Immigrant Strong: October 2023 Issue
On language and family, a boat ride, and a Hungarian childhood
It’s October, which means the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, edited by Victoria Buitron, is out in the world! It was so wonderful to attend the book’s launch in Hartford a couple of weeks ago and meet fellow contributors. There will be another event on Saturday, Nov. 4, from 4-5:30 pm at Norwalk Public Library, and I’ll be among the readers. My creative nonfiction essay Reclaiming My Name explores topics like immigrant identity, which I often discuss in this newsletter.
Book
Prachi Gupta’s They Called Us Exceptional is a compelling memoir that tackles myths and stereotypes associated with the American dream, immigrants, and assimilation. Through beautiful and sharp writing, the author confronts the pain and harm inflicted when her immigrant family hides its trauma in order to present a certain image to each other and the outside world. Gupta, who wrote the debut memoir in second person by addressing it to her mother, does a fantastic job of bringing to light what it means to be an immigrant family of color in a country that embraces capitalism and white supremacy.
Essays and Interviews
About a year ago, I was working on a wonderful project profiling extraordinary immigrants. As I sifted through dozens of biographies, one of them stood out for many reasons, but mainly the subject’s tenacity and perseverance. I remember reading about how many times she was rejected from grants, how many promotions and jobs she lost out on. That woman is Katalin Karikó, who recently shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with a colleague for critical work that led to development of the Covid-19 vaccine. So I loved coming across this piece, Nobel Prize Laureate Katalin Karikó on Her Hungarian Childhood, excerpted for LitHub from her memoir, Breaking Through: My Life in Science, out this month.
“Someday, decades in the future and an ocean away from here, in a land I haven’t yet heard of called Philadelphia, I’ll settle down in a home on a wide suburban street. There I’ll go in search of flowers to plant, and it is only when I struggle to find white daffodils that I will understand what I’m doing: searching not just for any blooms, but for these, the flowers I knew as a little girl, the ones I can remember my mother planting and tending.”
It’s always a thrill to spot a familiar byline. I’ve had the pleasure to meet Leila C. Nadir in an online writing community so I loved coming across her piece Bollywood Hijab 1985 for KHÔRA magazine. Her writing is both funny and fierce, and always makes for an engaging and eye-opening read.
“Girls in fifth grade were always talking about films, shows, programs, sitcoms, and I could never understand what they were saying. Their English was arranged and meaningful in ways I couldn’t decipher, like I lived in some alternate universe missing from US maps, like pop culture was a foreign dialect because I lived in Primetime Blackout.”
I featured Sergio Troncoso’s Nepantla Familias anthology in this newsletter before and recently came across this wonderful essay on it by Elizabeth Gonzalez James. In The Sacredness in the In-Between for Ploughshares, she beautifully describes how the book captures the essence of straddling cultures and ethnicities.
“The notion of nepantla was, and continues to be, life-changing to me on a personal level. Not only did I grow up in between countries, where enchiladas were as American as a hot dog, but I am also bi-ethnic, half-Mexican American and half white. Nepantla is as much within me as without, and acknowledging that there is an interstitial state, that the idea of a monoculture is, in fact, fiction, was enormously healing and allowed me the freedom to occupy a middle space without feeling always that I am lying about who I am.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose memoir is now out, makes terrific points in this Electric Literature interview with Eric Nguyen.
“For most refugees and immigrants, when we say we come here for the American dream, we are also saying we’re coming here to be a part of settler colonialism, whether we know it or not. The book connects the experiences of refugees and immigrants aspiring to the American dream to the very bloody history of this country, which also extends to the way that the United States has interacted with many of the countries from which refugees and immigrants come including, in my case, Vietnam.”
I recently heard Safiya Sinclair read from her memoir How to Say Babylon at the Brooklyn Book Festival and am currently reading the book. Here is an excerpt in the Guardian.
“Years later, while cloistered in the countryside and aching for my birthplace by the sea, I would come to understand. There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved. While my mother had saved me from the waves and gave me breath, my father tried to save me only by suffocation – with ever-increasing strictures, with incense-smoke. With fire. Both had wanted better for me, but only one of them would protect me in the end.”
There has been a lot of writing on the horrific situation in the Middle East, some of it completely void of historical context and even a basic understanding of human rights and humanitarian laws. I’m not an expert on the region by any means, but I have a master’s degree in International Affairs and have worked in human rights for over a decade. I know that the answer to oppression is not more oppression; that an effective response to a war crime is not engaging in more war crimes; that dehumanizing people and cutting off civilians’ access to water, food, and electricity is never justified. Anyone who engages in immoral and illegal attacks on civilians—whether a terrorist organization or a government—should be called out for it. It pains me to think about the staggering death toll of children that will only continue to surge, the flattening of whole communities, and erasure of entire families.
Sadly, the world has seen the horrors of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide before—including in my home country of Yugoslavia. So I’m glad writers like Lana Bastašić are writing about it and boldly calling out their own governments. Here is her Guardian opinion piece, I grew up in Bosnia, amid fear and hatred of Muslims. Now I see Germany’s mistakes over Gaza.
“People who lived by our side, sent their children to the same schools, spoke the same language, were now portrayed as non-human, as jihadists who would kill us while we slept, as animals that would pull our teeth out and rape our women. All of these stories I heard at the age of six. I knew the word mujahideen before having learned the alphabet.”
Like many immigrants who’ve spent most of their lives away from their home country, I’ve struggled with language attrition—the process of losing your mother tongue. Judy Bolton Fasman navigates this topic in ‘Language is blood; language is family’—even if I’m losing my Spanish for WBUR.
“In her country's isolation, my mother inflated its mysteriousness and wonder. As my relatives constantly pointed out, Key West was 90 miles from Havana's shore. Ninety miles was shorthand for how impossibly close yet maddeningly far Cuba was to us. It was the ex-pats' rallying cry to return.”
I enjoyed Brian Truong’s interview with Ghassan Zeineddine for The Rumpus, Staking ground in multiple lands.
“Arab Americans are gaining ground in local and national government and building thriving private businesses, yet there’s still the fear of federal agencies. You always question your idea of citizenship. You feel that you belong, you feel that you’re American, but at the same time, the government is singling you out. They don’t necessarily see you as an American; they see you as a Muslim or Arab. This brings a feeling that you’re always targeted. It was the anxiety that I tried to capture in the story collection because I felt it myself.”
I’ll wrap it up with Isma’il Kushkush’s beautiful Granta essay, A Boat Ride to the Confluence of the Two Niles.
“When we arrived back to our starting point, I got off the boat, paid Bakri and Ali, and thanked them. I saw Haneen and told him he saved my day, giving him a generous tip. I advised him to color his boat with the colors of the old independence flag. He laughed.
‘You from the diaspora should advise us what to do and we’ll follow.’
I smiled, but really, it was the other way around. It is astonishing what some ‘compassion’ can do. The resilience, imagination and humility of Sudan’s youth is what gave many in this country and abroad hope for better times.”
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.