Immigrant Strong: April 2022 Issue
On feeling uprooted, finding your accent, and migratory grief
In A Body Across Two Hemispheres, Victoria Buitron writes about her life in Connecticut and Ecuador through essays that use different points of view, tenses, and styles. In this debut memoir-in-essays, she covers topics such as being the daughter of a garbage collector, marrying a former undocumented immigrant, and the quirks of being bilingual. She writes with honesty as well as a strong understanding of the harms of our country’s immigration system on millions of families.
Essays and Interviews
I’ll start with Edin Hajdarpašić’s important piece for the Boston Review, Do They Know We’re Here? It resonated with me for reasons well beyond our shared Yugoslav roots, including his interesting examination of the role of disbelief in the early days of war, the tendency to erase some people’s experiences, and a common desire to search for happy endings.
“As a historian, I think my profession can confront these issues, but a deeper—and fundamentally narrative—problem remains: the desire for history to ultimately deliver a happy ending, some reassuring overcoming of past bigotry or some inkling that the future will be better than the past.”
Here is a powerful LitHub piece on being from a country that no longer exists, growing up with cows, the pain of looking back, and more. Written by Pacifique Irankunda, On Surviving a Childhood Marked by Civil War is excerpted from his memoir, The Tears of a Man Flow Inward.
“The past meant struggles of family problems and a country falling apart in war. Present time was more of that. Looking forward was looking beyond past and present to whatever undefined thing lay ahead. But though I didn’t realize it, looking ahead meant also carrying the deep past as my companion to the future.”
For Catapult, Janet Manley examines the role of skiing for migrants from Europe and beyond in The Curious Lives of Ski Migrants.
“I taught Texans to parallel, fell in love with my American husband by the Continental Divide, and the rest is history, as they say. But whose history? This is what I want to know: What does leaving one’s home country do to a person? What does it do to the land one tries to call home?”
I enjoyed Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s LitHub essay, The Revelation of Reading Toni Morrison in Moscow.
“For me and many of my female friends, Morrison’s books became portals into a new, freer world of self-discovery and womanhood; they peeled away the scar tissue that our hearts, our souls had grown like a protective shell, a carapace, in order not to be crushed, annihilated by a male fist. Her books gave us, if not solace, then hope, hope that one day we would be able to speak our minds, to express what we truly felt, to chart our own destiny, and to denounce the current regime that continuously suppressed, suffocated women.”
I always like Anjanette Delgado’s writing on uprootedness, which even those born on U.S. soil can feel. Here is What to Read When You Feel Uprooted for Electric Literature.
“You don’t have to be an immigrant to know the fear and loneliness of uprootedness. Sometimes life, your own, kicks you out of it. What you had built with so much sweat and love, gone in seconds.”
It’s a thrill to see writers I attended conferences with publish their debuts, so I’m happy to say Yasmín Ramírez’s memoir ¡Ándale, Prieta! is out now. As someone who dropped accents from my last name after becoming an immigrant, I very much related to her essay Finding My Accent for The Open Book Blog.
“At first, I was hesitant to start using the accents on my name. I felt like an imposter. Yasmín was someone who had always been in touch with her Mexican culture. She knew how to write in Spanish and used tildes as easily and freely as salsa en sus tacos. Meanwhile, my whole life, I’d been Yasmin. La chica pocha, whose Spanish was so so on any given day and whose cheeks flushed when she fumbled over verb conjugations.”
Here is Nina Li Coomes’s Guernica essay, How to Inhabit the Word.
“For years now, I have been trying to write my own fractured history. Being hafu Japanese and white American means that I am excluded from the mythic monoethnic past my two motherlands preserve and perpetuate. I can draw no straight line between me and any ancestors by blood, and so I have been drawing a complicated tidal chart, ebbing and flowing across time, objects, and place. But this process has left me too often feeling disoriented, lost. I craved a guide, someone who could braid the political and personal with bravery and care.”
Many immigrant daughters will likely relate to Patrycja Humienik’s Catapult essay, Unlearning My Immigrant Mother’s Ideas of Beauty.
“Like many immigrant daughters, I’m of a lineage of women who didn’t put themselves first. I don’t have the lived experience of unbridled authenticity and honesty in my personal life, nor do I have many models of it. Writing often feels antithetical to the charge as an immigrant daughter to be a secret keeper, to never bring shame to the family, to obey.”
I wanted to also include Sheon Han’s informative piece in The Atlantic about migratory grief, something I certainly feel, along with probably many others who hail from broken countries. Here is When You No Longer Recognize Your Home Country.
“But not all migratory grief is exactly alike. People like Monastyrskyi who emigrate from countries that have undergone severe political changes can feel that their home has irreversibly transformed. They grieve not merely their severance from a homeland, but the demise of a place as they knew it.”
I remember trying to get into one of Ocean Vuong’s readings with a friend at NYU a few years ago—we arrived more than half an hour early, only to find the line already stretched down two blocks. We never got in, but I remember walking away feeling happy that so many people came out to support such a talented writer. His writing and interviews are always so raw and honest, his reflections deep and contemplative. His TIME interview with Nicole Chung was no different.
“I thought, Here we are again: I have to speak for you. I have to speak for your pain. I have to verbalize your humanity. Because it’s not a given. Which is the central problem with how we value Asian American women.”
Here is one more interview with Vuong—with Hua Hsu for The New Yorker. Vuong’s new collection of poems, Time is a Mother, is out now.
“We often see these foreign countries as “behind,” but we only measure that in G.D.P. and technology. But when it comes to the spiritual wisdom of how to handle something like language, Vietnam is way ahead, and I hope America catches up one day.”
As the war in Ukraine rages on, it’s important to keep in mind the points Ruth Madievsky raises in her op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Speaking Russian doesn’t make me a supporter of Putin’s war.
“The nature of diaspora, of living between worlds with no discrete place to call home, makes it difficult to determine how I do want to identify. Diasporic peoples are intimately aware that being from a place does not make you of a place.”
Thanks for reading,
Vesna
About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, and children of immigrants and refugees. For more info, here is a Q&A I did with Longreads about the newsletter. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.
About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then immigrated to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits focusing on human rights and social justice. I have written about my immigrant experience for The New York Times, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. Last year, I attended Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing conference as a parent-fellow, and participated in the Tin House Summer Workshop. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.