Is There Laminators In Staples?

Europe, Ellis Island

was no longer Europe, it was still America. Or, if it were America, it was only in the form of anticipation of their needs, their fears encrypted twenty-nine questions - Whether a polygamist? Whether an Anarchist? Ever in prison or almhouse? - and a medical examination that could begin with careful observation of the decline of a gateway . A visual inspection and a few minutes before a naked body and the way back is written in chalk on the clothes: CT for trachoma, H for heart, K \u200b\u200bfor hernia, X for mental defect Suspected ...
Ellis Island was a frontier, the non-place where Europe came together to America, Europe feared the dispossessed who responded to the call released to the ocean - "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free "- and an America for Europe and the fulfillment of the promise secular figure. A promise and reduced to mere chance as the game settled in one go.
Ellis Island was a threshold, the door to the Golden Door . On one side called Italians, Greeks, Irish, Russian or Polish, the other the voice of a Welcome to America was a United States citizen. Perec compared with the manufacturing process:

"At the end of the day, Ellis Island is not just a U.S. factory to a factory to process migrants immigrants to the American factory, as quickly and efficiently as industry Chicago butcher "

Georges Perec, Ellis Island

But along with the identification mechanism for the production of identity, together with the description of the human chain , slip on all accounts, also in that of Perec, the signs of the rite of passage: opening of the time, purifying last acquisition of a name. The old Europe that sanctifies doors and parties also met his death when American obligation to mark the cycles and changes.
Ellis Island is not Europe, is the limit. Not in our memory, but as our memory what he lacks, as the lost photos of the family album. It is the silence of those who did not pass, the display returned by a chalk mark too incriminating, of which twenty-nine questions were the timing of the confession. Europe is being defined from the outside as the home they can always ungrateful to die again weighed and anarchists.

- Whether a polygamist? Whether an Anarchist? Ever in prison or almhouse?
- Da, da, da ...