Select Questions from the DS-160: Partial Application for a Non-Immigrant American Visa

by Ark Ramsay

Question 1: What is the given name of your mother’s mother?
I text my mother because I have forgotten. Again. I have forgotten.

Her response arrives in a rush of questions: whose grandmother? Mum’s tita?

I ask for more. Her father’s father’s name. The village in Syria which her grandparents traded in for the island of Trinidad. The rationale behind choosing one dot on the long Caribbean chain, and not another. Not America. Brazil. Argentina. Countries which at the turn of the twentieth century were devouring transient laborers from all corners of the globe.

I am newly desperate to understand how others before me, kinned by blood, have endured displacement.

Miriam. My great-grandmother’s name is Miriam.

I print her name into the empty block and it is accepted. As if the story of a life has ever only been a rectangle wide, and an easy thing to share.

Except, somewhere in my grandmother’s living room, with its walls of stern black-and-white photographs, Tita Miriam now hangs. Her portrait has overseen the telling of our family story, over and again, and my faithful work of forgetting it. I thought that I could detach myself from our story—first. My choice. Before what lived in me became impossible to hide.

*

What I do recall, of my family’s decision to leave Bilad al Sham, or “Greater Syria” (that entanglement of land which once encompassed parts of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine), is too fragmentary to satisfy any rectangle of white space.

In some versions, as a Christian, my great-great-great grandfather flees persecution under the Ottoman Empire. In others, it is a famine spreading like wildfire, which routes him. Sometimes, in the telling, he goes joyously. Swept up in the Great Migration of the late 19th century, charting his way West in some kind of Gold Rush—convinced that he can siphon America’s wealth right out of the ground.

The stories vacillate between fear of home and hope in a more secure future. Disbelonging and adventure. Always, one pillar dominates, as if the why of a great exodus is a clean cut. He never made it as far as his original destination, Ellis Island. So ours was a family line sworn to other port cities. Port-of-Spain, and then in time, Bridgetown. A murky, hundred-year-old trade of one future for another.

*

There must have lived some undocumented thirst in the middle of my greatgreat-great grandfather’s chest which rendered him so unlike the rest of his family. Something which forced both this passage across the world’s second largest ocean, and that wrong-placed disembarking.

When something becomes impossible to hide, it must force your hand. Your feet.

Question 2: What is your Legal Surname?
My great-great-great-grandfather. The one who disembarked at the wrong port. He would make his way through the interior of Trinidad. Barefoot, he sold pictures of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, out of a beat-up suitcase. He walked endlessly through verdant green, yelling Pwatik, Pwatik. Friend, Friend.

He spoke little, if any English. Trade must have been accomplished through pointing, displaying money, an ad hoc, gestural language. If so, was it assumed that Pwatik was his first name, or last?

When I was small, my grandmother ran a micro business which thrived out of one drawer in her armoire. She sold—and often gave away—scapulars, rosaries, confirmation cards, blessed candles. We are all descendants of that one holy suitcase, but only some of us have had to shoulder a certain kind of burden to keep this family afloat. Trafficking in the absolute. Selling the sacred.

*

The Sabgas and Moses. Matouks and Nadurs. Abouds and Abeds. My mother’s people—the last names swirling in my blood. I think of them most when I am far away, and out of sight. In liminal places like the demands of an immigration form, or the bite of someone else’s Arabic food. When I taste baklava, a complicated love is present between the layers of filo pastry, pistachio and honey.

I remember the scent of the stacked green boxes of arabic sweets, crowded into the air-conditioned backroom at my grandparents’ house. I could hide amongst the green towers, as they were slowly parceled out as Christmas gifts. Hiding, I could be small and out of notice.

That is what lingers for me in every bite of honey and pistachio.

Memory of a time before the hypervisibility of my body. Before I was on constant display.

*

My family’s motto is: better man belly bust, than good food go to waste. I ate, and ate, but—no matter how hard I tried—I was never any man.

*

I hand over, to the form, the last name which I inherited from my father. In a TSA line-up, no one will force a question, or pat this surname down. It is my body which attracts this unwanted attention.

