Giving a voice CT UndocuFund uses poetry to support to undocumented people struggling with economic meltdown
Frustrated by continually being left without a voice, undocumented people in Connecticut have turned to poetry to speak out about their plight during the coronavirus pandemic and bring financial relief to other undocumented folks throughout the state.
“If you are undocumented, it is very likely that you would not have gotten the $1,200 stimulus. And a lot of the resources that are being supplied, you wouldn’t get,” said Patrick “Rico” Williams, a Hartford poet and a member of the CT UndocuFund activist group.
“Additionally, if you are undocumented … you’re in hourly wage jobs, which are jobs that would have been lost immediately.”
CT UndocuFund came into being on April 15. The initiative is spearheaded by immigrants. Through Facebook, Instagram and GoFundMe, CT UndocuFund reaches out to the community of people who have enough, to ask them to donate to help people who don’t have enough.
“We are not a government agency. We are doing this work because they are not stepping in the gap,” Williams said.
“We all have COVID stories, but there are people who don’t have a safety blanket.”
Williams, who was born in Jamaica, participated in CT UndocuFund’s recent Undocu Poetry Week in May on Instagram. The series is live streams of readings by “Undocupoets” and discussions about the immigrant experience. The four one-hour sessions can be seen at instagram.com/ctundocufund/.
That Instagram page has a link to a fund-raising page – charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/ct-undocufund1 – which already has raised more than $73,000. The group also solicits funds on Venmo at @undocupoetryweek.
The group uses its Facebook page – facebook.com/CTUndocuFund/ – for people to request funds. In the first round of funding, applications were so numerous the Facebook portal had to close after just 10 minutes. Other rounds of funding will proceed when more cash is raised.
“There are so many needs in our community. A lot of them are tangible material needs. Folks are struggling to get groceries,” said Danilo Machado, a UConn graduate, poet and activist who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Machado, who was born in Medellin, Colombia, also participated in Undocu Poetry Week.
Machado said some of the money raised also was donated to Black Visions Collective in Minnesota.
Unlike government and foundational cash stimulus initiatives, CT UndocuFund doesn’t require formal paperwork and doesn’t ask too many questions.
“We’re not asking exactly what they are needing the funds for. We ask what kind of need, did you lose your job?” said Tashi Sanchez-Llaury of Stamford, a poet and activist. “A lot of us organizing on the fund are formerly or currently undocumented. We know what questions are triggering or unnecessary.”
While most undocumented people in the country fly
McEwen is one of the participants in Essential Voices of the Pandemic, a new project by West Hartford-based poetrywriting initiative Poetry in the Streets.
Melanie Faranello, who founded Poetry in the Streets in 2017, used to sit on street corners in Hartford with a jar of words and a typewriter, encouraging passersby to grab a word and start writing a poem.
“It connected people, engaging them with strangers. Now with the pandemic, I can’t do that anymore,” Faranello said. “But it’s a potent time now. People want and need to express themselves. Arts and creative writing are healing in a way.”
Faranello set up a page on her website to post poems written in response to the pandemic, quarantine, mass unemployment, financial hardship and any other aspect of the coronavirus experience.
“The poems could be about anything. How are you? What happened to you? Can we hear from you?” Faranello said. “Everybody is going through something different right now.”
Faranello has collected the poems she has gathered on her website – poetryonthestreets.com/read-entries-here – and wants members of the public to contribute more. A call for entries is at poetryonthestreets.com. Most submissions will be posted, pending review, Faranello said.
Contributions of prose are also welcome, such as that contributed by bus driver James Dale:
McEwen, a freelance poet and shortstory writer, met Faranello months ago. “When I met her on the street I was so happy. I loved her setup with the typewriter,” McEwen, 44, said.
Writing about life during COVID-19 came naturally to her. “Some people had routines that caused them to panic. They liked going out to nightclubs and to visit friends,” she said. “I was living the same life, but now I was living it during a pandemic. I’ve always been a melan