Immigrant Strong: October 2022 Issue
Growing up undocumented in Brooklyn; translating the immigrant experience; and motherhood in diaspora
My deepest thank you to Pigeon Pages for nominating my creative nonfiction essay, An Immigrant’s Alphabet, for Best of the Net awards. My experience publishing there has been wonderful, and I’m grateful to be a part of their diverse and supportive literary community.
It’s always thrilling to see friends, colleagues, classmates, and fellow writers publish their books. This month, Alison Mariella Désir, who I went to grad school with, published her memoir, Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn’t Built for Us. I attended one of her virtual book events this week, and she was so great at discussing everything from inequities in running and what we can do about them, to how we all have different layers of privilege and power. My Tin House workshop colleague Leah Mele-Bazaz has published her memoir, LAILA: Held for a Moment. I had the privilege of reading a small part of it at the workshop last year, and know the full book will be just as powerful as that excerpt. And Sara Lippmann, who I’ve had to pleasure of meeting through my incredible Pen Parentis group, has published her debut novel, LECH. She’s had several articles and interviews out in recent weeks and I encourage you to read them—she is always so fun, honest, and engaging.
Book
Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country has been on my to-read list since it was released last year and I finally started reading it a day after hearing her speak at the Brooklyn Book Festival--where she talked about moving from China to the United States when she was seven; the discrimination she repeatedly faced as a woman of color and an immigrant; and how she wrote much of the book on her phone while riding and waiting for the subway.
I inhaled the book. It’s my favorite memoir that I’ve read so far this year. Wang writes poignantly about living as an undocumented child in Brooklyn and working alongside her mom at jobs like a sweatshop and a sushi factory. Her prose is clear and honest, and the memoir is both devastatingly sad and charming. It is a heart-wrenching but necessary read about a childhood marked by hunger, poverty, and fear because of her family’s lack of immigration status--and the resilience that helped her emerge out of it. It pains me to think that by the time I send this newsletter next month, this country will almost certainly have elected a new wave of politicians who will continue to demonize and attack immigrants without having any understanding of the harm and trauma that unleashes on so many families, including children.
Essays and Interviews
Readers who speak more than one language or work in translation will likely appreciate this beautiful Catapult essay by Elisa Wouk Almino, Translated Self, which combines personal narrative with informative quotes about mother tongues, language attrition, and the meaning of translation.
“When I speak in Portuguese, the tone of my voice is a bit deeper. When I’m at ease in my Portuguese (which is not always the case), I stretch my words for more beats than in English. Speaking Portuguese can feel like a release, like singing. The sound, more than the actual meanings of words, arouses a warm and easy sensation of belonging. When I hear the language’s wave-like inflections, I feel embraced.”
Here is a great LitHub interview, Cecilia Gentili on Growing up Trans in 1970s Argentina (and Discovering How to Write About It).
“All these narratives were about misery and pain. And I wanted to show that misery and pain were part of my story, but there was also beauty and fun and crazy things, and those two things could live together. That was the essence of my show. And that I hope is the essence of my book.”
I enjoyed Raaza Jamshed’s Guernica essay, If an American Cannot Speak Arabic.
“I have long known that languages house worlds unique to them. I was born and raised in Pakistan. English, the language of the colonizers, was drilled into me along with Urdu, my mother tongue. Arabic was the language of religion, indecipherable to me as a child, when its utterance a matter of heaven and hell. My life remains polyvocal: I love in English, weep in Urdu, pray in Arabic.”
For Electric Literature, Eric Nguyen spoke with Hua Hsu in this interview, Hua Hsu Ponders the Meaning of Friendship and Identity in the Face of Loss.
“For immigrants, like my parents, they left something willingly and didn’t assume they would ever go back. Growing up, they would often remember things, but it wasn’t indulging in nostalgia the way young Americans indulges in nostalgia. It was really (I hesitate to say) recovering trauma. There were triggers for emotions or feelings or memories that they didn’t have the time to put language to. They were sensations that they had thought they had forgotten perhaps forever.”
I focus on nonfiction, but as someone who has written about my family and my immigrant experience, I related to plenty of things in Ruth Madievsky’s Catapult essay, Translating the Immigrant Experience Into Fiction.
“Fictionalizing someone else’s story is already a fraught endeavor. When that story is also an immigrant story—congratulations, you’ve made a fraught sandwich. Many immigrants and children of immigrants like myself feel a sense of duty to honor the sacrifices our families made to give us a better life. It can feel like an unrepayable debt, and trotting out our family’s traumas for the world to see isn’t exactly a straightforward show of gratitude.”
This essay about (among other things) the challenges of being an immigrant parent in the diaspora also deeply resonated with me. Here is Grace Loh Prasad’s The Orca and the Spider: On Motherhood, Loss, and Community for the Offing magazine.
“What was causing my depletion was the absence of a familial support system, an unforeseen consequence of my family history and the forces of diaspora that had separated me from my relatives and landed me in a country where I was comfortable with the language and culture, but had no network to sustain me. Where I had to do everything myself.”
I usually focus on personal essays in this newsletter, but wanted to share this well-researched and beautifully written nonfiction piece for Kitchen Table Quarterly by Zephaniah Sole--the Gate, about a Guatemalan immigrant and a job he set out to do.
“But if Francisco wanted to leave something right in his suffering city, he needed to confront the turbulent voice in his own head. The voice that said he was worthless. The voice that made him undervalue himself and his work.”
Here is The Black Period by Hafizah Augustus Geter for Bomb magazine, excerpted from The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin.
“Together, my parents were always making our Black Period—their version, one where, if not our bodies, then our minds could be free. Eventually, I would learn to render a Black Period of my own—the Black Period I needed, the one that could, once again, get me home, and I would create it using the two greatest gifts that I inherited from my parents: this hunger in my belly for knowledge, and an obligation to community.”
I’ve mentioned Malaka Gharib’s work in this newsletter before; I’ll wrap it up with a LitHub excerpt from her new graphic memoir, It Won’t Always Be Like This.
“You know how in Egypt you have to go to a different store just to get like, meat, or a light bulb? IN America, everything is one place. We have a store called Costco and they have rows of everything and free samples and everything is cheap.”
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, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.