Three foreign born story tellers scheduled to perform on Sunday in Somerville at an event called Suitcase Stories — an eight-year-old program meant to give immigrants a space to share personal tales — have decided not to take the stage.
For the first time in the program’s history, Suitcase Stories founder Cheryl Hamilton said, none of the speakers felt safe enough to step into the spotlight due to concerns about President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“People are being silenced in a way that was not happening before,” said Hamilton, also founder of the Boston-based nonprofit Stellar Story Company.
Hamilton said she began Suitcase Stories in 2017 in response to negative rhetoric towards immigrants, the same year Trump first entered the White House.
Hundreds have participated in the storytelling events, sharing their personal journeys, identity, struggles, and successes. Immigrants — some of them undocumented — have taken to stages big and small across New England and other parts of the country, in the program run through the nonprofit International Institute of New England and Global Arts Live.
But less than 40 days into the new Trump term, Hamilton says immigrants no longer feel safe enough to speak publicly. She says fear and anxiety are sweeping through immigrant communities at unprecedented levels, even among some who have become U.S. citizens or acquired legal status.
But Hamilton said the group was not willing to let the stage simply go dark — several new narrators volunteered to stand in for those too afraid to go on.
Among them, Stephanie Khoury, a French Lebanese immigrant and ethno-musicologist at Tufts University, said she plans to talk about her arrival to the United States from France after years of living in Cambodia.
“I became a U.S. citizen two years ago, and I don’t feel threatened at all by telling my story,” she said.
Khoury told GBH News that she is nervous about going on stage but felt it was important to speak out. She said she worries about the silencing of immigrant voices in the United States and fears that her adopted country may be teetering toward autocracy.
“These programs are being canceled, and that means that we don’t get to know who we live with, and we have to rely on stereotypes,” she said.
Khoury’s own story includes years spent in Cambodia where she used storytelling, music and art to help heal traumatized communities ravaged by decades by genocide, dictatorship and totalitarianism. She says she worries that Trump’s attempts to wipe out diversity, equity and inclusion programs could erase the voices of entire communities.
“If you prevent a diversity of voices to have a space where they can be heard, you therefore have the ownership over the narrative,'' she said. ”If you own the narrative, you can tell whatever story is important to you, and you can make people believe whatever you want them to believe; creating a single story that doesn’t need to be real and based on any form of reality.“
Haitian immigration counselor Joseph Charleston also plans to speak at the Sunday event. He expects to talk about coming to the United States in 2016 and confronting his own suspicions and paranoia as the first Trump Administration was ramping up rhetoric aimed at Black and brown immigrants.
His says his story begins in Boston’s underground. “I took a subway one day to go to downtown Boston. I saw an elegant stranger on the train and she took my picture…So many question come up in my brain. Am I going to get arrested? Am I going to get deported? Did she take it for malicious action against me?”
The photo, said Charleston, symbolized the anxiety that Haitians continue to feel as federal authorities spread across the country with orders to arrest undocumented immigrants.
Charleston, who practiced law in Haiti, said he is eager to tell his story to ease the psychological burdens of fellow Haitians and other immigrants who have figuratively gone underground.
Hamilton said there have been discussions with organizers of the Sunday program about the presence of immigration officials at the event. But, she said, they have no concerns about federal agents attending the show — particularly because people who are being targeted won’t show up.
Not only are Suitcase Stories live performances being impacted, she said, but so too other educational storytelling programs once supported by diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
“Some of our clients have canceled contracts to go into schools or into businesses or are reconsidering them. And they’re actually asking, 'could we focus on a broader theme and not actually make it to be specifically about global migration?,'' she said.
Despite the change in speakers, hundreds are expected to attend Sunday’s Suitcase Story event. Hamilton says it saddens her that some immigrants fear they cannot attend although others will stand in their place.
“So that audience is filled with people that feel like it’s safe to be present,'' she said. ”That also breaks my heart, because the idea is to bring together the spectrum of people.”
