The Article I Wish I had Time to Write

This might be the first of a whole series of posts that could be subtitled "if I had time." It goes like this:

If I had time, I would love to write a law review article about asylum & narrative. This is because the central piece of an asylee's application is a declaration describing the persecution they suffered in their home country. This might seem to be a reasonable request on the part of the U.S. Government -- after all, your life story is free and when everything else has been taken from you, it is likely to remain.

Or is it?

The irony or tension here is that many if not most asylees suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is what happens when you are persecuted and/or tortured. One of the main effects this has is to disrupt the coherence of your past and even yourself, and part of the healing process is taking the fragments of traumatic experience and assembling them back into a narrative that allows you to move forward.

So you can look at the asylum process in a very positive way -- that lawyers are facilitating healing in the form of narrative reconstitution. Or you can look it in a more cynical way that SOMEHOW the Government has contrived to ask for the one thing that may be impossible to give.

I would love to write this article but obviously I can't due to the fact that I am spending all my time trying to collect the various springs and moving parts that keep popping out of my brain. BUT if I had time...

Actually, if I had time I would probably start by doing laundry and taking a seven-hour nap...but that is a topic for another post.