Immigrant Strong: June Issue
On Black Lives Matter, war and the pandemic, and family photographs
In the middle of all the awful news — our government’s continued failure to handle this pandemic, voter suppression, response to protests against police brutality and racism with more police brutality and racism — this recent picture of the New York Times bestseller list gives me some hope. I realize NYT’s readership is hardly representative of our country, but I hope this kind of education about racism and white privilege is not just a fad. Those of us who are white especially need to turn to Black writers to educate ourselves about the unfair system that we benefit from on a daily basis so we can help dismantle it.
Here are 15 suggestions for books about race and an antiracist reading list from Ibram X. Kendi. For the little ones in your life, here is a good list of children’s book recommendations by age. Also, if you are buying books, please consider skipping Amazon and supporting your local independent bookstore instead. And check out LitHub’s list of Black-owned independent bookstores.
Essays
I left Yugoslavia as a child right before war and have probably thought about that move more in the last three months than the previous three decades. This passage from Sara Goudarzi’s Al Jazeera piece helps explain some of the things I’ve been reflecting a lot about in recent months.
“My mind travels back a few decades, to Tehran. For the first time, I think about the two experiences as parallels, about how both the war and pandemic started so slowly - one bomb at the onset, then several; a positive case in one state, then another - that no one believed either event to really be occurring. And then, one day, life as we knew it had been upended. Everything routine dissipated into ether.”
I love Raksha Vasudevan’s writing—she’s great at experimenting with different styles, and this piece is no exception. Here is Reasons I Wish to Wed Plantain in The Offing literary magazine.
“I am Asian, woman, immigrant. These bodies are not allowed to wear desire. But you have all the same identities as I.”
Here is a lovely essay by Beth Nguyen, Family Photographs, for the Paris Review.
“All family pictures create a chronology. But I realize only now that the pictures we took and kept were a space just for us. White people determined so much about our lives—jobs, schools, language—but not in these photos. In these images we seem to be in our own world, alone together.”
Sarah Chaves, a daughter of Portuguese immigrants, has written this powerful and timely piece, When Cleaning Is The Only Option, for The New York Times.
“I see my mother’s eyes in the eyes of my students who are now behind a Plexiglass partition instead of in my classroom, beeping my groceries along and handing me my receipt with trembling fingers. I worry for anyone who has been deemed essential, but who has always been thought of as less than.”
I enjoyed Madhushree Ghosh’s interview for The Rumpus with Sejal Shah, author of a debut essay collection out this month, This Is One Way to Dance. I appreciated Shah’s comments on shifting identities, and deciding not to use italics in her book.
“I wanted to honor my experience and the experiences of immigrants who do have to look words up. Not everything needs to be translated.”
To get a taste of Shah’s book, here is an excerpt in Guernica.
Fernanda Santos interviewed a young immigrant in this New York Times piece, What You Can Learn From a Dreamer in Arizona.
“Our skins have the color of caramel. Our names have an other-ness ring, though it’s a ring that can also represent the sound of the future in a fast-changing United States.”
Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much is high up on my to-read list. Here is a great interview with the Palestinian American writer in The Rumpus.
“Being a part of a diaspora can often feel like being a part of nothing. You are neither this nor that. It would be one thing to be Arab and living in the Middle East, or to be American and live in the United States, but to be both can be painful because you always feel called to the other.”
Thanks for reading,
Vesna
Event
At 8 pm ET tonight, Epiphany journal is hosting a virtual reading and release party for its new borders issue.
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 moved to Canada, and now live in New York, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits focusing on human rights. 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.