borderlands Restoration Nursery told us about the agaves, she said, “See, it’s possible to be human and not destroy everything. It’s possible to be a part of nature in a way that you’re actually helping.”
I thought of how, in my project of “realness,” my most compelling evidence was that my husband and I collaborated to pay taxes to a violent state allowing it to uphold its borders. Being a “real” citizen, a “real” resident comes with social and financial privileges from the “real state.” And the “real” responsibility of taxes that keep the state (the borders) intact. With every step I took closer to being a permanent resident and citizen of the country, I was becoming better and better at keeping the border up. I was becoming closer to the definition of “human” that whiteness believes in— destructive, consumptive, and cruel.
*
And then I saw the border I was helping uphold. In Douglas, Arizona, the border wall and its red metal bars, each filled with concrete. Tall metal bars painted with the unmissable maroon of rust. The little pieces of metal soldered on some of the bars to increase the stability of the wall. A milkweed plant that grew right at the base of a section of red metal. Through the bars, I watched cows chewing the cud on the other side. As we walked along the wall, I saw the open floodgates that were a result of nature conservancy activism. The gates allow water and animals to pass. It felt so easy. Standing so close to it, to see the soil and plants on the “other side” that were identical to “this side.” It felt like an easy possibility to just step across. Even in its concrete reality, the border didn’t feel “real” to me.
We didn’t see a single border patrol agent. We saw an empty border patrol van, which I learned meant that the agents who were supposed to be in it had left to chase people crossing. “Will they come after us?” one of the Field Studies fellows voiced what I had been wondering, but they didn’t. At one point during our walk along the border, I took out my sunscreen and slathered it on my hands. We were so removed, in our sun hats, sunglasses, and La Roche Posay sunscreen. That the border, even its physical presence, was not “real” to us the way it was to the many people hiding in the bushes on the Mexican side waiting for a good time to start crossing.
“Don’t cross it” a faculty member warned, and I thought the border was real because in the event that I crossed it, I’d face consequences. And that was it. I’d only face consequences if I crossed it and crossed back without permission. As long as I stayed on the American side of the border, it wasn’t real to me. The consequences of its existence that I dealt with, in the form of documents, paperwork, processing fees, biometric appointments, and interviews, were nothing compared to the physical reality that so many people face every day. In my reality, there are no border patrol agents at the border.
*
In the attorney’s office, I had wanted to tell him, “What do you mean, real? I have always defied real, that’s how I’m here.” I always believed that I could harness magic and prayer. But the magic that I always believed made me an exception to reality was actually not a personal feat of defiance and perseverance, but a manifestation of privilege.
On the last day of the Fellowship in Patagonia, AZ, I went to a small boutique with a friend. Near the checkout counter, were tins of “Magic Essential Oil Solid Perfume” marketed as “Power Blends” with different scents capable of giving the wearer different powers. There was a “Wanderlust” blend, a “Stand-Up and Speak-Up” blend, and a “Boss-Babe” blend. It was a sharp moment of realization for me, that magic is not exempt from the violence of structures like capitalism.
I deal with the usual annoyances and inequalities of inhabiting the identities I have as a marginalized person. I worked three on-campus jobs to pay for winter clothes. People make fun of my accent. I’m an immigrant who never found a stable, all-embracing community in the face of islamophobia, queerphobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and classism. When potential employers Google me, they see news articles about an ex-ISIS member, another person called Dure Ahmed, who is on trial for terrorism.
To deal with marginalization, and still know that I’m capable of creating my own oppressive reality like the American, white version of reality, is humbling. When I name my privilege magic, I deny my complicity. I must interrogate my own rituals of existence to make sure I’m not upholding the border through consumption, ignorance, and complacency.
Witnessing the work of the many organizations at the border, I have a renewed hope that it is possible for humans to live in harmony with the best interests of other people and the Earth. Till this land is returned to those who planted agaves all over the desert, it is possible for us, who made our home here, to move towards their and our own liberation. Maybe that is the real magic: not just individual responsibility, but the perseverance of resistance and hope.