Immigrant Strong: February 2021 Issue
The lunchbox moment, on saris and identity, and grieving from a distance
I’ll start with a little announcement: on Saturday, March 6, I’ll be teaching an online workshop on immigrant writing through the Cooper Street Workshop at Rutgers Camden College of Arts and Science. In this the 3-hour class, we’ll look at non-fiction/memoir/personal essay work by immigrant writers, discuss themes that immigrant narratives lend themselves to, talk about where you can pitch your story, and get some writing done. I hope to make it engaging and informative — so if you are interested in joining or know someone who is, please pass along the registration link above. (Facebook event link is here and Eventbrite link to buy tickets is here).
Book
In Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu tells her story in terms of the tremors, shocks, and fault lines that earthquakes create, the fragmented structure reflecting a life split between countries and continents. Owusu, who was born in Tanzania to a white Armenian-American mother and a Black Ghanian father, has also lived in Uganda, Ethiopia, Italy, England, and the United States. Her search for home and identity is at the center of this debut memoir. Owusu also weaves in cultural history about some of the places where she has lived, examines what being Black and biracial means, and how abandonment by her mother and the death of her father at an early age have shaped her. Her writing is lyrical, the back-and-forth format is fitting for her story, and I look forward to more writing from this Brooklyn-based writer.
Essays
Let’s start with In the Shadow of Saris: Exploring Identity Through Memory and Dislocation by Bhavna Mehta for Catapult.
“Once the wheels of immigration were set in motion, I wanted the independent (promised) life in America with such an intensity that leaving felt natural, absolute. I willingly let go of tradition, language, familiarity, family, country. Moving across continents grown and alone, I did not brood over loss and separation. I was tired of walking with braces and the effort it took to be included, to be visible. I was ready to take up residence in the land of inalienable rights and roll my wheelchair to a freedom absent in my dreams.”
This Eater piece by Jaya Saxena, The Limits of the Lunchbox Moment, is really good at pointing out a trope that immigrant stories often fall into, questioning why that is the case, and what writers and editors can do about it. It made me think about my own writing, and I love that there is growing conversation about the fact that immigrant stories are complex and nuanced, and do not fit neatly into molds.
“The story of being bullied in the cafeteria for one’s lunch is so ubiquitous that it’s attained a gloss of fictionality. It’s become metonymy for the entire diaspora experience; to be a young immigrant or child of immigrants is to be bullied for your lunch, and vice versa.”
Speaking of immigrant narratives, here is another piece that goes into this subject — and so much more. Here is The Many Lives of Steven Yeun by Jay Caspian Kang for The New York Times Magazine.
“What, exactly, is a typical immigrant story? And is the transcription of a person’s traumas and “truth” — which in literary terms usually means explaining all the nuances of the immigrant struggle to a presumed white, upper-middle-class audience — the only thing that qualifies as “literature”? And if not, what then clears the bar?”
I’ll stick to the themes about immigrant stories and the importance of representation of immigrants in literature with this Lithub essay by Eman Quotah’s, Writing a Saudi American Novel When No One Has Done It Before.
“Standing in the bookstore in my jeans and t-shirt, I felt erased, as fully as if someone had draped a black cloth over me to hide me from view, like the princess on the cover of the book in my hands. The image of Saudi women marketed to Americans, it seemed, presented them as rich, abused, oppressed, hidden, enslaved by Saudi men. They hadn’t roller skated round and round their best friends’ tiled yards as preteens and later bought bootleg Crowded House tapes at the music store.”
I learned a lot from this Harper’s BAZAAR piece, Why I Separated My Indian Identity from My Hindu Identity, by Mathangi Subramanian.
“The truth was I didn’t love being Hindu. But I loved being Indian American.While I was secure in my American identity, the Indian part was more complicated. I couldn’t speak Tamil, my mother tongue, nor did I know how to cook more than a handful of traditional dishes. I preferred Western movies to Indian ones, and although I followed Indian politics, I lived too far away to be truly involved. Hinduism was my only connection to India.”
Grace Loh Prasad has another beautiful essay, Unfinished Translation, in KHÔRA.
“Symbols fill the space where language fails. As the daughter of a translator and a child of diaspora, I’m often at a loss for words, stumbling over the edges and gaps where we switch from one system to another, where we lack a perfect translation or direct equivalent.”
Matt Ortile has a column at Catapult, Grief at a Distance, about the death of his mother in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first piece is beautiful and heartbreaking: My Mother Lives Here Because I Live Here.
“But I don’t want her watching over me. I need Mom next to me, on this same mortal plane, only a call or text or transpacific plane ride away. (I’m old. You do the traveling. Collect the miles.) That was the comfort of our immigrant lives, after she and Dad returned to the Philippines. Technology gave us ways to be together, as best we could, helped us figure out how to live apart. Now, we are simply apart.”
Here is another interview with the always insightful Laila Lalami, by Abbie Reese for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“But an erasure of memory is part of how the United States constructs its national identity. It’s by erasing these little portions of its history that are shameful or distasteful or disturbing that American mythology is created. Think about the myth of “a nation of immigrants,” made up of many different races, and how that erases indigenous dispossession, slavery, or segregation.”
I’ll leave you with this beautiful visual essay, The Summer I Learned to Lie, written by May Ziadé and illustrated by Lucile Gauvain for The Believer magazine.
“I think there is a war.
Mom said I shouldn’t worry.
Don’t worry.
Just fireworks.
So I learned not to.”
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. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.
About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then moved to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits focusing on human rights. I have written about my immigrant experience for The New York Times, Catapult, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.