Immigrant Strong: March 2022 Issue
My piece in Pigeon Pages, longing for Kyiv, and reading dangerously
In Go Back To Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American, Wajahat Ali uses a phrase commonly unleashed at immigrants, children of immigrants, and people of color as a starting point to discuss what it means to be an American today. Born in California to Pakistani parents, Ali’s memoir weaves humor, cultural criticism, and historical context to examine issues such as Islamophobia, racism, and white supremacy. It would be a particularly good read for those under the impression that we live in a post-racial society, and anyone trying to get a sense of what it’s like to be brown and Muslim in post-9/11 America.
Essays and Interviews
I am excited to share my creative nonfiction essay An Immigrant’s Alphabet was published by Pigeon Pages, a New York-based literary journal. I wrote this flash essay in second-person to express how our society dehumanizes and others immigrants—through its bizarre visa system, degrading language, and by endlessly using immigrants for political fodder.
The piece had been percolating in my head for years, but I put pen to paper last summer, while attending Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing’s conference as a parent-fellow. I’m so grateful for the burst of motivation and confidence the conference gave me—I frantically wrote much of this piece late at night, energized and inspired from listening to other writers.
Pigeon Pages paired my words with powerful images from Tahir Carl Karmali, a Kenya-born artist and designer, and my editor Ashley made the piece stronger by asking terrific questions. I’m deeply thankful for her care and commitment to this piece, and bringing my words to life. You can read the essay here.
There has been a lot of powerful writing on Ukraine, Russia, and the ongoing war. Others have compiled it much better than I can, so I’ll include a few of those links for those who want to dig deeper. LitHub has a section on Ukraine; the Atlantic recommends 9 books to help understand the war in Ukraine; Book Riot suggests 11 Ukrainian books available in English translation; and Electric Literature offers a literary guide to understanding Ukraine. Writer Lea Zeltersman’s March newsletter gives recommendations focusing on Jewish history and identity in Ukraine. n+1 has essays and translated dispatches from Ukraine. Here are a few pieces that struck a chord with me:
I hail from a war-torn country—Yugoslavia—so Maria Kuznetsova’s My Painting of Kyiv for The Yale Review deeply resonated; her exploration of what it means to grieve for your homeland, the complexity of doing that from far away, and feeling “just one notch more legitimate than a tourist.”
“These past few weeks, as I’ve watched my fellow Soviet immigrants post pictures on Facebook and write thoughtful tweets and change their profile banners to Ukrainian flags, I’ve been at a loss for words. Am I allowed to feel gutted when I see my birthplace targeted by an aggressive military attack? Why do I feel like I need to ask permission to be authentically affected?”
A number of Americans have asked me what I think about what’s been happening—I’m not sure if it’s because I come from another European country destroyed by war, or because my graduate degree is in international affairs, or they think my “foreigner” status grants me some kind of credibility, or they are just making small talk. Either way, there are many things in Leah Asmelash’s CNN interview with the great Ilya Kaminsky that I wish I could express as well as he does—the “ignorant bliss” that drives me mad, the role of complicity, and the importance of following the money. (Seriously, always follow the money!)
“As an author, I see the irony in the citizens of the American empire showing so much concern for the victims of [for example] the Russian empire while America is regularly bombing people's houses, and all the while it uses police brutality against its own citizens [at] right this very moment.”
Agata Izabela Brewer turns to poetry to confront loss and exile in this powerful Guernica essay, Leaving Lviv.
“Every time that border shifted, with every tyrant who came to power, others were told to leave: Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Armenians. Still others perished in Ukrainian pogroms and in the Holocaust. The culture of Lviv changed with each exile, with every life lost; it is not one thing but an amalgam of many peoples, a child of human migratory paths and constantly shifting borders. So is its history, its language.”
I’ve been thinking about the abundance of simplified and binary takes on this invasion—the desire to label everyone as the good guys or the bad guys, the rush to get quick answers to complex questions, the tendency to lump millions of people from diverse and nuanced countries into a single group. Taras Tsymbal, a Ukrainian sociologist, discusses the failure of critical thinking in this series of Dispatches from Ukraine in AGNI journal.
“Critical thinkers have failed. They failed to recognize the inchoate threat until it grew too large to be contained. And their failure is no accident. It stems from a simplistic vision of the world as composed of either good or bad, where the bad is identified with whatever they criticize, and the good—with its opposite. This binary vision is a gross oversimplification of the globalized world with its multiple sub-levels, niches, cross-cutting ties, and lateral linkages. Surprisingly, critical theory is well aware of such complexities, but it has somehow failed to apply them appropriately to Russia for years.”
As we read through these difficult times, I also wanted to include Dwight Garner’s New York Times piece, Again and Again, Literature Provides an Outlet for the Upended Lives of Refugees.
