You can kinda understand why American customs officials would choose to detain a subversive author of extremist materials at Los Angeles Airport, but it’s a lil’ harder to conceptualise why they’d hold Australian treasure Mem Fox earlier this month.
Speaking to the ABC, the beloved creator of Possum Magic and Where is the Green Sheep? said she “can’t imagine going back to the states” after being wrongfully detained for two hours due to a (non-existent) problem with her visa.
Fox, who was passing through on her way to an event in Milwaukee, called the incident “disgraceful,” and that “never in my life been spoken to with such insolence, treated with such disdain, with so many insults and with so much gratuitous impoliteness.”
She described being held in a room with a number of other foreign visitors, including a parent with a small child, while someone “heavy with weaponry” dressed her down over her paperwork.
After that public barrage, 70-year-old Fox “felt like I had been physically assaulted,” and sobbed upon arrival at her hotel room. Let us reiterate: somebody did this to the person who wrote Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.
Fox emailed the U.S. embassy in Canberra, and received “an absolutely charming letter from them within hours of my email hitting their desk.” You can only assume it took a local staffer who recognised her name to realise how badly customs officials had fucked up.
Despite that objectively terrible experience, Fox also had time to recognise how much worse it could have been, saying “I am old and white, innocent and educated, and I speak English fluently.”
“Imagine what happened to the others in the room, including an old Iranian woman in her 80s, in a wheelchair.”
At this point, it’s worth mentioning that social media users quickly connected the incident with Fox’s latest work, which advocates for a more open, diverse, and accepting Australia for newcomers.
I reckon US Immigration said “Mem Fox – Let’s do a Google search. She writes verboten literature! Heavy vetting for you, lady” pic.twitter.com/CSPNMmDjAr
— Brendan Jones ?? (@jonesytheteachr) February 25, 2017
Source: ABC / The Advertiser.
Photo: The Little Bookroom / Instagram.
