Lost Children Archive

“The children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They’re like two anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, with a touch more narcissism. The girl asks to hear the same stories over and over again. The boy asks about moments of their childhood together, as if they had happened decades ago. So we tell them. We tell them all the stories we’re able to remember. Always, if we miss a part, confuse a detail, or if they notice any minimal variation to the version they remember, they interrupt, correct us, and demand that the story be told once more, properly this time. So we rewind the tape in our minds and play it again from the beginning.”

The mother narrator elaborates upon the children’s need for a story of their family’s “beginning,” comparing these stories to “cosmogonic narratives”: stories about the origins of Earth, the universe, and life itself. Her reference to “rewinding” introduces the thematic motif of repetition and echoes, which plays a major role in Lost Children Archive. The narrator’s description of ways she rewinds and revises stories to help her children process them also foreshadows the ways in which she will struggle with the radio narratives of child migrants crossing the border, wondering how much she should share with the children, and how much she should “rewind,” “shuffle,” distract, and protect them from stories of others’ trauma.

“I pored over reports and articles about child refugees, and tried to gather information on what was happening beyond the New York immigration court, at the border, in detention centers and shelters. […] I collected loose notes, scraps, cutouts, quotes copied down on cards, letters, maps, photographs, lists of words, clippings, tape-recorded testimonies. […] I read and read, long sleepless nights reading about archive fevers, about rebuilding memory in diaspora narratives, about being lost in ‘the ashes’ of the archive.” 

Upon meeting a migrant woman named Manuela and learning about her two daughters who are being held at a detention center, the narrator begins an impassioned research and sound project around the subject of migrants’ stories. This fragmented project—with all its “loose notes, scraps, cutouts”—highlights how alone the narrator feels in her research process (spending long hours reading when everyone else is sleeping, “lost in ‘the ashes’ of the archive”). Herein, the narrator seems to recognize the danger of getting “lost” in stories of other families’ suffering and the danger of getting so “lost” in her own research that she loses track of her own family. This fear of getting lost becomes a major theme in Lost Children Archive.

“Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?” 

After the narrator agrees to accompany her husband to Arizona for his “Inventory of Echoes” project, then return to New York with her daughter, the family feels uneasy. They know that they will soon separate, possibly for good. The children attempt to comfort themselves by inventing (often silly) words, and the parents take comfort in their invented language. The narrator observes that this language of made-up words—and the collective connection they feel to these words—defines their family as much as spatial togetherness. She worries, however, that when their family is spatially divided, the shared definitions and connective associations within this shared language—their “intimate archive”—will be lost.

“If we mapped our lives back in the city, if we drew a map of the daily circuits and routines the four of us left behind, it would look nothing like the route map we will now follow across this vast country. Our daily lives back in the city traced lines that branched outward—school, work, errands, appointments, meetings, bookstore, corner deli, notary public, doctor’s office—but always those lines circled around, brought back and reunited in a single point at the end of the day. That point was the apartment where we had lived together for four years, It was a small but luminous space where we had become a family. It was the center of gravity we had now, suddenly, lost.”

The narrator introduces the reader to her complex understanding of “maps.” For her, maps are not mere depictions of spaces, but embodiments of one’s connections with those spaces. Maps are illustrations of personal “routes,” and the linear A to B road map feels very alien and different from the familiar circular route of their days in the city. The spaces in these day-to-day routes embody their habits, rituals, and feelings of comfort, knowing that the central hub of this route is the home apartment. Without this hub, the narrator feels lost.

“I suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed. You whisper intuitions and thoughts into the emptiness, hoping to hear something back. And sometimes, just sometimes, an echo does indeed return, a real reverberation of something, bouncing back with clarity when you’ve finally hit the right pitch and found the right surface.” 

The narrator searches through the husband’s archive boxes, hoping to find some inspiration for her own project. She’s also hoping to find some sense of connection between their disparate projects, and some related connection to him. For her, his archive boxes are the embodiment of the gap—the deep metaphorical “valley”—between them, and she subconsciously yearns for “an echo […] a real reverberation of something,” to give meaning to this painful gap. Later on in the novel, she feels betrayed upon discovering an underlined passage from one of her own books in her husband’s archive box, suggesting that she has complicated feelings about the ways one person’s research and discoveries “echo” another’s.

“What does it mean to be a refugee? I suppose I could tell the girl: A child refugee is someone who waits. But instead, I tell her that a refugee is someone who has to find a new home. Then, to soften the conversation, distract her from all this, I look for a playlist and press Shuffle.” 

