Immigrant Strong: November 2022 Issue
On borders, gardening, and political activism as a gay Black man
Thanks in part to the chaos on Twitter brought by its new narcissistic owner, I’m starting a public Instagram account where I’ll focus on writing and reading, and occasionally my work in the human rights and social justice space. As much as I don’t want more social media, I want to be able to connect with writers, readers and others in my field, outside the constraints of my personal account. Please follow me there—my username is my full name, instagram.com/vesnajaksiclowe. I’ll post any updates to this newsletter there, so you can also reach out with any book and essay suggestions.
Book
Prince Shakur’s debut memoir When They Tell You To Be Good traces his path of becoming an organizer and political activist as a queer Jamaican American. Shakur contends with the murder of his biological father, the impact of multi-generational toxic masculinity, and what it means to be a gay Black man. If you are interested in learning more about him and his work on this searing memoir, I suggest reading these interviews in The Rumpus and Electric Literature.
In light of the recent shooting at an LGBTQIA+ club in Colorado, Shakur tweeted a passage from his book that includes this line:
“In the pity of my belly, even at fifteen, I already knew that being gay meant that I had to be prepared to die.”
And yet, right-wing politicians will continue to pass laws targeting LGBTQIA+ individuals and spew hatred that encourages this kind of abhorrent violence. They’ll ban books but not deadly weapons, and shut down drag shows but not unfettered sales of assault rifles. They’ll use their power to prevent individuals from accessing critical health care and services instead of focusing on actual problems affecting communities—of which there is hardly a shortage.
My heart goes out to everyone affected by this tragedy. I stand in solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ community, and am grateful for everyone doing their part to stop bigotry and discrimination.
Essays and Interviews
Here is one of Momtaza Mehri’s many great quotes from this illuminating Granta interview with Warsan Shire.
“Frankly, the immigrant is an ambiguous spectre. Immigrants sometimes possess coveted work visas. They can be well-educated. They can arrive on a plane psychically and materially cushioned by their social positions as elites in their respective motherlands. The immigrant can want nothing to do with the refugee. The refugee suffers from corporeal excess. She is sensationalised in degradation, disease and death. Her inner life is dismissed as secondary to the political reality of her divisive presence. The refugee is denied a sense of humour, the right to be insolent, desirous, maladaptive and thankless – all those characteristics which make human beings so luminous. You refuse to deprive the refugee of these needs, and that means so much.”
Harsha Walia’s informative Boston Review piece on borders and the politicization of migration is worth your time. Here is There is No “Migrant Crisis.”
“Borders are simultaneously monetized and militarized. Racial capitalism and racial citizenship rely on the dispossession and immobility of migrants to maintain state power and capitalist extractions. Like the carceral construct of criminality, illegality is invented and policed as a race-making and property-protecting regime. And—like policing, prisons, and private property—borders destroy communal social organization by operating through the logic of dispossession, capture, containment, and immobility.”
Davon Loeb, who has a forthcoming memoir, The In-Betweens, wrote How I learned to embrace my Black and Jewish heritage for The Los Angeles Times.
“What seems to separate us — our skin, our culture, our history — is really what binds the Black and Jewish people. We have defied persecution and slavery and genocide and systemic and institutional racism and antisemitism, but we’re not defined by just our struggles. Our resolve, our irrefutable drive for freedom and equality define us. As a kid, I didn’t understand any of that.”
For The Markaz Review, Rushda Rafeek interviewed Malaka Gharib, who made great points about representation, an issue immigrant writers often confront.
“The perspectives of the Egyptian diaspora and their offspring deserve examination and representation—we are our own culture in and of itself, and we are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be Egyptian—and for me in particular, what it means to be Egyptian in the United States, a country that has a conflicted relationship with Muslims, Arabs and the Middle East.”
Jason Allen-Paisant penned this beautiful essay, Primitive Child, for Granta (you may need a subscription to access the full piece).
“Language is place. I can feel its flesh. I can feel the thickness of language as I sink into it. I can feel a cool shadow as it shields me. I can feel the excitement of its foreign sound. I don’t know if we’ve had previous lives and why one person should feel such an affinity with a sound that is supposedly other, but for me it was like coming home after a long exile.”
Torsa Ghosal wrote about her mother’s garden, nurturing her own plants, and gardening’s connections to colonialism in The Language of Plants Was Shaped By a Colonial Past for Catapult.
“Planting familiar herbage in an unfamiliar place—that’s what the memsahibs did. Although I get my plants off the racks, don’t have the wherewithal or the naivete to introduce foreign species across oceans, I detect likeness in the behaviors of the homesick.”
I’ll wrap it up with this interesting Narratively essay by Mai Serhan, I Have Never Been to the Place Where I am From, But I Will Imagine It For Us.
“I go because where I’m from is not on the map no more, so I seek the edges and overlook the borders. I go because I’ve inherited a gene that roams, and the restless foot is mine to bear too. The ghosts of the past are calling me, they are asking me to follow in their footsteps, to keep walking out and out. To stop is to know I am out of place, so I move from place to place. Perhaps in the strangest lands I might cease to be a stranger.”
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, on my new Instagram account, @vesnajaksiclowe, or my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.