Question 3: What Are Your Given Names?
I was ten years old when my grandfather’s dog, Sarah, leapt the boundary wall into the neighbor’s concrete yard. When the screaming started, my Jido was in his underwear mixing instant coffee. From his vantage at the kitchen window I knew that he could see the full-blooming orange bougainvillea, and the cement block wall, but not what lay beyond.

He instructed me to go and retrieve his beloved dog.

When I arrived, the neighbor’s child—no more than four, or five—was curled up in the grass, sobbing. Enormous, snotty gulps. A small white dog, fur like sifted flour, yipped and snapped, placing its brave-shivering body between child and Sarah. I watched as it released a long stream of yellow urine, but it never backed down. Sarah circled both dog and boy, all of her teeth on full display.

When she spotted me, Sarah went for the throat, ragdolling that little white dog, capsules of blood spurting out. Red in the flour. The yipping became desperate, the high, staccato note digested within Sarah’s throaty snarls. An adult voice was yelling at me: do something, do something. So I wrapped my arms around Sarah’s long body, and screamed. I yelled for her to let go, to come back, to not become the kind of animal with murder on its conscience.

Eventually the long wire of Sarah’s body eased. I could feel her tail thumping the concrete driveway. As she grew soft and pliant, in turn, I grew wired with rage. Arms around her neck, I dragged her home.

I kept expecting to stumble into my grandfather, and some newfound concern.

His arms around my body, my arms around the dog.

Once I had locked Sarah back in her dirt-floor pen, she circled me, shy and regretful, wanting to be held, licking at her blood-dappled fur. I slipped out and shut her in alone. She scrabbled at the dirt and howled. Repentant. Behind her, two other pens, empty now after their owners had slipped out of this life—and a solitary avocado tree which thrived where nothing else did.

Through the open kitchen window, my grandfather watched all of this, coffee in hand. His expression, blank, as if the television channel was boring— but not enough to warrant changing it.

My rage bubbled over in a way it never had before.

Asshole, I yelled, my ten-year-old voice unsteady. I beat my chest and pointed up at him, framed in the window, You asshole.

He went on sipping his coffee, looking past me to the flowers in bloom. I repeated it again, that word which was banned from my mouth. At home it would elicit the threat of soap, or pepper sauce. When I was spent, I heard the clink of his favorite mug resting in the sink.

The neighbor’s boy had stopped crying. A car had sped out from the property, probably vet-bound. I crouched in a hollow that the hanging bougainvillea couldn’t reach. I knelt amongst thorns. Ever after, my grandfather called out to me only in declarative grunts—or in the third person—what is this boy doing? What is this boy wearing?

*

I was given other names which proved wrong.

My mother invoked apostles, cloaking my seven pound body in the highest form of love she had access to. Two decades later, when I told her that I was not a man, and did not want a man’s name, she beseeched me—it came to me in a dream, this is god’s name for you.

Obstinate, I took this to mean that the only way to truly un-apostle myself was to pit my dreamworld in contest with my mother’s dreamworld. If the slippery and mutable world of sleep was responsible, then I could hide behind its cloak. I would not have to step out wearing a counterfeit name derived from nowhere. One nobody would be compelled to use.

*

Dreaming, a  soft voice calls out to me and I hear the name—more real than real—it sits in my spirit and it is my name.

*

I imagine two separate ocean journeys.

In one, my great-great-great grandfather crosses the Atlantic, head lifted to the roar of salt and the incomparable freedom of blue. Hoping that America, his intended, will welcome him in. Only a brief stay. He expects a way home again, and will be satisfied with nothing but Homs.

In the other, my great-great-great grandfather delights in who he might become when he is not Syria-tied. On the steam ship, in hiding places carved out of luggage holes, he discovers a belly-watering, secret intimacy. To the men who cannot bring themselves to look at him, and speak only a curt English, he whispers in a cascading Arabic. Tells them all about his desire to be someone in this world—and the complicated, contrary desire to be rid of everything which is expected of him. As a first-born Syrian son. Sometimes, even as a son at all. In this voyage, Trinidad is not some accident of fate, but a surety of choice.

It remains beyond me to imagine an outcome where two things collide: living open, living family-loved.

*

I do not know the word for “friend” without searching it out.

I do not read or speak Arabic. My mother was never taught, so I was never taught.

