Immigrant Strong: May 2024 Issue

We're 5 years old! On immigrants' mental health, language attrition, and love poems

May 28, 2024

Immigrant Strong is five years old this month! Woo-hoo! Happy birthday to us! And I mean “us” because above all, this newsletter is about building community and supporting other writers.

By the time this lands in your inbox, I will be at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing’s conference. I won one of their Poet & Author Fellowships, and am thrilled to be heading to my first in-person creative writing conference. This has essentially become a third part of my career (after journalism and nonprofits), and it’s given me so much joy and purpose—in addition to agony, doubt, and rejection; it is writing, after all.

I’ve never left my daughter for more than 3 nights—and that was years ago—so I’ve had anxiety dreams about being apart from her for a full week. But I’ve talked to her about the importance of her mama doing something she loves and does for work, just like she loves to play soccer, swim, and go to school (PE and recess are her favorite subjects). I’m psyched to take craft classes, meet other writers, and have dedicated writing time -- which is so challenging to find between day-to-day work, parenting, housework and other stuff life keeps throwing at me.

My other baby—Immigrant Strong!—is more than 1,100 subscribers strong, and I hope it’s still doing what I set out to do when I started it five years ago—uplifting immigrant writers, expanding the immigrant literature canon, and motivating other immigrants and children of immigrants to share their stories. If you’ve subscribed, passed it along to a friend, bought one of the books, or somehow supported the writers I’ve featured—hvala! (that’s ‘thank you’ in Croatian). And a special thanks to all the wonderful newsletters that have been recommending it to their readers, including culture shock, Ojala, Global Natives, Macedonian Matters, By Fernanda Santos, and Foreign Bodies, among others.

Book

I was thrilled to attend Sahaj Kaur Kohli’s book launch event at magical Yu & Me Books earlier this month. She’s a therapist, a Washington Post columnist, and founder of Brown Girl Therapy who specializes in mental health issues among children of immigrants. (Fun fact: in my Reclaiming My Name Essay in the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, I quoted her about the importance of names). Needless to say, I found a lot to relate to in her debut book, But What Will People Say? Navigating Mental Health, Identity, Love, and Family Between Cultures. Whether it’s her writing on toxic positivity, the tendency of immigrant families to shove things under the rug, or the multiple issues immigrant children contend with while navigating different cultures, the book left me with many ‘a-ha! moments. Part memoir and part guidebook, it’s an essential read for children of immigrants—but I wish others would also read it to better understand the day-to-day realities of being an immigrant or a child of immigrants.

Essays and Interviews

For the Offing magazine, Mandy Shunnarah shares how My Love Poems Are the Most Palestinian Thing About Me.

“Hope, too, is intrinsic to Palestinians. How else could we go on? Even before this current and most fast-paced genocide, Gaza has been destroyed by conquerors ten times throughout its history, and Palestine as a whole was occupied by the British before the Zionists, and the Ottoman Empire before them. Each time, our people have persevered—which is not to say that we haven’t suffered great losses, but that we have so much hope in the value of living that we will not go quietly to extinction.”

Zaina Arafat writes about being Palestinian in this moment in this beautiful essay introducing a series of Kholood Eid’s powerful photographs. For The New Yorker, here is The View from Palestinian America.

“To be a Palestinian in the diaspora is to miss one’s home, the blād—the mountains and the sea, the family members left behind, the distinct bitterness of our olives and our sumac- and za’atar-dusted mezze spreads—even as one enjoys the privilege of distance from Palestine’s hardships. It is to possess a luxury that is missing from Palestine itself: a choice.”

Liv Kane interviews Margaret Juhae Lee about her debut memoir, Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History, for The Rumpus.

“Starry Field is for the next generation so readers can understand what gets lost in immigration. Because that first generation, they’re just trying to survive—they don’t have the time to look to the past. They don’t have time to explain the past because they’re concerned with very basic survival. It’s up to the second generation or third to really delve into the past and see what history is, what their culture is.”

I’ve felt the blow of language attrition when it comes to my mother tongue so I found interesting research on this topic in Madeleine Schwartz’s New York Times Magazine piece, Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?

“A change in language use, whether deliberate or unconscious, often affects our sense of self. Language is inextricably tied up with our emotions; it’s how we express ourselves — our pain, our love, our fear.”

Here is Coco Picard’s interesting Electric Literature illustrated interview (what a neat format!), For This Mexican Writer, Magical Realism Is a Craft for Dissecting the Drug Wars.

“One of the subtle aims of the novel is a call to understand the social effects of what we are consuming—which substances make violence unfold in what ways—and who is being affected most. It is all a snowballing effect which we have to be permanently aware of. A very basic notion of justice is at stake, and this is especially noticeable with the crisis of forced disappearance.”

For Granta, Momtaza Mehri interviews m nourbeSe philip about her book-length poem about the Zong massacre, which occurred onboard a slave ship in 1781, resulting in deaths of 150 enslaved Africans.

“While the dead of the Zong massacre are honoured in the readings, they also stand in for, as you say, the ongoing-ness of he present, and all the dead. This pushes back against the way Black life in the Western world is cheapened––not only Black lives, but the lives of all those who are perceived to be marginal. I am thinking of the people currently crossing into the US, particularly the children and the very vulnerable.”

Priya Krishna reflects on her time in the kitchen with her mom in a New York Times essay, I Didn’t Truly Know My Mother Until I Cooked With Her.

“My whole childhood, we struggled to find common ground. We weren’t just from different generations. My mother was an immigrant from India; I was an American kid trying to navigate the world without a language to understand my identity.”

Check out The Dharma Generation, where reporter, teacher and oral historian Shilpi Malinowski tackles topics such as belonging among children of immigrants. A recent post includes a portion of an oral history transcript, and I was again struck by how much children of immigrants have in common, regardless of where we come from. (Another reason to read this month’s featured book!)

May is AAPI Heritage Month so I’ll wrap it up with Eddie Ahn’s 7 Graphic Memoirs by Asian American Writers for Electric Literature. It includes some wonderful books I’ve featured in this newsletter 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. 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 in the human rights and international affairs fields. I have written about my immigrant experience for the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post, and the New York Daily News. I participated in Tin House workshops in 2024 and 2021, and attended the 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Conference as a parent-fellow. Find me on Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe, or twitter, @vesnajaksic.