Immigrant Strong: November Issue

A Palestinian-American's debut novel, essays on multiple identities, and "Where are you from?"

If you follow this newsletter, you know that I overwhelmingly read non-fiction, and most of that is memoirs written by women of color. But a week before the election, I wanted to get away from reality, so I grabbed You Exist Too Much, a debut novel by the Palestinian-American author Zaina Arafat.

It follows a young woman who explores her cultural and sexual identities and is an interesting story centered on a complex character. As this Kirkus review put it: “Arafat’s protagonist is a messy, complicated character who doesn’t fit neatly into any single “multicultural” category, and that, all by itself, is refreshing.” I agreed with this; it reminded me how I often can’t relate to a lot of American pop culture because I find the jocks and the nerds and other overly simplified characters not representative of the people I grew up with. To tell interesting stories with complex characters, we need people from all backgrounds — cultural, ethnical, and sexual.

---

Essays

This LitHub piece, Elif Shafak on What It Means to Belong in Many Places at Once, left me in awe of her writing and made me hold on to every word and phrase. Elif Shafak’s work is consistently impressive, as is her ability to portray the beauty and pain of immigration.

“Motherlands are castles made of glass. In order to leave them, you have to break something—a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you. To be an emigré, therefore means to forever bear shards of glass in your pockets.”

If you like the topics that come up in this newsletter, you’ll want to read all of Anomaly #31: Citizenship and its Discontents, edited by Grace Loh Prasad, whose work I’ve mentioned here before. Here is a piece to give you a taste from another great writer named Grace I’ve mentioned many times in this newsletter, Grace Talusan, in Three Flash Essays on the Border.

“Does one belong more to the country where one is born or the country where one is buried? I belong to both places and neither. I was conceived in a place that my family left when I was two years old. We cut ourselves from our family tree, grafting this new branch onto a different tree in America. The life that I would have lived back there ended, and a new life here bloomed.” 

Okay, just one more piece from this issue from another writer whose byline I love coming across, Michelle A. Chikaonda, The True Thieves of Greatness Have Always Been at Home.

“Leaving home is heartbreaking; we do it knowing it could end up a one-way journey, that we might never come back, and that even if we did we may not find a place for ourselves again. We might never see our parents or siblings again, or the land on which we were raised, hear our language and music reverberating through the air as we walk down the street, visit any part of the country and know—without a second thought, without the grinding work of constant self-validation—that we are home.”

In Guernica, I enjoyed Kelly Sundberg’s interview with Sejal Shah, author of This Is One Way To Dance, particularly Shah’s take on multiple identities.

“Finally, I think we need to give dignity to how a person responds–to how she or he wants to define their life and lived experiences. We’re all from more than one place, depending on how you answer the questions. I don’t think the question itself is offensive, but it’s exclusionary and racist if you’re just trying to point to “What’s your race, and why are you here?””

I think many of us from immigrant backgrounds can relate to Saeide Mirzaei’s Does It Matter Why in The Rumpus — the questions we are asked, the assumptions that exist about us, and the roles we play in a society that others us.

“I’m playing the emancipated Muslim woman who has fled an oppressive patriarchal society to set her body free and educate her feeble mind. Americans like to think of me that way. It doesn’t matter that I arrived here with a graduate degree in [does it matter what?].”

I come from a country that no longer exists — Yugoslavia. I am privileged to have documents from several countries, but I identify the least with the one I live in. So I appreciated Vanessa Hua’s The Complexity in ‘Where Are You From?’ for The New York Times. There is a lot to unpack in that four-word question, and for many of us, it’s not one that can be answered with a simple word, or even a sentence or a paragraph.

“And yet the question “where are you from?” is just as complicated for me to answer. Or rather, my initial reply — “I’m from California”— never seems to satisfy the strangers asking. Their mouths twitch and silence lengthens between us.”

Concepción de León interviews Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, a National Book Award finalist for The Undocumented Americans, and discusses important issues related to immigration, including the meaning of the so-called American dream. Here is ‘I Came From Nothing’: An Undocumented Writer Defies the Odds, in The New York Times.

“I think a lot of “good” immigrants who’ve “done it the right way,” who are model immigrants, they have a very narrow view of the American dream that they’ve spread the gospel about. I think the American dream has to mean something different for every single immigrant. It’s private.”

Catapult always has so many essays I could include in this newsletter; here is On Preserving Taiwanese Through Romanization by Grace Hwang Lynch.

“Like the island itself, my father’s life was shaped by occupation and silence. He is as shrouded and multilayered as Taiwan’s history. Taiwanese identity is of great importance and pride to him, but as an American-born daughter of immigrants, I found the definition of Taiwanese-ness kind of blurry.”

I’ll wrap things up with Padma Lakshmi’s opinion piece in The New York Times, Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris Moved Me to Tears, discussing the importance of representation.

“Finally, I was thinking. Finally a woman, and a woman of color, takes this office.

I felt like a marathon runner who breaks down into tears at the end of a race. And that marathon was a lifetime of fighting to be seen and to advance, as an immigrant and woman of color with few guides.”

Thanks for reading. And to everyone who voted for truth and decency over lies and corruption: thank you. Thank you for choosing justice and equality over racism and misogyny. For saying humanity, dignity, and diversity matter. For choosing the right side of history through your votes, your work to get out the vote, your donations, your texts, your phone calls, your letters, your marches, your awkward family conversations — whatever it took.

Getting rid of the anti-immigrant racist occupying the nation’s highest office is a step in the right direction, but a lot of the damage has already been done and this country’s deep-rooted problems are not going anywhere. So the work continues — and a key part has to be dismantling the status quo and the pernicious system of white supremacy and patriarchy it was built on. Let’s continue to lift the voices of immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized groups — in politics, arts and literature, workplaces, and our day-to-day life.

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. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.

About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then moved to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits focusing on human rights. I have written about my immigrant experience for The New York Times, Catapult, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.