The personal misery of a police state is hard for language to capture. The Russians are better at it than we can pretend to be during this ragged Minnesota winter of our ICE occupation. Well, their experience is so much longer, deeper. Czarist prisons, the Soviet Terror. Their decades, even centuries; our recent months. We do share a relentless climate, the biting winters of Moscow and the steppe, our brutal winds sweeping across the plains to the old northern river towns of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Maybe that’s why Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” comes to mind just now, more resonant and exact than any American voice I can think of. Especially her prose-like preface about the worst Stalinist times of the 1930s:
During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad…. One day…there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold…. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there)—“Could one ever describe this?” And I answered, “I can.” It was then that something like a smile passed over what had once been her face.
It’s a long, majestic poem, but that’s all you really need to get the feel of the sledgehammer of state power on the nerves. Does Akhmatova describe all “this”—the shared, yet paradoxically absolute loneliness of political oppression? Does she record it all? Not really. That smile passing over what had once been a face documents the erasure of the vulnerable self by the impersonal force of the state. A single lost face.
This Minnesota winter, we don’t have to wait for someone to describe this. We have our cell phones. People hold them up to record—to describe—what’s happening. We see it all. Alex Pretti was holding his aloft.
We may be addicted to our phones, the doomscrolling we keep meaning to control. But we’re on our knees to this god of evidence-gathering, even as language, our old intimate way of making meaning, is traduced again and again by this president and his minions, enraging us and sending us into the streets to hold the little magic lights aloft to get the goods on the ICE agents masked and marauding our streets.
I have a friend—we all know someone—with a husband and twin babies, terrified, hiding out, counting on delivered groceries and diapers, trying to decide if the family should self-deport. The cruelty baffles them. It baffles me. This is Minnesota Nice, remember? As a poster out there says, “No one expected the revolution to start in Minneapolis—except Prince.” I also have a friend—we all do—who is doing brave (that is, scary) things to document ICE invasions.
Still, the desire, the need to have the felt experience of these days captured in words persists. It isn’t that we resist the evidence of the images—we text video clips like crazy to each other. We crow across our platforms when the Times headline “Video Seems to Contradict Federal Account” is finally edited, deleting “Seems to.” My resolution to limit my phone time—that’s another year’s illusory hope. I’m glued.
Words—they still matter here in image-besotted Minnesota. When did we cease to be The Flyover and become The News? Akhmatova could tell the almost-erased woman that she could “describe this.” But people here mostly say, “I can’t believe it. This can’t be happening. It’s happening, but I can’t believe it.”
So we can’t describe this. Well, okay then, just keep taking the pictures and recording. That one where the ICE agent runs and crashes hard on his big backside on our icy street—play that again, and yet again. I love it. Can’t get enough of that guy slamming on the Minneapolis ice.
In the silence that is part of the strangely intimate feeling we now have for each other in these sub-zero twinned towns, something has changed in our language. Kristi Noem, in her streaming Cruella hair and cute baseball cap, calls people illegals. Other words they have used to describe the people they’re chasing down: garbage, bitch, terrorist. At the beginning of all this, people around here might have described those in the crosshairs of ICE as “undocumented.”
But language has a mind of its own. It’s feral. It goes where it will, hefting its cargo of fresh reality without asking permission of anyone. Language lives on the intimacy of perception, seeking the live-wire of reality to touch others also lost in it all. In recent weeks, I’ve noticed people here don’t use either of those words anymore to describe people—illegals, undocumented. The term of art now, without any discussion or plan, is neighbors. It’s become the more exact word. Not because it’s vaguely sentimental, but because it’s more accurate to the nature of our connection. We aren’t using the word to describe people who live nearby or even people we know. Our neighbors, people say. They can’t do that to my neighbors. I’m driving my neighbor to work. We’re packing groceries for the neighbors.
It’s just one word, but it’s become the patois of this time, this place. It’s the one word that comes close to describing this, the very real unreality we have been living these weeks.
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