Ours is a language separated from the source for decades. We engage in a generations-long game of earnest Telephone. Trying to hold on to what we were once told—and even then, even in this—I am possessed by some inexplicable shame. As if, someone, three generations back, is being let down. Slowly mutating into indecipherability and simplistic stories.

I search and search but no Arabic-English dictionary holds the word Pwatik. Sadiq means friend. So who, if anyone, was my great-great-great jido calling out to?

*

For all that I know, Pwatik could be purpose-work.

A new sound altogether.

My great-great-great grandfather’s desire to walk a thousand miles inside of a newly crafted identity. Hollering out a dreamed-of name to this island he does not yet know well, hoping that the response will be accepting. Emphatic. Look, Pwatik has come again with Jesus in his suitcase.

What better way to have a name persist in the mouths of your family than by telling them it means, “friend”?

4: Write Your Full name in Native Alphabet
Here I record all of the names my mother wrote on my birth certificate.

Our family was originally Greek Orthodox, but the closest religious relative they found on arrival in Trinidad was Catholicism. Saints. Shepherds. Patriarchs. My names were smuggled across half the world in that one holy suitcase. They are everything we thought capable of providing safeguard in this life, and the next.

I grew up hearing that the family had come from the “Krak De Chevalier”, and that these words meant, “The Valley of the Christians” in Arabic. Years later, I came to understand that this was not a place, but a crusader castle. A medieval site of war and attempted-conquest. I kept chasing the name of our village. My mother would repeat something which sounded like, We are from An-Alrohips—but that was a no-place. No map led me there. Our language had curled back on itself, until we could not make the right sounds to find home anymore.

On my birth certificate, my mother’s writing stretches from the far-most left of the page to the right border, spilling over the assigned line like a burst river, as if she needed me to be named as much as I possibly could. As if, somehow, she had already predicted that some of these could be stripped away—and others, I would be desperate to cast off. In utero, I had a twin who died. These five-too-many names might have been shared, split between the two of us. Maybe that fetus would have been happy to carry forward the legacy of all those men, and I could have walked out completely unnamed.

Instead, my dead brother Gerard, yours is another name on the burstriver line.

*

My grandfather was dead.

Around his living room table sat the women he had left behind. Sisters, cousins, nieces, daughters, and me. The air was humid, pushed around by two electric fans which could not compete with the crowd of bodies. We took napkins to our foreheads, wiped at the sweat which pooled on our necks. We picked at greasy wontons, bought because nobody could stomach cooking anymore—said, oh god one more—took two more instead. We shared stories.

I told them about Sarah leaping the boundary wall.

Your Jido was like that. Go on, eat, eat.

I ate. No further explanation arrived. I ate.

In all of their favorite stories about my Jido, he was eating. Eating, he never looked up from his plate, focused intently on the food, shoveling it into his mouth. Here he was, eating an entire plate of raw kibbeh. Smushing half an avocado into a salt bread with mustard. Swallowing a banana in one eyesshut bite. His white mustache capturing the memory of sauces and soups. He ate with a chorus of noises, shed food all around him so that the floor could feed, and he glowed the whole time.

Did my Jido see it coming across the horizon, speeding fast, a thundering manhood?

For the seven days of his wake, I was terrified that I might somehow grow up to be a man like that man.

*

When my grandfather stopped calling out to me by any name, some surety in me cracked open.

What is my native alphabet, if it both is, and is not, Arabic?

What is my family’s village, if it both is, and is not, An-Alrohips?

What is my desired gender identity, if it both is, and is not, womanhood?

Question 5: What is your Sex at Birth?
Non-binary like not man and not woman? My mother asks, when I first try to explain. Her forehead is wrinkled, but she is still with me on the video call, trying to make sense—trying to stay close.

I say yes, because it is easier than saying no.

Easier than explaining “non-binary” like the heavy paw of a sleeping lion is pressed atop my chest. “Non-binary” like the one inadequate word I have to express someone bolting without a surety of destination. “Non-binary”, like a body in motion—a gender on the run.

*

My family harbors a long meticulous memory of our foods, dogs, journeys, divorces, feuds, car crashes, deaths, births, business successes, business failures, good days and bad. And alongside this memory—shadow on the wall—is an even longer, cautious silence.

