Hafizah Augustus Geter’s The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin combines personal narrative with sharp criticism of America’s colonial past and its ongoing atrocious treatment of marginalized groups. As a queer, Muslim, Nigerian American woman, the author explores her place in a country that attempts to erase people like her, and the structures and institutions that perpetuate these harms. It poses questions about who gets to define history, and does not shy away from pointing out America’s vast contradictions.
The debut lyrical memoir is a lengthy and intense read, but a necessary one for anyone eager to learn about America’s origins and the painful realities they translate to. By combining her family’s history, her father’s stunning art work, and analysis rooted in sound research, Augustus Geter weaves an impressive narrative about what it is like to survive as a Black and queer person in this country.
As a white immigrant who works in human rights, I often find it appalling how ignorant so many white people around me are about critically important issues. On the day the UN warned we have only a decade to prevent irreversible damage from climate change, I watched parents roll into the school parking lot with cars the size of small buses. While making small talk during a kid’s birthday party, a neighbor sounded utterly confused about why I worked on voting rights—he had not the slightest ounce of awareness about how Republicans have made it extremely difficult or impossible for many marginalized and vulnerable citizens to cast a ballot. My daughter returns from birthday parties with goody bags brimming with plastic toys that’ll fill our oceans and landfills. Moms decry school shootings on the playground one day, then vote for NRA-sponsored politicians the next day. And I have friends and relatives who proudly proclaim “I don’t get involved in politics!” or “I don’t need to read the news!” not realizing the ignorance and privilege embedded in such comments and attitudes.
This book touches on many topics I’ve worked on and deeply care about, including climate change, immigration, and racial justice. And even as so many people continue to sweep these issues under the rug, Augustus Geter gave me a sense of hope and community. Ignorance will not get us anywhere—in fact, it will exacerbate many crises and problems. This book unapologetically calls them out and confronts them.
Essays and Interviews
I’ll start with Chanelle Benz’s beautiful Granta essay, The Antigua Journals (What Is a Homeland).
“In the US, I would not be Black enough or white enough but stuck-up and uppity and ugly and exotic and spat on and my hair pulled out and what are you and why do you talk that way and you don’t look like them is that your family and you’re not urban enough and we don’t know what to do with you and you’re more marketable professional attractive when your hair is straight. I am used to not belonging; it is, you could say, my brand.”
In this great interview with Bazeed for Bomb magazine, Lamya H, author of Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir, discusses anonymity, rage, and writing a book about queerness that wasn’t centered on coming out.
“I like to think that my sense of outsiderness shaped my politics too, and honed my anger at injustice in the world. It can be easier to see wrong when you’re on the outside, easier to fight for yourself, easier to see points of solidarity with others. This is what I hope to live, to embody. To do something constructive with my outsiderness.”
For The Guardian’s The long read, Dina Nayeri explores the complicated relationship with her mother, intergenerational immigrant trauma, and what it means to be a parent and a child as an immigrant. Here is Foreign mothers, foreign tongues: ‘In another universe, she could have been my friend.’
“In those early immigrant days, my mother, brother and I lived in a perpetual state of wonder and bafflement. Everything these anglophones did was weird, and at night we clung to one another and laughed about it until our mirth turned to tears, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms, wishing that one day we’d get their jokes and sit easy at their table.”
Here is a lengthy but stunning and wide-ranging piece by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, whose bold and lyric writing I’ve featured here before. This one is about so many things—the intersection of literature, our national consciousness, family and mental health, and more. Here is Whose Time Are We Speaking In? for The Sewanee Review.
“Every nation, regardless of where it sits on the political spectrum, operates through the dissemination of propaganda; the banner of the American Dream, for instance, is a simplified rendition of the hypnotic seduction and symbolic value of the myth of equality. That myth is the expression of a purposeful and urgent aspiration we must continue to strive toward without losing sight of the fact that it has been systematically deployed to mask the ongoing uneven distribution of the very freedoms it claims to uphold.”
In this LitHub excerpt from a book from Armenian writers in diaspora, Chris McCormick makes connections between fiction and memory, the real and the imagined. Here is Countries Real and Imagined: Chris McCormick on Creating His Own Armenia.
“I calmed myself by thinking of my mother—I was being a baby, after all. In 1975, when she immigrated to the United States from then-Soviet Armenia at the age of nineteen, she had flown from the same airport I now approached. What had she imagined, standing at the gate with a suitcase in her grip? Certainly not a white husband from the American Midwest, not a pair of half-Armenian children, not one of them growing up to write books in a language she didn’t yet speak, to imagine his own version of her country, to arrive in the place she’d left behind—the very same spot—without her.”
As someone with documents from multiple countries, I often contemplate their meaning and implications, their ability to constrain us and free us. Diane Mehta writes skillfully about the topic in her essay Documents for the Kenyon Review.
“It is not unusual to hang on to pipe dreams around heritage, genetics, color, and sect when it comes to our children, in the hope that we will stall the end of our tradition or lose our own sense of what is left after our bodies are gone. My mother sawed away the name Leonard, chopped from Levine, but like all of us, she had only one half of a name: the father, the patriarch, the money earner, the strongman. How did she feel being Mrs. Mehta, when strangers excised her first name?”
I enjoyed this Publishers Weekly interview with Patricia Park, author of Imposter Syndrome and other confessions of Alejandra Kim.
“Growing up in an immigrant family in Queens, even though I was born and raised here, you’re taught to treat time and language differently. Time is money. So you don’t have time to faff about. Language becomes about communicating necessities. Growing up, I did not have a language in English or Korean or Spanish to really linger on my feelings and my philosophies on this and that. I think Alejandra and I share that imposter syndrome as we’re kind of trying to navigate our way through academic circles.”
I’ll wrap it up with Julia Kovalenko’s LitHub interview with the incomparable Min Jin Lee.
“The command of the English language is an extraordinary source of power in the world. We don’t want to talk about it because it makes us uncomfortable to think about the supremacy and privilege of the English language. But whether we like it or not, having an acceptable and admired way of commanding the English language is dollars-and-cents power in many parts of the world.”
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.