The author interweaves her account of overcoming border politics to marry with stories of how other couples fought the government policies that tore them apart. Lekas Miller reports on contentious borders around the world, borders that keep couples and families apart under prejudicial laws she says are designed to do just that - divide people if one of them doesn’t have the right colour, religion or politics. Through connections, he managed to get a visa to Kurdish-controlled Iraq, where the couple concocted a plan to live together and build documents needed to help them apply for an American spouse visa. When Turkey cracked down on refugees, it looked like Rizk might be deported to Syria, where he would be killed. Rizk said he wouldn’t marry her until his passport gave him the same rights as hers to get around the word.
He wasn’t able to return to Syria, as he was living in exile after disappearing into Bashar al-Assad’s jails for two years. Lekas Miller’s passport was basically a get-through-customs-free card, while Rizk’s Syrian passport granted entry to only 29 countries without visas that are difficult and expensive to obtain.
She jokes how, after knowing the Syrian photojournalist for a week, she accidentally proposed to him, saying flirtatiously she wasn’t averse to marrying someone so they could get a U.S. The Lebanese-American international correspondent ran head-on into a wall - a border wall - when she met Salem Rizk in Istanbul in late 2015 as “the guy” for information on Syria, a staple of the freelance reporting community.
The subjects of Anna Lekas Miller’s Love Across Borders, including Lekas Miller herself, might think they missed an amended passage in marriage vows: Until the wrong papers do us part. Free Press 101: How we practise journalism.
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