“I am not here to suggest that reading necessarily makes us better, more moral. The Nazis liked Dostoyevsky, too. But Joyce Carol Oates was surely correct when she wrote, “Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.”
The unrelentingly grim news is a reminder of how much of literature is fueled by crises of migration and its aftermaths, and how writers have tried to capture the texture of upended lives.”
While all attention is on Ukraine and Russia now, there is no corner of the world that has been spared from forced displacement and migration. Here is On Surviving a Journey Across the Sahara (and Other Impossibilities) by Ousman Umar in LitHub. The piece is excerpted from his memoir, North to Paradise.
“Walk, that’s all we did. Eventually, we had to make the grueling journey over the Hoggar Mountains. When we encountered another set of bodies, I started to realize that the desert was like a mass grave for migrants on their way to a better life.”
For Khôra magazine, Lorena Hernandez Leonard examines what it means to leave in this beautiful essay, Salsipuedes: Leave If You Can.
“No one was stopping us from leaving. No one was making up nonsensical reasons to keep us with them longer and we were truly ready to leave. In the aftermath of the increasing homicides, of which I had witnessed one and got near a few others, and the car bomb aimed at the drug kingpin that had hit so close to home, breaking the windows in my bedroom, it was understood that leaving was not a choice but a necessity for survival. In our shoes, any of our family members would have taken the opportunity to escape to safety too. Their anguish, and ours, was palpable.”
Here in the United States, many state and local officials are hell-bent on banning books—they apparently find literature more threatening than deadly weapons. As this senseless crackdown continues, I was glad to come across this piece by Azar Nafisi, The Power—and Necessity—of Reading Dangerously for LitHub. It’s adapted from her book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.
“In Iran, like all totalitarian states, the regime pays too much attention to poets and writers, harassing, jailing, and even killing them. The problem in America is that too little attention is paid to them. They are silenced not by torture and jail but by indifference and negligence.”
Attacks and hate crimes against Asian American women must be confronted with both words and action, so I was glad to see Patricia Park pen this piece for The New York Times, I’m Done Being Your Model Minority.
“Every Asian in America can recall incidents of verbal taunting or stereotyping, times we’ve been asked to make ourselves smaller. Some have experienced physical aggression or violence. Letting these incidents go unchecked — be they microaggressions or far worse — sends the message that our lives are less valued. Dehumanizing a population in subtle ways emboldens some members of society to attack in more harmful ways.”
Namrata Poddar’s book Border Less is out; I’ve seen a number of great pieces around this novel. In this interview with Nikhita Obeegadoo for Catapult, the author discusses race and identity, her process of writing the book, and the benefits of working with a small publisher.
“I’m unable to separate my racial identity from my other identities as a writer, an academic, and a migrant. No matter what hat I’m wearing within my large intersectional identity, brownness to me firstly means the awareness of this paradox: Race is a construct, yet the impact of it on human beings is very real: For those of us who aren’t white and are regularly confronted with white supremacy (in the arts, history, or politics), the impact of race is often lethal.”
I love coming across Dubravka Ugrešić’s words; here is Adam Dalva’s interview with the Croatian writer in Full Stop.
“I am writing for her/him no matter where they are, in the Mongolian steppes, in some provincial Chilean town library, or in a New York Starbucks. My “Western audience” might reject me like an anonymous reader (on Goodreads) who explained why he disliked my book: “It’s incomprehensible, it must be something Slavic.” I’m using “unexpected” cultural references (yes, many of them are picked from the Slavic literary world). Why am I doing it, risking (though it’s really not a risk) being labeled as “incomprehensible”?”
It’s always thrilling to see your friends and colleagues get published. Milda M De Voe, the wonderful leader of my Pen Parentis group, discusses the struggles of teaching—or not teaching—her kids her mother tongue. For Mutha magazine, here is “You Know How Americans Are.”
“The fact that so many of us fail to manage at bilingualism might, in fact, point to a failure of American Society to accept bilingualism as important—a failure of our schools to support this learning at home, while also not teaching it in the classroom.”
I recommend reading It’s an Honor Just to Be Asian: Sandra Oh on Systemic Racism in Hollywood for LitHub. It’s excerpted from Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now.
“And that’s the moment that I realized how deep the internalized racism had been for me by that point in my career. I couldn’t even see the part I was supposed to be playing. I’d gone from a place of tremendous possibility and confidence when I was very young to not even being able to see myself on the page.”
For Scalawag magazine, here is Anjali Enjeti’s interview with Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia: Coming up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place.
“Queerness was manifesting during my childhood, but I didn't have words for it, and I didn't know what it was. In the early 1980s, I didn't know of any queer people. No one said they were queer. I can see now that there were people who were queer. But at the time, there was silence.”
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. Last year, 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, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.