Immigrant Strong: February 2024 Issue

On flying solo, making art in the diaspora, and fiction and societies' fabric

Over the last couple of weeks, I workshopped my writing with Wendy C. Ortiz and a group of nine other writers during the Tin House Winter Workshop. We missed putting our kids to bed, dealt with hungry dogs, and zoomed in from Australia at 5am. I did it while working two jobs (including writing a 15-page report on international peace and security that will be sent to 193 UN member states), coordinating child care while my daughter was on winter break, taking her to the slime museum for her birthday, and doing other parenting and life things. I organized a virtual hangout for immigrant writers—a group that was beyond impressive, supportive, and wonderful. We came from so many countries but shared common experiences, whether it was forgetting our mother tongues, feeling longing and nostalgia for our motherlands, or getting frustrated with the bureaucracy and injustices embedded in U.S. immigration laws.

The world is on fire and a genocide is unravelling in front of our eyes, so it was comforting to at least temporarily be surrounded by others who recognized that reality instead of ignoring it. Many writers in this community also care about writing that exposes societal ills, advocates for justice and equality, and demands respect for the marginalized and oppressed. The workshop felt necessary and invigorating, and I’m honored I got to be a part of the Tin House family again.

Two quick announcements:

• From 6-8 pm ET on April 2 and 9, I’m teaching Writing about your immigrant experience, a two-part virtual class for Cooper Street Workshops. It’s my third time teaching this class and I hope it’s as nurturing as it was the first two times. Participants will walk away with a comprehensive resource document and the presentation slides.

• Because the billionaire baby ruined twitter and so many writers have abandoned the site as a result, I’ll be shifting to linking to people’s Instagram handles or personal websites.

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Book

Matt Ortile published one of my first creative nonfiction essays—and let me put octopus in a headline! I’ve been meaning to feature his memoir since it came out as it was truly a great read. The Groom Will Keep His Name And Other Vows I’ve Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance is a funny and introspective essay collection from the New York-based writer and editor. Through honesty, humor, as well as research and cultural criticism, he takes us on his journey as a gay Filipino immigrant in New York and writes about dating, the model minority myth, male beauty standards, and more.

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Essays, Interviews, and Lists

Elena Dudum points out how harmful it is for journalists and others to use the passive voice when writing about Gaza and Palestine in this TIME piece, Palestine and the Power of Language.

“As a Palestinian American, with refugee grandparents who survived the Nakba, I’m confronting the occupation back home from the safety of my apartment in America. Over the years,  I’ve combed through headlines searching for the active voice in a sea of passivity. I need those who commit actions, those who hold agency, to be named. I need Israel and its occupational forces to be named.”  

Here is another important take, Do Palestinian Lives Have the Same Value to Us? by the Dutch-Palestinian writer Ramsey Nasr. LitHub reproduced his op-ed, which appeared in a leading Dutch newspaper and was translated by David Colmer.

“Dignity is not universal; we grant it to those we choose. It is not inalienable; I can no longer blindly believe that. I’ve seen too many people lose their dignity or cast it aside like a glove that’s too tight. What’s more, I think it’s very difficult, if not impossible, for those who have lost their dignity to regain it.”

I was interested in Aminatta Forna’s What Fiction Can Reveal About the Fragile Fabric of Our Societies for many reasons, including the comparisons of what happened in Sierra Leone to my homeland of Yugoslavia, and later, Croatia. She raises great points about why nations go from peace to conflict, and why many people fail to see the warning signs.

“Four years after that conversation, on the day before the invasion of the Capitol on (coincidentally also) January 6, I sent a text to an American friend in London: “Are you ready for the coup?” I was only half joking. He would later ask me how I’d known, and all I could say is that I had spent a long time thinking about the ways in which a country strays from the path of peace.”

I enjoyed this excerpt from A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging by Lauren Markham for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“More than a third of the students at the high school where I work are applying for some kind of immigration relief here in the United States and must thus learn to narrate the story of the threats against their lives in as much detail as possible. Any deviation, any faltering, any misplaced fact risks the applicants being disbelieved and their applications being rejected—and thus being deported back home to the very danger they were trying to flee. The legal process assumes, and even requires, that memory is infallible, and that we recall things in perfect order.”

Carole Burns interviewed Donna Hemans for Electric Literature about her latest novel, the pain that comes with immigration, and how fiction can sometimes illuminate stories that nonfiction can’t.

“What was very clear to me was that every argument being made around 2016 about immigrants and the jobs that they were stealing, certain language being used about the immigrants and the countries that they come from—it was exactly the same as I was seeing in the research from 100 years before. There was nothing any different, nothing original about the arguments that you’re hearing today. It really brings home the point that there are certain groups of people who are always, always trying to find a home in the world. They are moving from one place to another to try to find that place where they belong. And so that’s what I really wanted to hone in on in this story.”

Here is Amanda Churchill on Embracing Her Japanese Heritage Through Food for LitHub.

“I felt a fizz of happiness inside me. She was calling me Japanese. Something lifted and something fell into place. I didn’t dare remind her of the Spaghetti-Os and of what she said to me so long ago. And she had predicted correctly. I would soon find out that, indeed, I was pregnant with a daughter.”

Electric Literature has two lists that may be of interest to readers of this newsletter: 11 Books About Seasonal and Migrant Farmworkers in America and 8 Stories About Cultural Alienation and the Search for Belonging. Words Without Borders has a list of 8 Writers who write in their mother languages. There are of course lots of lists out there for Black History Month—which I hope people are reading year-round, not just in February.

Emanuel Admassu interviewed Salome Asega for Guernica on making art in the diaspora, community-focused storytelling, and breaking the rules of artistic spaces.

“When I make work it’s very much situated in a diaspora identity. I’m making work that can’t be distinctly “tagged” to place defined by borders. It’s just of the diaspora, as a global player, as someone who moves between nodes. But also, when I make work, I ask myself, Can my Ethiopian mom understand this?”

I’m looking forward to reading Grace Loh Prasad’s The Translator’s Daughter: A Memoir, which comes out next month. Here is an excerpt in Longreads: Chaos and Cosmic Order: The Year of the Dragon.

“The immigration hall is just as I remember it—cold and sterile with high ceilings and yellowish lighting. I’m surprised that the room isn’t brightened with decorations since I know every other public space in Taiwan will be festooned with greetings on red banners, bundles of paper firecrackers, potted kumquat trees, and lucky images of coins and fish to signify wealth and abundance in the new year.”

I also enjoyed Kristina Kasparian’s Longreads essays, Flying Solo.

“The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me? I’m resistant to changing my rituals, to deviating from the script. I order the same gelato, take the same shortcut, sit in my same spot on the fountain and on my bench in the park. I want to stick to what I used to do and who I used to be.”

I’ll end with this inspiring quote from I Had to Hold a Whole Ocean in My Hands: A Conversation with Ani Gjika in The Rumpus.

“Women writers of diasporic heritage are often marginalized and unseen, and so I wish for them to write their stories standing from a place of power that comes from knowing, seeing, and loving themselves for who they are. They carry a superpower, a multilingual brain, and they are capable of bridging cultures in new and exciting ways.”

Thanks for reading,

Vesna

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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 in the human rights and international affairs fields. I have written about my immigrant experience for the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. I participated in Tin House workshops in 2024 and 2021, and attended the 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Conference as a parent-fellow. Find me on Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe, or twitter, @vesnajaksic.