The narrator confronts her daughter’s difficult questions after listening to a radio conversation about migrant refugee children crossing the border. This moment illustrates that “shuffling” often obscures some detail, some resonance, that feels too harsh to dwell on. It also develops the novel’s interest in the ideas parents explain versus conceal in their explanations of others’ pain.

“No one thinks of those children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. Everyone keeps asking: Which war, where? Why are they here? Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?”

After hearing the words of closed-minded speakers on the radio and reading the words of short-sighted commentators in the news, the narrator becomes frustrated with common perspectives on the migration of Mexican children to the United States. Here, she points out the self-centered focus of their rhetoric, which fails to ask what she believes is the most essential question: “Why did they flee their homes?” This passage begins to establish the migrant children as the “lost children” figures that evolve over the course of the novel. It also begins to insinuate how the migration of Mexican children over the border “echoes” similar movements—similar losses of homes—throughout North American history.

“I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet til then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck align in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”

The mother narrator describes the complicated knowledge (and self-understanding) she derives from reading. Specifically, she alludes to the feeling of rediscovery in revisiting passages she’s underlined in previously read books. This moment develops the idea of reading as a kind of self-archiving: a collection of underlined moments, of all the past feelings and associations connected to those underlined moments. This passage also builds upon the novel’s previous reference to the archive as a “valley” of echoes.

“Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them ‘the lost children.’ I suppose the word ‘refugee’ is more difficult to remember. And even if the term ‘lost’ is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as ‘the lost children.’ And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.” 

The novel continues to explore the themes of loss, being lost, and the complications of processing others’ trauma. Just as the family develops their own comforting “linguistic archaeology” in conversations, they evolve their own “family lexicon” for issues they haven’t experienced, but nevertheless identify with. So doing, the novel also deepens its explorations of language, examining how the same word can have many different connotative meanings and uses. Here, “lost” refers not only to the fact that the children are wandering through unknown territories of the desert, but to the idea that they “lost the right to a childhood” when circumstances forced them to flee their homes.

“Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? […] Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized […]”

The narrator reflects how, when volunteering as an interpreter in the federal immigration court, she felt she knew what her project was doing and where it was going. Now, removed from the sources of her stories, and moving closer to the border, she feels much less sure. She contemplates the efficacy of her project, whether it’s unethical to “make art with someone else’s suffering.” These reflections resonate with a certain degree of self-acknowledging irony, given that Luiselli herself based Lost Children Archive around her own experiences as a volunteer translator in the federal immigration court.

“When we were in better spirits, we were able to joke about our differences. We’d say that I was a documentarist and he was a documentarian, which meant that I was more like a chemist and he was more like a librarian. What he never understood about how I saw my work […] was that pragmatic storytelling, commitment to truth, and a direct attack on issues was not, as he thought, a mere adherence to a conventional form of radio journalism. […] My apparent lack of greater aesthetic principles was not a blind obedience to funders and funding, as he often said. My work was simply full of patchwork solutions, like those old houses where everything is falling apart and you just have to solve things, urgently, no time for turning questions and their possible answers into aesthetic theories about sound and its reverberations.” 

The narrator introduces the running motif of “documentarist” versus “documentarian” work. For the narrator and her husband, these different aesthetic approaches and perspectives on documenting define not only their work, but also their personal ethos, their world view, their personality, and their identity. What seem like subtle, imperceptible differences to the outside world seem like untraversable gaps in understanding to them.

“The strange thing is this: if, in the future one day, you add all those documents together again, what you have, all over again, is the experience. Or at least a version of the experience that replaces the lived experience, even if what you originally documented were the moments cut out from it.” 

As the boy learns to use his Polaroid camera, he asks his mother what it means to document things and struggles to decide what he should photograph. The mother narrator ponders his questions, realizing that she doesn’t know the answers. She believes in the ability to reassemble experience via archives of documents (or, perhaps, she believes in the archive as its own echo-version of experience). She acknowledges, however, that the documents themselves are not a simulacrum of experience so much as a fragmented set of reminders: “the moments cut” from an experience. Thus, both the experience one documents in these “cut” moments and the experience one reassembles from them is the product of conscious choices.

“But I suppose it’s always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. […] None of this is new, though I guess I am simply accustomed to dealing with more edulcorated versions of xenophobia. I don’t know which is worse.” 

The mother narrator continues to experience profound frustration with the ignorance of reporters who gesture toward Mexico as “a no-man’s land.” By thus identifying the land that the migrants come from, such reporters thus diminish their “loss” and the meaning of these children being “lost.” After all, if someone already comes from “no-man’s land,” what else can they expect? Thus, Luiselli continues her examination of the ways language and rhetoric shapes the imagination of political issues.

