Immigrant Strong: July 2023 Issue
On culture and consumption; reclaiming community; and inherited trauma
I am excited to share I’ll have an essay in the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, edited by the award-winning writer Victoria Buitron, author of A Body Across Two Hemispheres. The anthology will be published October 3 and is now available to preorder. The book will also be celebrated at the Connecticut Literary Festival in Hartford on Oct. 14. To learn about upcoming events and readings around the book’s launch, you can follow my public instagram account and my twitter account (as long as I’m still there, ugh…). I’ll post any updates in this monthly newsletter if the timing aligns.
Book
Gina Chung’s debut novel, Sea Change, beautifully navigates loneliness, immigrant trauma, identity, and female friendship. The writing feels both lyric and conversational, and I loved Chung’s exploration of nature and animals, and our relationship to them. Any book with an octopus on the cover is likely to catch my attention, and I’m glad this one did—it was a moving read, with everything from grief to humor woven in.
Essays and Interviews
I’ll start with Christine Kandic Torres’s great Electric Literature essay, I Can’t Offer Up My Culture for Consumption. She is the author of The Girls in Queens, which is now available in paperback.
“I don’t want to serve my home on a platter, the bones to be picked clean and forgotten about until it’s burped back up a bit later. My novel is titled The Girls in Queens, but I can’t offer up my culture to be consumed without context. After all, food might attract a certain segment of the population to Queens, but “the food” is certainly not what attracted our immigrant families to settle down here.”
I related to many things in Ermina Veljačić’s piece Reclaiming Community as a Bosnian Refugee on Chicago’s South Side for the South Side Weekly. The Bosnia-born writer combines personal experience with important information about the harms of ethno-nationalism and genocide denial.
“I found solace in the friendships I formed with a few Mexican peers. They welcomed me with open arms, without prying into my origins or demanding explanations of cultural differences. And honestly, that was a relief. I didn’t have to answer questions about where I came from, and it was easier to just blend in and be accepted for who I was without the weight of trying to fit in.”
Thien Pham expresses gratitude to his Asian immigrant parents in this interview with Hannah Bae for Kirkus. Here is A Story of Food and Family, Told Through Pictures, centered around Pham’s graphic memoir, Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam.
“In the past, when my friends would say I should write my immigrant story, I never knew how to come at it, with me being the hero or the protagonist. When I wrote this book, I saw the heroes were my mom and dad. I don’t know where I’d be without my mom. She’s the reason why we survived and thrived in America.”
Ingrid Rojas Contreras discusses memory and memory loss, things we inherit and don’t inherit, and living with a lot of questions in this Bomb magazine interview with Kaveh Akbar.
“I think at that moment, when my memory came back, I remembered that my mother had also lost her memory, this strange kind of inheritance. Thinking of inheritance, I wrote a book that's about the things that you inherit, and the things that you don't inherit, and all sorts of memory, like a nation's memory, or a people's memory when political stories have been erased. Cultural memory, personal memory.”
For Electric Literature, Ruth Madievsky speaks with Arturo Vidich about inherited trauma, having a foot in two worlds, queerness, and more. Her debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, is now out.
“But it was more about this idea that the legacy of the Holocaust and Soviet Terror is inescapable, I think, even for these people who are a few generations removed. It doesn’t just disappear. It’s part of how they grew up. It’s not something that’s spoken about. That was a thread I was interested in pulling at in the novel without hammering in some kind of unambiguous thesis about, you know, Debbie is the way she is because of “blank.”
It’s always exciting to see friends’ writing out in the world—plus this one involves my motherland of Croatia! Here is is Heritage Fantasy, from my talented Tin House ‘21 cohort member Katie Kopajtic. It was originally published in Cream City Review.
“Similar to the way that my Puerto Rican wife feels only truly at home when she is near a cerulean ocean, I feel an inexplicable ease in Croatia. I cherish the sight of scrabble mountainsides and pebble beaches. Everything makes sense when I am there–the warm bottles of milk, the way their brand of seltzer (Jamnica) fizzes, the motion sensor stair lights leading up to my cousin’s apartment, the piles of fresh figs rotting on the sidewalks in unfettered abundance. I admire the strength of the lavender sprigs, gripping the sea cliffs as they reach for the sun-drenched Adriatic.”
Mihret Sibhat writes about the importance of names for Ethiopians, and the meaning behind them in this LitHub essay.
“Maybe the question shouldn’t be who is right—the angels or the preacher? Both positions, taken together, appear to be pointing to the bigger and obvious truth that people are “large and contain multitudes.” Maybe our names and the hopeful stories accompanying them are mere guardrails intended to keep us on the right side of our inner struggles.”
Stephanie Jimenez conducted this interesting interview for The Rumpus, Balancing all the parts to the whole arc: A conversation with Cristina García.
“In a way, the book is looking at a spectrum of reunion possibilities, both personally and politically, and with varying results. I think the book interrogates the possibilities to impossibilities of reunions personally and politically. But politics gets in the way a lot. I mean, I see it in my own family.”
I will leave you with Arthur Asseraf’s moving Granta essay, My Time Machine.
“The power balance had shifted. I was the one who could get by in Arabic, who had done my research, who was acting as a guide. I had always thought of my father’s Casablanca as an enchanted place I could never enter. It turns out that this place had largely existed in my head, as my imagination filled in the gaps from his limited recollections.”
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. 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.