Immigrant Strong: June 2021 Issue
On changing your name, being Taiwanese, fall of communism in Poland, and more
Thanks to Fiza Pirani’s wonderful Foreign Bodies newsletter on immigrants and mental health, I recently won a copy of Anjali Enjeti’s book Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change. I’ve been following Anjali’s work for some time, so it’s not surprising I enjoyed her debut essay collection.
Anjali, who lives outside Atlanta and is half Indian, and a quarter each Puerto Rican and Austrian, says she is “an immigrant’s daughter and also a daughter of the Deep South.” I instantly related to her essays about the pronounciation of her name, feeling like a perpetual foreigner, and being repulsed by nationalism, racism, and fascism. I was impressed how, even as a woman of color, she acknowledges when she fell short of doing everything she could to confront her complicity in perpetuating these harmful systems. As I read her book, I could not help but wonder how much better off this country would be if all of us — but especially those of us who are white — had even a portion of her self-awareness and used it to fight these injustices, like she has been doing as an activist. She describes her tireless work fighting Republicans’ voter suppression efforts in her home state of Georgia, and getting her AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community engaged in voting.
Anjali has a way of articulating things I often think about but can’t quite explain — such as the connection between identity and activism; how marginalized groups are repeatedly harmed when literature and journalism are centered on whiteness; and how problematic it is when we stay silent in the face of racism and extremism. With so many people trying to deny this country’s history of racism, Anjali’s book is a timely and necessary read that weaves together some of my favorite subject areas, including identity, social justice, and activism. She recently also published a novel, The Parted Earth, which has been getting great reviews.
Essays
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure to attend Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing’s conference as a parent-fellow. During one workshop, I returned to a piece I started a while back, about how my family shaved off accents from our last name after we immigrated from Yugoslavia to Canada. When the conference ended and I started catching up on links I’d saved weeks earlier, I came across this stunning piece by Leslie Nguyen-Okwu, To Protect Me From America, My Parents Changed My Name Without Telling Me. I hope you’ll read her Harper’s BAZAAR essay, in which she discusses the importance of holding on to her Black and Asian roots.
“I am living proof of the country’s fast-changing face and a counterweight to white supremacy. As racial violence embroils the country once again, I finally understand the power of what my parents did—to not only honor the nuance of who I am, but also to hedge against the color of my dark skin.”
Freda Epum’s Electric Literature essay How to Be a Terrible No-Good African Daughter also touches on names, connecting with one’s roots, and so much more.
“No, I do not speak the language of my parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. It is quite possible that my language will die with me, as I am unable to extend it to my children or children’s children. I become an island with no bridge to other generations.”
This fantastic Longreads piece by Madhushree Ghosh explores the feelings of guilt many immigrants and children of immigrants feel, the role of privilege, and how we minimize our cultures in America. Here is The State We Are In: Neither Here, There, nor in Heaven.
“I have lived in America longer than in India, my birth country. I’m not even Tamil, and yet, that word, “chitti” — younger sister of an aunt, mausi, mashi, moushi in other Desi languages — reverberates in bursts of validation all through our immigrant communities.”
In this interview with Mathangi Subramanian for BOMB magazine, Rajiv Mohabir discusses merging poetry and prose in his book Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, the lack of representation of queer people of color in literature, how everything is political, and more.
“We’ve been told for far too long that we are broken—or imitations of real Indians. Our languages are not broken. We are not broken. Our history is not one of rupture and extinction. Our history is one of survival en route to flourishing. I wanted to claim these languages and hold them tightly.”
I enjoyed this Electric Literature essay by Yi Shun Lai, I Thought this Memoir Wasn’t “Taiwanese Enough” — Because That Was My Fear About Myself.
“For years I tried to be white, to be American, to be Born in the U.S.A. I wanted so badly to prove my parents wrong. I wanted to prove folks could see me for just me and not for my ethnicity. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade growing out of that; owning up to my heritage, embracing it as my own.”
I’ve mentioned Nina Coomes’s great Catapult column Mistranslate here before; here is her latest piece, FMA and Me: Reckoning With Anime as Japanese and American.
“Complicating the magnetism of anime were the strange expectations that white anime lovers had of me. The hungry way they stared at me, the unnatural insertion of Japanese words into their speech, their claim to “love Japan”—which usually amounted to an essentializing of what they saw on-screen with little awareness that anime often presented fantasy, not reality.”
Akwaeke Emezi’s moving LitHub piece, Up in Smoke: On Death, Identity, and a Flammable Childhood in Nigeria, is excerpted from DEAR SENTHURAN: A Black Spirit Memoir.
“When I came back to the country after leaving for college, I knew from my first circling of the Lagos crowd that the location of my childhood could serve as ammunition against people who thought I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t Nigerian enough.”
Ania Spyra penned this very interesting essay, Shock Therapy, for Guernica on the end of communism in her home country of Poland.
“I was almost fifteen. I had just started high school, where instead of Russian (the tool of Soviet imperialism now phased out of schools) I had begun studying English, its global vistas and promises of mobility so alluring that no one yet noticed its imperial power.”
I always like coming across Grace Loh Prasad’s work; here is her essay in Artsy, This Monumental Xu Bing Installation Helped Me Embrace My Taiwanese American Identity.
“The work affirmed my diasporic position of standing outside and looking in, of being denied access to something that was familiar but just out of reach. It challenged what had always felt to me like a binary definition of identity: Either you are Taiwanese or you are not, with language being the litmus test I would never pass. Tianshu opened up the possibility of a third space for someone like me who was neither an insider nor a foreigner, but in between.”
Hannah Bae has a column at Catapult, Gwangju Daughter; here is a recent essay, Finding a Way to My Father Through ‘Peppermint Candy.’
“It took me years to realize that even the most mundane article in my newsroom queue might reveal some bread crumb of our culture, our language, our history. I am only now starting to see the trail that links my individual family story of separation, grief, and survival to a much larger legacy on the Korean Peninsula.”
I’ll leave you with Dariel Suarez’s LitHub essay, On a Non-Native English Speaker’s Creative Journey to Authenticity, which I think will resonate with many immigrant writers. I love how he discusses the need to stay true to our characters, language, and cultures.
“My language, I decided, would remain “awkward.” Which, in practice, simply meant I would prioritize the cultural authenticity and idiosyncrasy of my characters over any American reader. Immediately, I experienced a level of freedom and confidence I hadn’t felt before.”
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 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, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.