“Geronimo and his band were the last men to surrender to the white-eyes and their Indian Removal Act, my husband tells the children. I don’t interrupt his story to say so out loud, but the word ‘removal’ is still used today as a euphemism for ‘deportations.’ […] When an ‘illegal’ immigrant is deported nowadays, he or she is, in written history, ‘removed.’ His stories are not directly linked to the piece I’m working on, but the more I listen to the stories he tells about this country’s past, the more it seems like he’s talking about the present.” 

The mother narrator continues to examine the ways the same word can be used in many different ways—in this case, as a euphemism for many different kinds of deportation based on assumption of who belongs in the United States. This passage also continues to explore the novel’s interest in echoes. Here, the present-day issues of migrants echo the experiences of Apaches under the Indian Removal Act.

“He’s somehow trying to capture their past presence in the world, and making it audible, despite their current absence, by sampling any echoes that still reverberate of them. […] The inventory of echoes was not a collection of sounds that have been lost—such a thing would in fact be impossible—but rather one of sounds that were present in the time of recording and that, when we listen to them, remind us of the ones that are lost.”

For the husband’s project, he brings the family to the graveyard where Geronimo is buried. In this graveyard, there are also over 300 Chiricahua Apaches buried as prisoners of war after they surrendered to the US Army in 1894. The narrator is struck by all the artifacts left as offerings around Geronimo’s grave and seems to perceive the grave as its own kind of archive. The narrator is also struck by the gentle, considerate way her husband leads the son around the graveyard with his boom mic. Seeing them together—and being in the solemn space of the graveyard—the narrator recognizes that this project is not a recreation of “lost” sounds, but a “reminder” of those who are now absent from the landscape. In this sense, Luiselli continues her examinations of history melding with the present, of the present-day atmosphere “echoing” US history.

“What ties me to where? There’s the story about the lost children on their crusade, and their march across jungles and barrenlands, which I read and reread, sometimes absentmindedly, other times in a kind of rapture, recording it; and now I am reading parts to the boy. And then there’s also the story of the real lost children, some of whom are about to board a plane. There are many other children, too, crossing the border or still on their way here, riding trains, hiding from dangers. There are Manuela’s two girls, lost somewhere, waiting to be found. And of course, finally, there are my own children one of whom I might soon lose, and both of whom are no always pretending to be lost children, having to run away, either fleeing from white-eyes, riding horses in bands of Apache children, or riding trains, hiding from the Border Patrol.” 

Late at night, the narrator contemplates the “echoes” and overlaps between Elegies for Lost Children, the similar experiences of Manuela’s daughters, her imagination of these experiences, and the history that resonates with these experiences. These many different layers coalesce in her own children, who role-play in the car during the day as “lost children” in the desert. She attempts to wrap her mind around the experiences of children like Manuela’s daughters by examining her anxiety for her own children.

“The picture I had taken earlier that day, of the airplane standing there, slipped out from the pages of the book. I looked at it, hard, like I was waiting for the children to appear in it, but of course they didn’t. There’s nothing in the picture, if you look at it, except that stupid plane, which makes me so frustrated. But as I tucked the picture back in between some pages toward the end of the book, I realized something important, which is this: that everything that happened after I took the picture was also inside it, even though no one could see it, except me when I looked at it, and maybe also you, in the future, when you look at it, even though you didn’t even see the original moment with your own eyes.” 

This moment is narrated from the boy’s perspective as he experiences frustration when he successfully photographs the migrant children boarding a plane to be deported back to Mexico, noting, “nothing in the picture, if you look at it, except that stupid plane.” He realizes, however, that the photograph does not capture a moment so much as it reminds the viewer of everything that happened before and after. This realization resonates with the mother’s earlier realizations in Part 1.

“It made me so angry at her. I wanted to remind her that even though those children were lost, we were not lost, we were there, right next to her. And it made me wonder, what if we got lost, would she then finally pay attention to us?” 

The boy expresses his frustration over the fact that his mother is so distracted by her despair over Manuela’s “lost children” that she isn’t paying attention to her own children. With her decision to imperil the boy and girl from this novel, Luiselli invites the reader to consider the complicated layers of closeness and removal we feel when processing others’ trauma, to question why we identify more closely with the narrator’s “lost children” than the stories of other “lost children.” As such, she slyly reverses the question of “paying attention” from the migrant “lost children”—the distant subjects of news stories and radio interviews—to the “lost children” of our own families, compelling the reader to examine their own emotional priorities.