Ours is supposed to be the story of a people in constant motion, and yet this memory only captures us at our stillest. Everyone born a man marries a woman. Everyone born a woman remains a woman. No space, in this recounting, for the fragile glass bowl of gender to slip. Shatter.

If a chance arrives, I will descend my family tree, branch by branch, and listen.

I might have had a 6th great-grandmother, who will tell of the teenage moment when she was pressed up against a cedar tree in rushed, Sapphic pleasure.

I might have had a 10th great-grandfather, who wants out of manhood, and lies awake at night dreaming in what-could-have-beens.

I might have had a 17th great-grand, who was never a father or mother except by role, and leaves everything behind to live unnamed. 

Out of their mouths, in mourning songs and lamentations, I will come to learn better words. Words more supple and close-fitting than “trans”, or “nonbinary”—which come from foreign, and therefore fit foreign. Maybe, at the tree’s base, something pre-language is waiting. Some better way of describing an intent to walk, hand-in-hand with my body, until it has sloughed off this strange idea of becoming a man. It would be so inherently ours that my people would recognize it, whisper, Yes, yes, eat, eat. We see you now.

*

Is it wrong to be willing to go to any length, just to be legible?

*

These are all lonely imaginings. I am not able to spin-up the secret lives of my ancestors, and even if the silence is telling, this speculation is just another kind of half-truth.

My biggest fear: following the tree to its base and finding out that there is nobody else like me. That my transition comes from nowhere—not dreams, not customs, not blood.

Is this something my great-great-great grandfather came to understand?

The farther you go, the fainter the stable voice of belonging becomes.

Question 6: Have you ever been issued a U.S. Visa?
Right before he died, my grandfather spoke to me again.

He was sitting in his underwear, sucking the yellow off a mango skin, watching the news. Onscreen bombs were falling on the city, Homs. Only a few miles from the “Krak De Chevalier”.

They are bombing my house, he said, pointing at me and then at the screen. He was sobbing, big full body gulps. They bomb my house.

It was a strange way to phrase it, he had never lived in Homs, owned no land, no house there. It was visceral, wounded, the saddest I had ever seen him. He kept pointing from me to the screen, as if I was expected to wade through  glass and arrest disaster. I thought that this would be a moment for us to come together. To use words. Names. Even after the silence between us, my heart broke for what I could not provide him. Not just a way to cross the Atlantic, in the opposite direction to his own father, but some exposed root, on arrival, which would recognize him as a prodigal son. Instead, he gestured one final time at the CNN reporter on screen and put the whole mango seed into his mouth. Sucked the yellow off the pit. Together, we watched as his Homs went up in flames.

*

This is a truth I have come to learn about my family. We are all undergoing some kind of transition. I am just one of myriad blossoms, turning to the sun in whatever small ways we can.

Why then, do we choose, so often, to go it alone?

Question 7: What is the Purpose of Your Trip to the United States of America?
I will not spend fifteen days in the hold of a steam ship to reach America. Mine is a five-hour flight with manageable turbulence. The journey I am on is not a parallel to my great-great-great grandfather’s. What I find curious, instead, is the instruction he has left behind—that, alone, a person’s journey across boundaries is neither scarce nor unlivable. There is such a requisite faith necessary to board a steamship by oneself, and leave behind the only home you have ever known. On my most isolated days, I draw on this memory. I kin myself to it. I craft a family out of who I am becoming, and who I am yet to share that with.

*

Not only business.

Not only pleasure.

Not only study.

I come to America, one-hundred years late, searching for a place where my disparate parts can come together. And eat. Eat for the floor as well. It is in my blood, this migration. I will pass through this country—like flour through a sieve—until I find the kind of place promised within the word Pwatik.

Friend-calling.

Friend-answering.

Ark Ramsay (Bridgetown 1994) is a trans non-binary writer currently based in Barbados. Their fiction centers Caribbean queer identities, and coping with a warming earth from the vantage of an always-acted-upon island ecosystem. Their writing has appeared in The A-Line: Journal of Progressive Thought, Small Axe, Gertrude Press, Meridian, and The Rumpus. It has also been a finalist for the Inaugural Story Foundation Prize through Story Magazine, and an honorable mention in Ninth Letter’s 2021 Literary Award for Nonfiction. They have received an MFA from The Ohio State University.