Immigrant Strong: November 2023 Issue
On growing up Rastafari, a prayer for Gaza, and cultural appropriation
I loved reading my essay from the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023 a couple of weeks ago along with these wonderful writers (photo on the bottom—I’m hiding in the back!). Now that I live outside New York City, and am no longer surrounded by other writers, I was a bit worried about inviting non-writers to a literary event. I never stress about this when I go with another writer—even if they don’t love the reading, I know they understand the importance of literary citizenship, supporting writers, libraries, and bookstores, and showing up so authors who poured their soul into writing aren’t greeted with empty chairs. So I was so happy to see my friends enjoy the event—it reminded me how joyful and fulfilling literature can be for everyone, not just the avid readers and writers. Given the times we’re living in and how much collective grief there is in the world, I’m sure many of us can benefit from this.
I usually love it when poets write prose memoirs, and Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon is no exception. The Jamaica-born writer penned this gut-wrenching memoir about her strict Rastafari upbringing and what it took to break free from it. Given her background in poetry, I’m not surprised her words sing on the page, even when she’s describing a difficult and abusive relationship. Sinclair’s resilience and determination shine in this coming-of-age memoir, but her lyrical writing is what made me love this book.
Essays and Interviews
I featured Etaf Rum’s A Woman is No Man in this newsletter before, and always love coming across her work. In this great Electric Literature interview with Bareerah Ghani, she talks about her new novel, Evil Eye, Western and Eastern standards for women, and the role of Palestinian artists in resistance.
“It’s crucial for us to stand up and speak our truth, regardless of the fear of being silenced. Palestinian artists, in particular, carry the burden of addressing the traumatic history of Palestine and raising awareness while simultaneously dismantling Western stereotypes and misrepresentations. Especially because there is a profound lack of Palestinian representation in literature, media, politics, and education, limiting our voices. And so those of us doing this work have a duty to use our platforms, to speak up, to tell our stories, now more than ever.”
I don’t think I can add much to what has already been said about the atrocities taking place in Gaza, but I want to share at least some writing related to it. Here is Elena Dudum’s heart-wrenching When I Close My Eyes: A Prayer for Gaza for the Offing.
“When I close my eyes there is no humanitarian crisis. There is no military siege or apartheid. No occupation. Here, occupation is a word used for doctors, journalists, professors, caretakers, shopkeepers, researchers, chefs, engineers, construction workers, entrepreneurs, artists, and farmers. Here, occupation is a livelihood. Here, occupation is a calling. It is a choice and it is always beautiful.”
With so many conflicts raging, I wonder if some people are becoming desensitized to the horrors they inflict. I wish more people would understand just how much war upends lives, leaving a permanent mark even on those who make it out alive. For the Guardian, Zarlasht Halaimzai wrote about growing up in conflict in Afghanistan, ‘I remember the silence between the falling shells’: the terror of living under siege as a child.
“Instead of reading, which I loved to do, I learned other lessons. Like how perverse hope can be, when you’re crouching in the corner of a room waiting for a bomb to fall and kill you and your family. Hope in those moments when you’re waiting to be killed is dreadful. The belief in our own survival is so deep that even when confronted with a bomb, there is a small part of you that always keeps space for hope.”
Here is a beautiful read in LitHub—The Call of the Void: Hannah Lillith Assadi on Losing Home, Identity and Her Father, excerpted from Freeman’s: Conclusions.
“What does falling have to do with home? Probably nothing, and maybe everything. We are born, we die, with a dream in between. We live in an apartment, a country, on a planet, in a galaxy of a rapidly expanding, darkening universe, in a body. Until we don’t. Where do we fall to? My second daughter lives inside of me now, and I shelter her until she falls away from me. We lose Eden—Palestine, Macon, ourselves. Home is only a metaphor for life. Who are we but wandering spirits, refugees from the void?”
This is a lengthy, but well-researched and important piece by Fady Joudah, My Palestinian Poem that “The New Yorker” Wouldn’t Publish for The Los Angeles Review of Books.
“It is indecent that a Palestinian has to prove their capacity to love Jewish people or vice versa. It is indecent that Palestinians must show their identification cards of good will. This manipulative aggression is all the worse since countless Americans have to prove nothing of the sort toward Palestinians. How unimaginable it is for so many of us in the West, in 2021, to know the suffering that millions of Palestinians know on a daily basis and have known for generations? And yet each human heart is always one beat away from embracing empathy.”
I enjoyed this conversation in Electric Literature with Nicole Zhao and Jami Nakamura Lin, who discussed her illustrated memoir The Night Parade.
“I’m trying to put aside the idea of authenticity and embrace the idea of transformation while also not pretending that I’m something that I’m not. So I resonate so much with what you’re saying about feeling that conflict. It is a complicated and difficult question. It’s different for different people and different situations. It’s something I’m still thinking about.”
Here is another great Electric Literature piece—Kavita Das’s I Was Too Quick To Call Out Cultural Appropriation.
“In truth, I couldn’t yet admit to liking the song because it felt a bit like when white girl rockers like Gwen Stefani wear a bindi as a costume. Doing so, I felt, might make me a bad Indian, betraying my culture by falling prey to the wiles of a culturally appropriative yet masterful performer. Yet, this song oddly captured my essence—a little bit Hindustani, a little bit rock ‘n roll. And the lyrics about the singer’s search to find and be found by his “Sweet Lord” spoke to my own quest to find my identity and be seen in my totality as an Indian-American—a person formed by these two bold, and often opposing, cultures.”
I adored E.J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others and featured it in this newsletter before. She discusses her new novel, The Liberators, in this interview with Ari Shapiro for NPR.
“I think zooming in on the details of everyday life of individuals - not just the communities, but the individuals within them - and how they live and how their families go on to live and in the succeeding generations, how they're impacted by something like the war, we get to really see how every individual makes a choice - makes a different choice maybe about how to or whether they should erase the troubling origins of the war or reconcile with the urge to do so in the face of inherited grief and violence and pain. And so we come to a really human level of understanding these choices.”
I got to see Christine Kandic Torres at the Connecticut Literary Anthology reading and it was great to also see her byline in this fantastic LitHub interview, John Manuel Arias on Decolonial Storytelling and the Multi-Generational Family Novel.
“I feel like the book is confident and educational in a way that is not playing to a white person’s perspective. I never wrote for the white gaze. I wrote for Costa Ricans. I wrote for my family. I wrote for Latin Americans, Latinx people, and I think it does so in a way that is very unapologetic and allows the reader to participate, if they want to participate, and if they don’t want to participate, they won’t.”
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 Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, 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.