Immigrant Strong: June 2023 Issue
On navigating queerness in Spanish and English; borders and rivers; and a cookie tin
The title of Anne Liu Kellor’s memoir, Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging, helped draw me to the book—it contemplates so many things I love to read about and explore through this newsletter and my own writing. I found it moving and introspective, and related to how she grapples with trying to live, love, and belong in two languages, countries, and cultures.
Essays and Interviews
I’ll start with Manuel Betancourt’s great piece about navigating queerness in English and Spanish, excerpted for LitHub from The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men.
“For years this is how I experienced homophobia at home. Not with any one instance of openly hurtful provocation (though there were plenty of those as well) but with the insistent and incessant monotony of linguistic crutches that eroded any ability to claim those words, let alone those identities, as my own. It’s why I found refuge in the English language. It may be an illusory oasis whose own linguistic biases feel, in their foreignness, easier to parse out, discard, or ignore accordingly, but it’s nevertheless given me the tools with which to see myself anew.”
Rachel Heng wrote a fantastic piece for TIME that has resonated with many immigrant writers and I hope is widely read by others as well, Why I Don't Translate Non-English Words in My Writing.
“Characters in my novel speak in Singlish, with its unique syntax, rhythms, and vocabulary arising from the intermingling of English with different languages in Singapore, including Malay, Cantonese, Tamil, and Hokkien. I chose not to italicize, translate, or gloss, not wanting to position the language and world of my Singaporean characters as something foreign, something othered, that needed to be made legible for the white Western reader.”
I loved Alejandra Oliva’s piece, Borders and Rivers: On Language, Faith, and Family at the US/Mexico Border, excerpted for LitHub from her book, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration.
“We see this daily migration in twinned cities all along our southern border: San Diego/Tijuana, El Paso/Juárez, Brownsville/Matamoros. Entire communities full of people good enough to work in the United States, to provide cheap labor cleaning houses or watching children, but not good enough to be sponsored for visas or to be paid a living wage as defined on the U.S. side of the border.”
Yao Xiao penned a beautiful and well-thought-out essay on bilingualism, creating art in another language, authenticity, and immigrant identity. For Electric Literature, here is I Wanted To Write and Teach Literature Like My Mother Did.
“The cost of being fluid is never feeling true, the curse of being inauthentic to all sides. Many times in my life as an immigrant, I am asked whether I feel more American or Chinese. It is too big a question to answer definitively, but when I set out to make art on a day to day basis, the competition of languages and how much time I am willing to invest in each begs to be resolved with urgency.”
Christine Kandic Torres’s LitHub interview with two other writers from Queens has many great quotes, including this one from Bushra Rehman:
“I also think I have a certain sense of awareness and strength and even self-confidence that comes from growing up as an immigrant among other immigrants (or second generation amongst other second generations), so—although the white hierarchy and oppression was always there—I was always among other people who were just like me. I wasn’t isolated. I have a sense of myself.”
Emily Bernard wrote about parenting, studying abroad, and so much more in a stunning Yale Review essay called This Part of Our Lives Is Over.
“I couldn’t wait for Giulia to see for herself that the history of the United States is not the history of the world; that human vocabulary, naturally limited, cannot capture all that we mean to communicate to one another; that difference ought to inspire only curiosity and joy—not fear; that it is okay, even good, to be alone in the world sometimes.”
I enjoyed Kyla Walker’s interview with Kenan Orhan, author of I Am My Country. Here is Turning Small Rebellions Into a Large Literary Revolution for Electric Literature.
“There’s a lot of different ways contemporary publishing tries to set up situations so that they go well, whether it’s sensitivity readers or making sure that people get to tell their own stories rather than having those stories taken out of their mouths and told by other people. I struggle with that still, as someone who’s away from Turkey, someone who’s not living those disasters, I don’t know, with 100% confidence that I have any right to tell these stories. But I also know that their not being told in the States is kind of a shame. And if no one else here is going to write them, I guess I will.”
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dima Ayoub penned this very informative piece, A Century of Writing Back: How Salma Khadra Jayyusi Brought Arabic Literature to the Anglophone World.
“As a young immigrant growing up in the diaspora, I found that Jayyusi’s translations made palpable an absence that was otherwise unconscious—what the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish would name the “present-absent.” I was studying postcolonial literature at the turn of the millennium and found that Jayyusi’s body of work, which featured diverse voices spanning centuries, awakened in me the pain of neglect and the realization that even fields like postcolonial literature had marginalized the literary output of Arab writers.”
I’ll wrap it up with Raksha Vasudevan’s heart-wrenching New York Times piece, The Immigrant Experience in a Danish Butter Cookie Tin, which I think will speak to many of us who are immigrants or children of immigrants.
“After we left India, another one showed up in our pantry in Canada. My brother and I devoured the biscuits, but the tin remained. Over the course of years, that container witnessed our lives mutate as we became dully classic examples of the immigrant experience.”
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.
Dear Paola, you are too kind! Thank you so much for your kind words, they made my day! So glad you're enjoying the newsletter!
You know I absolutely love your newsletter... I'm reading the June issue only now that I got the notification for the July issue.
I had been travelling in June and I ended up waiting to read this so long that the new one came. Always waiting for a moment of quiet that was good enough to enjoy reading 100%.
This is what I used to do as a kid sometimes with my favourite weekly comic books :D
Thought you should know.
Thanks so much as always.
Your newsletter is truly one of the ones I look forward to receiving the most, dear Vesna.
Much love from Spain