This Jamaican-born Writer Brings the Undocumented Voices to the Limelight
In her Jamaican Patois dialect, Donauta Watson-Starcevic read:
Who me?
Me ah nuh nobody
Mi nuh have no paper
Mi nuh have the numba, you know di numba, whey de pon di paypa
Me nuh have no numba
Donauta stood in the middle of an audience of a dozen, sporting a brown hat and a brown dress under a burgundy flannel. With a fierce look, she shared her poem “Nuh Nobody” at the annual Lit Crawl NYC 2019. The event included readings from four other immigrant writers based in Brooklyn and Queens. In the backyard of a Cobble Hill coffee shop, the sound of rustling leaves meshed with Donauta’s lusty voice.
‘Nuh, Nobody’ was one of the poems that Donauta contributed to an anthology called “DREAMing Out Loud: Voices of Undocumented Students” — a collection of personal essays, short stories and poems written by undocumented students at City University of New York.
‘Nuh, Nobody’ started as a recording,” Donauta said. “There’s the performative aspect to it as well. ‘Nuh, Nobody’ did not start on the page.” She speaks and thinks in English and Patois in real life, so it’s only natural that she uses the two languages interchangeably in her writing. A recent graduate from CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Donauta had read this poem in front of a crowd before. “I read parts of it at John Jay for at an English event and a professor came up to me and he was like, ‘I’m picturing Zora Neale Hurston’.”
The DREAMing Out Loud anthology came out of a series of writing workshops hosted by PEN America, founded by the award-winning Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue with the help of writers Lisa Ko and Charlie Vázquez. The first piece Donauta wrote in that workshop was about her sister’s death.
When she was six years old, Donauta came to the U.S. from Portmore, Jamaica, with her family, including her 14-year-old sister. They lived undocumented in the ‘90s’ neighborhood of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Donauta remembers her sister spending nearly two decades trying to obtain proper paperwork to update her legal status, such as getting a social security number. “She was talking to me about like: she enrolled in classes, she was going back to school, there was a specific dream that she had,” said Donauta. Then suddenly, just two days before Donauta’s 24th birthday, her sister just didn’t wake up. “It was like a real shock to my family because she wasn’t sick beforehand.”
The writing at first was Donauta’s way of trying to process what happened, to process the fact that her sister was so close to reaping the fruits of her hard work through all these years. “In the grand scheme of life, it’s like, oh, so it matters,” Donauta said. “But no, it does not that much because you get it and then you’re not here anymore.”
When she first chose to go to John Jay, Donauta had hoped to become a lawyer. She had begun working towards a law career at Martin Luther King High School, where she studied law, advocacy and community justice. Since then, Donauta knew that advocacy and education were a big part of who she was.
Unlike most undergraduate students at John Jay, Donauta spent over 10 years at the school before obtaining her bachelor’s degree in 2018. As an undocumented student, Donauta wasn’t qualified for financial aid so she had to find a way to support herself, mostly by waitressing at restaurants while taking night classes. “I had to navigate the space of how to advocate for myself before I could even advocate for anyone else,” she said.
There came a point when Donauta started to question herself: “Yes, I wanted to advocate, but is this the only way to do advocacy work?” She ended up switching her college major from international criminal justice to English, giving credit to writing as a tool that helped her navigate her undocumented experience.
Given the current attack on DACA and the anti-immigrant sentiment under the Trump administration, workshops like DREAMing Out Loud serve as a space for undocumented writers to convene and share their stories. “My writing is a form of resistance, but it’s also a battle cry for DREAMers,” Donauta said.
Turning 31 this year, Donauta lives in a very art-centered household with her husband who is a painter and a five-year-old daughter who, according to Donauta, “is performative in her own way.” When not sharing her poetry at public readings, Donauta has a day job as an admin assistant in the teaching and learning department at NYU Steinhardt.
This summer, she will be enrolling in NYU’s MFA Low Residency Program, which allows her to write independently and several times a year, fly to Paris to attend short-term creative writing workshops. “I was at John Jay for a very long time, so I was familiar with their department. I want to also give myself that time to really get one foot in and work in a giant like NYU,” said Donauta.
You is a writer, writer
What is a writer, Lord?
You nuh gah school?
Oh, you still a make them fool you with school
You need fi come out of school and start live life
Putting her story on the page and going on stage to share it with others is still not an easy task for Donauta, who used to hide this part of her life for a long time. The DREAMing Out Loud workshops enabled Donauta to write about her experience in a room full of undocumented individuals who completely understood her from the get-go. But it’s another thing to speak about it in a room with people who have no firsthand understanding of this experience. “Sometimes I have to wonder, is it also hurting me, putting these very real things on paper for very different crowds?” she said.
At the same time, Donauta realizes that people do understand her story and that she isn’t just speaking for herself. “This is not undocumented. This is not Jamaican experience. This is the human experience.”
This story was reported and written in October 2019.
