Immigrant Strong: October 2021 Issue
My Longreads interview, and essays on xenophobic discourse, revisiting a border, invisibility
I’m so grateful to Cheri Lucas Rowlands and Longreads for interviewing me about this newsletter. In the Q&A, I discuss why the last presidential election did not negate the need for storytelling by immigrants, which themes I’m on the lookout for when I pick stories for the newsletter, and why my recent trip to Croatia was so emotionally charged.
I started this newsletter more than two years ago, seeping with anger over our nation’s leadership spewing whatever was their latest anti-immigrant hostility. I thought about how I could combine my work in human rights with my love for literature and a desire to uplift immigrant writers, and in May 2019, Immigrant Strong was born. It’s a thrill to see this project of love featured on a website that has published so many essays by writers I admire. Please be sure to also read Cheri’s wonderful reading list on names, identity and the immigrant experience, which links to many pieces I’ve mentioned here.
Book
A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home has been on my to-read list since it was released last year, and I’m so glad I found the time to read it. Edited by Nicole Chung (who I had the pleasure to workshop with at Tin House, and whose work I first recommended in my third issue) and Mensah Demary, it’s a striking anthology that interrogates all the themes I obsess over. There were many bylines I recognized and a few that were new to me, but each piece gripped me and left me with something to think about, which is what good writing should do.
Essays and Lists
This Guernica piece by George Abraham, Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse is so important, and taught me a lot about how oppressors use language as a weapon.
“As a Palestinian living in the United States, I witness my homeland’s cyclic apocalypse, as newer victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing replace older ones in the hashtags; as news met with Western apathy and zionist suppression dissolves into silence. Palestinians – having no choice but that which the West fetishizes as “bravery” – rebuild, survive in ways the West couldn’t begin to imagine, and above all, continue resisting.”
Sticking to the theme of language, here is another must-read essay, Divya Victor's Strangers in Our Own Homes: The pandemic’s xenophobic discourse for The Yale Review.
“As we became strangers to ourselves, my family began referring to ourselves as the “two-suitcase people.” When we migrated again from Singapore, we packed our lives into the fifty pounds allotted by the airlines. In the weeks leading up to the migration, we participated in sullen acts of calculation, our hearts splitting with every loved object left behind, given to a friend, buried in the ground, or placed in the rubbish bin next to the eggshells.”
There are many things I have in common with Irina Dumitrescu — moving to Toronto from Eastern Europe, forgetting some of my mother tongue, then trying to reconnect with it after birthing my child. It’s no wonder I found her essay for The Rumpus, Tongue Stuck, resonated.
“I speak a Romanian that is antiquated, out of fashion. It’s the language of diaspora and nostalgia. The language of grandmothers.”
Ani Gjika recently won the Restless Books 2021 Prize for New Immigrant Writing for By Its Right Name; here is an excerpt in LitHub, “I Have a Mouth.”
“The more I question death the further from answers I get. But deep down I have this strong sense that my questioning has something to do with home. As though home is the opposite of death and once I reach there, or have a better grasp of what that is, I’ll no longer be afraid to die, or to lose it all, because there is no loss. Only a transition. Another form of experiencing home. Maybe. I’ll never be done thinking this through. Will I go to hell?”
I enjoyed this piece, Best Friends, by Tshego Letsoalo for The Rumpus.
“One of my mom’s colleagues would always commend her about the way I answered the phone (“You’d never tell you were calling a Black person’s house!”), and when I met him once he bragged to another white woman about how well I spoke while looking at me like I was the true vision of the new South Africa: one where Black people assimilated into white society so they wouldn’t deserve the brutality and humiliation that fell from somewhere upon them.”
Over at Catapult, Ruth Madievsky has a new column, Eldest Immigrant Daughter. Here is the first piece (which I immediately sent to my older sister), Lessons On Diasporic Identity from Meme Culture.
“This is what it means to be diasporic: to live between worlds, to never have a discrete place to call home. There’s beauty in liminality, and also loneliness. For eldest daughters of immigrants, that loneliness can manifest as a call to action.”
Check out Richa Kaul Padte’s 7 Indian Women Writers You Should Be Reading for Electric Literature.
“I needed books that were sharp and true and felt, but most of all, that were less interested in the subaltern speaking back to empire than they were in writing without reference and deference to empire at all.”
Also at Electric Literature, Cindy Fazzi wrote this great piece about invisibility, Seeing My Filipino Immigrant Self in Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”
“If only my so-called “American” education covered the depth and breadth of American culture—and included literature written by Blacks, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and other people of color—it might have prepared me better for my struggles as an immigrant in America.”
I had a hard time picking one quote from Arianne Shahvisi’s The Guardian Long Read essay, ‘Iran was our Hogwarts’: my childhood between Tehran and Essex, so I’m including two of them.
“As any migrant or mixed person knows, I am valued there has no value here. Bodies migrate; worth, like home-boiled jam, doesn’t travel well.”
And this line left me weeping:
“For every migrant who says they’ll go back and never does, there’s a mixed person who says they’ll be both and can only be one.”
Victoria Cho wrote about mental health issues in her family and South Korea in Survival Mechanisms for the Offing magazine (content warning: suicide).
“I wanted to start at the beginning. What is the origin of South Koreans’ suffering? Why are they, and their descendants born in America and elsewhere, like me, wrestling with their lives in this manner? I hoped that understanding the origin would prevent this pattern from reaching me.”
Here is one of many powerful passages from Javier Zamora’s Revisiting a Border During a Pandemic in The Bare Life Review.
“Everyone seems to speak for immigrants; not many people ask us what we think about the current state of the country. We, who also pay taxes, must constantly prove that we are extraordinary, the best of the best, in order to have a chance at being considered somewhat human. I can’t participate in this “democratic” right—not yet—but I plan to. Until then, I write to have a voice.”
To Javier and other immigrants and children of immigrants: keep on writing.
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 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, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. This 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, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.