"I was often detained in airports, in a small room with flickering fluorescent lighting: how did I come to have an American passport? What kind of black magic is this? Whom did you pay? And with what?"
Reavey recounts the suspicion with which she was often met in airports and other government institutions. Because her appearance is ethnically Filipina, she is treated like an imposter. Her experiences reveal a disturbing trend of racial profiling among American institutions.
"She sings a song for travelers to make the sea throw up rocks that come islands angry, the sky throws down fresh water to flood them, but the bamboo stalks soak it up and the jungle crow, so very thirsty, pecks and pecks the stalks until it splits open"
In her conception of the jungle creatures like the crow, Reavey inserts an element of mystery and the magical. She wishes to infuse her poetry with a sustained return to the spiritual realm, which appears most readily in nature -- flora and fauna. Similarly, the intersections of people with nature often contain a piece of the spiritual.
"how do you reconcile the practices of your ancestors, the practices of where you are from, and the practices of where you are living, which may or may not all be in the same place? Decolonialization re-presented as radical healing. Because healing, I am learning, is exactly that."
In her encounter of cultural diversity and the complications of identity stripped from place and culture -- a complex intersection -- Reavey notes that reconciliation is key. In order to find healing one must be willing to allow all parties to be heard. More importantly, these concepts of identity must be dislocation from physical place.
"For an emigrant a desire line is a kind of violence that masks loneliness."
Reavey's experience of emigration is one fraught with fear and loneliness. She needed to tap into an inner strength in order to successfully navigate this isolation. Often, she observes, desire serves as a necessary mask for one's own fear of isolation.