“One day, though, while you were asleep and I was pretending to sleep but actually listening to Ma and Pa arguing about radio, about politics, about work, about their future plans together, and then not together, about us, and them, and everything, I came up with a plan, and this was the plan. I’d become a documentarist and a documentarian. I could be both, for a while, at least on this trip. I could document everything, even the little things, however I could. Because I understood, even though Pa and Ma thought I didn’t, that it was our last trip as a family.” 

In this moment, the boy embarks on his project to fuse the documenting styles of both parents and create a document of their travels for his sister. Herein, he echoes the mother’s attempt to traverse the gaps in their perspectives by searching through the echo valley of the archive. His collection of Polaroid photos, and the chapter entitled “Document” (a transcription of a recording he makes for his sister), can thus be read as his own “Inventory of Echoes.” As opposed to recording the “echoes” of Apache absences, however, the boy’s project records the “echoes” of their family’s experiences, conversations, and shared language.

“This whole country, Papa said, is an enormous cemetery, but only some people get proper graves, because most lives don’t matter. Most lives get erased, lost in the whirlpool of trash we call history, he said.” 

After visiting Geronimo’s grave, the father explains the injustice of the 300 unmarked Apache graves to his son. His father’s connection between the present “whirlpool of trash” they live in and the “whirlpool of trash we call history” echoes the mother’s earlier connections between history and the present.

“When Pa stopped talking, I finally put on his hat, and whispered to you like I was some old Indian-cowboy, said, hey you, hey Memphis, imagine we had got lost here in these mountains. […] But Mama heard me, and before you could answer me, she turned around from her seat and asked me to promise that if we ever got lost, I would know how to find them again. So I said, of course, Ma, yes. She asked me if I knew her and Papa’s phone numbers by heart, and I said, yes, 555-836-6314 and 555-734-3258. [I said], if we got lost, we would look for you in Echo Canyon. Wrong answer, Ma said, as if it really was a test. If you get lost out in the open, you have to look for a road, the larger the better, and wait for someone to pass, okay? And both of us said, yes Ma, okay, okay. But then I whispered to you, and she didn’t hear me, I said, but first we would go to Echo Canyon, right?” 

The boy solidifies the connection between Manuela’s daughters and their own performances as “lost children.” Just as Manuela’s mother sewed her phone number inside the collars of the girls’ dresses and had them recite the phone number over and over again, the boy’s mother emphasizes the importance of memorizing their phone numbers. Their focus on Echo Canyon further symbolically emphasizes the ways in which they’re “echoing” the lost children’s journey. Unlike the migrant lost children, however, this experience is a test. They are not being forced to illegally cross a border or flee from any real, present danger in their home country.

“But where are you, are you, are you? […] Pa and Ma looked at you looking confused and then back at me like wanting a translation. I understood you question perfectly, so I explained it to them. I was always the one standing between you and them, or between us and them. I said, she thinks there’s someone on the other side of the mountain who is answering us.” 

On their family visit to Echo Canyon, the girl struggles to understand that the sounds of “echoes” are bouncing off surfaces—that there are not actual people calling back to them from the other side of the canyon. Here, the boy acts as a kind of translator between his parents—who don’t understand why she is confused—and his sister, a go-between from the adult world to the world of “lost children.” This position of translator echoes his aforementioned goal of being both “documentarian and documentarist.” This passage also foreshadows the children’s later return to Echo Canyon in the one-sentence chapter of the same name.

“Finally, a song came up—and this was the lucky part for us. It was one of our very own songs, yours and mine, one of the songs we knew by heart and had been singing in the car with our parents before we got lost or they got lost or everyone got lost. The song was called ‘Space Oddity,’ about an astronaut who leaves his capsule and drifts far away from Earth. I knew we both knew the song, so I started up a game for you to follow right there. I looked at you sand said, you’re Major Tom and I’m Ground Control. Then slowly I put imaginary helmets on both of us, and both of us were holding pretend space walkie-talkies. Ground Control to Major Tom, I said into the walkie-talkie.” 

In previous scenes, the boy and girl have demonstrated a certain fascination with this song, and they’ve regularly role-played the roles of “Major Tom” and “Ground Control.” Here, their role-plays commingle with their lived roles of “lost children.” This game aligns with the novel’s ongoing interest in echoes, as the game entails echoing one another via imaginary walkie-talkies and a more figurative “echo” performance of the song itself. Ironically, this song deals with the theme of Major Tom being lost in space, just before the girl becomes lost, separated from her brother.