Immigrant Strong: January 2024 Issue
On ghosts, witnessing, and affection
I saw Ingrid Rojas Contreras read at the Brooklyn Book Festival in the fall, and love engaging with someone’s work after hearing them discuss it in person. In The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir, she digs into her family’s powers of healing and magic, recounts what she gained when she and her Mami lost their memory in two separate accidents, and reckons with her family’s secrets and history. This lyric memoir is an intense and unique read; it earned the Colombian-born author spots in the finals for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Essays and Interviews
I want to start with Sarah Aziza’s powerful essay for Jewish Currents, The Work of the Witness.
“THE DILEMMA OF THE DIASPORIC PALESTINIAN: In exile, we are forced to witness Palestine from a distance, and yet remain intimately bound to the events unfolding there. We straddle multiple vectors of power and oppression, and struggle with how best to respond to the murder of our kin. I feel the sting of Owda’s words, the moral implications of my position as a tax-paying US citizen. Yet, as a Palestinian with roots in Gaza, I have wrestled with my own questions of disclosure. I, too, know the impulse to publicize my family’s tragedy, to demand witness of others.”
Here is another great essay on a related topic—Susan Muaddi Darraj on Finding Inspiration in the Lives of Ordinary Palestinians for LitHub. Her novel Behind You Is The Sea is now out.
“These days, I’m reminded how impossible it feels to be a Palestinian in the diaspora. My social media timeline is more surreal than anything Kafka could have conjured up. On the one hand, I see a Palestinian child screaming, holding up a hand on which most of the fingers have been blown off. On the other, I see posts from American friends who are irate but amused that Valentine’s stuff is hitting the store shelves so soon after Christmas. Meanwhile, as a Palestinian Christian, I belong to a mourning community that refused to celebrate Christmas this year, even though the holiday originated with our ancestors.”
I featured Melissa Rivero’s debut book in this newsletter; her second novel, Flores and Miss Paula, is now out. Ivelisse Rodriguez spoke with the author in this interview for Bomb magazine.
“Whether we’re nostalgic for a homeland or missing a loved one, these lands of longing are places that provide us with solace. They offer comfort. They provide hope. They’re a way for us to continue connecting with something or someone that’s no longer within our reach. Sometimes, we can and do go back to our homeland, but it'll never be how we see it in our minds. It’s the same with our loved ones.”
I loved Vanessa Chan’s fantastic Vogue essay Finding—And Writing—A Space for Myself. Her novel The Storm We Made is now out and has already made many lists.
“Often I would stroll bookshelves, roaming the aisle with all works by authors with last names beginning with Ch and dreaming of my hypothetical book sitting alongside them. But as a Malaysian woman without access to the centers of the publishing industry, reading books written almost entirely by white men, I couldn’t envision a life for myself in literature. I never felt permitted to think of myself as a writer.”
I enjoyed Deborah Lindsay Williams’s interview for The Rumpus, Longing for Home: A Conversation with Gemini Wahhaj.
“Am I flattening these characters who are not really thinking about “why am I here” or about their experience in America? I’m not sure. I mean, the diaspora is not just a longing for home but is also really complicated and beautiful and painful, this mysterious experience abroad.”
Jiadai Lin (we’re both doing the Tin House workshop now!) wrote about Affection; the piece won her an honorable mention in Pigeon Pages’ 2023 flash contest.
“Once, she told you that when people see her alone they ask, where’s your other half? You were sitting together in the hallway after the last bell had rung, and she touched her thigh to yours and rested her head on your shoulder, and you thought that you were so lucky to be seen, even if it was just as part of a whole.”
Here is Alicia Romero’s great interview with A.J. Rodriguez for the New England Review.
“The choices of language and audience I made for “Raíces” are the same I make for any story. I write for my ideal reader, someone who doesn’t need me to translate or italicize or explain or justify the use of Spanish, the use of New Mexican slang, the refusal of “proper” grammar and spelling. In other words, I write for my community. I write so that a story’s cultural meaning and emotional resonance feels true to them.”
It’s always so wonderful to come across someone’s first published piece. Esther Hwi-Young Kim penned eating my way home for one of The Seventh Wave’s beautifully curated anthologies.
“what do you do when the journey home brings you back to a place where you can no longer enter? or to someone whose warmth no longer exists outside of memory? my father leaves his motherland once again, and i weep on the train ride back to seocheon.”
Many of us will relate to the sentiment Michael Hoffman expressed in this Granta essay about being a a “good little immigrant,” Out of Germany.
“I tried, in my twenties and thirties and beyond, to be a good little immigrant. I renounced Germany and renounced German. I denied that either had aesthetic virtue. I was reluctant to speak it, couldn’t write it, and didn’t want to live in it. Germany to me was always the newer country, rebuilt after the Second World War – and formed, as I was, in and by England, I held that only an old, shabby country could be beautiful and habitable. I denied the language, and wished I could unlearn it – the one Frederick the Great (him again) used with his horses.”
Delia Radu reflected on growing up in Bucharest, Romania, in A Tree Called Mayakovsky for Litro magazine.
“Ours was a land of lampposts with no lamps. Phone boxes with no phones inside. Playgrounds with child swing frames but no swing seats. Sandpits with no sand. Every day more and more restrictions and cuts were declared, not as such, on the telly they were dubbed “firm, dignified steps towards a golden future,” and they meant that, wherever one found oneself, the light bulbs would fizz and refuse to give light, the taps would cough and refuse to spout water, the radiators wouldn’t radiate, the heaters wouldn’t heat.”
Kimberly Rooney explored their Chinese identity, adoption, and more in this fantastic essay for The Rumpus, Ghosts in the Mirror.
“My body felt like the most Chinese thing about me. This body was my proof—the one thing I could point to when people cited my lack of language, my lack of culture, my lack of familial relation as evidence of my non-Chineseness, or worse, my whiteness. Until I opened my mouth, I was Chinese.”
I appreciated Haig Chahinian’s enlightening interview with Nancy Agabian for the Los Angeles Review of Books
“I hoped the book would shine a light on a diaspora experience—the fear that manifests when your identity is invisible within a hugely powerful country, and that same identity makes you feel responsible for a small, historically beleaguered country. A push-pull of feeling powerless, and yet being confronted with your own power.”
A heartfelt thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and subscribing to Immigrant Strong—we are now more than 1,000 subscribers strong. Not bad for my little project with a $0 budget. With gratitude,
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 Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. In 2021, 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; Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe; or my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.