Immigrant Strong: September 2023 Issue

On Chicana identity; life after deportation; and censorship

I usually like fall and September’s back-to-school vibes, but this month started with—well, a fall that landed my daughter in the hospital. She’s fine now, back in school and as happy as ever, but the whole thing left a toll on both of us. I haven’t had much time or emotional space to read, much less write (at least not creative writing…) So I turned to a graphic memoir, and am happy to say it was a quick and heartwarming read, which was just what I needed. In her second memoir, It Won’t Always Be Like This, Malaka Gharib writes about summers spent with family in Egypt, and tries to adapt as a multicultural person in different cultures.

A couple of FYIs about my own work and whereabouts: I have an essay coming out in the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023—you can preorder it now, or buy it wherever books are sold starting this Tuesday, Oct. 3 (but please use the above link and support independent bookstores!) If you’re in Hartford on Oct. 14, I’ll be there for the book’s launch at CT Lit Fest, and will also be at a reading at Norwalk Public Library at 4pm on Nov. 4. I recently started a public instagram account (yes, I need to use it more…) so follow me there for event updates.

This is unrelated to the book, but I’ll be attending the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday in case anyone is around and wants to say hi!

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Essays and Interviews

I’ll start with Wiam El-Tamami’s beautiful Granta essay, Cairo Song.

“Over years of living here, I saw how hard my body had to work to filter out so much, how my energy and capacities were slashed down into a fraction of what they could be. And I am one of the more privileged ones. How much of our life energy and potential do we have to give up in order to keep pushing against a system and a state that are brutally and perpetually pitted against us?

That is why I left. I could no longer bear to live within a system that is actively rigged against people, against life, against human flourishing.”

El-Tamami also penned this powerful segmented essay about her harrowing last days in Kuwait. Here is This Shattering for Craft Literary.

“The country was devastated, my mother says. Slowly, it began to rebuild. But people were very different after the war. It was a quiet and peaceful place, a tolerant place, before; everyone just minded their own business. But the people of Kuwait were changed by the war. They felt they had been betrayed; they didn’t trust anyone. It never went back to the way it was.”

Javier Zamora recently led a successful effort to get the Pulitzer Prize board to expand prize eligibility to writers who are not U.S. citizens but have made this country their home. Nia T. Evans interviewed Zamora (whose memoir, Solito, was featured in this newsletter recently!) for Mother Jones—it was hard to pick just one one of his quotes from the conversation. Here is Javier Zamora’s Fight Against the Pulitzer Prizes—and American Exceptionalism.

“Americans lack imagination if they can’t conceive of someone outside of birthright citizenship having something to contribute to this country. Everybody always goes back to the Founding Fathers. A lot of them weren’t even born here. And they couldn’t imagine a better world. That is part of the problem. We think in 2023 that the Founding Fathers had the best imaginations. Men who founded this nation and owned slaves. It’s our duty now to imagine the actual future because they couldn’t even imagine our presence.”

For Electric Literature, Christopher Gonzalez interviewed Javier Fuentes, who discusses the fear of living in the United States without proper documents. Here is A Queer Undocumented Chef Rebuilds His Life After Deportation.

“As someone who has gone through the process of cultural assimilation and has built a life in a different country, I spent many years fearing not being able to stay. Up until I got my permanent residency and then my citizenship, I felt that the life I had worked so hard for, could one day be stripped from me. So, putting the protagonist in that position and forcing him out of the country was a way to explore a personal fear that I had suffered from for a long time.”

Here is a powerful Guernica piece by Prachi Gupta, The Paradox.

“Later, the system that funneled Mummy and Papa in as immigrants reduced all of us to parts, wanting our productivity but not our personhood. It used our bodies to house the lie: every day, we feel the weight of this country’s decades-long history of exclusion against us, yet simultaneously, we are the face of America’s melting pot, used to erase that very memory of our exclusion from America’s collective consciousness.”

I enjoyed Liz Declan’s interview for The Rumpus with Janika Oza, who explores the meaning of home, deciding when to start her debut novel, and why she’s keeping some things about it close to her chest.

“My own family has a history of exile and uprooting. We are refugees and immigrants and settlers all at once, and so my personal understanding of home has been shaped by those experiences. In writing this novel, I wanted to engage not just with the question of what is home but also who gets to feel security and belonging in these places? Can we call it a home if we aren’t all safe and free in it?”

Vauhini Vara wrote about what it means to be an Indian American writer in Jhumpa Lahiri and Me for The New York Times.

“Being Indian American was neither the most important fact of my life nor a particular source of tension. My parents switched back and forth between Telugu and English and didn’t mind that my sister and I answered in English. Some of my closest friends had Chinese, Taiwanese and Panamanian roots. At their houses, hearing languages other than English wasn’t unusual.”

Sarah Chavera Edwards discusses why representation is critical in literature and beyond, and why book banning is harmful in The House on Mango Street Helped Me Embrace My Chicana Identity for Teen Vogue.

“With books being banned across the country, I worry about the missed opportunities for LGBTQ students, students of color, and other marginalized young people who won’t see themselves in the classroom like I did. They won’t learn that being themselves is not a negative, but something to be celebrated and explored. I continue my own celebration and exploration of my Chicano culture all thanks to a banned book.”

Maggie Millner interviewed Jenny Xie for The Yale Review in On memory and migration.

“Many of the poems in The Rupture Tense were seeded during and shortly after a trip I took to China in 2019, when I returned to my birthplace, after thirty years away. I met with relatives I hadn’t touched base with for over a decade. I hadn’t been prepared to preemptively feel the acute loss of whole generations who will one day leave us. It was a complicated experience, and one thing that came out of it was an understanding of how much would disappear—memories, knowledge, textured impressions, life—when my older relatives pass on.”

As always, Cathy Park Hong brings up great points in this Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Michelle Chihara, Let’s Be Neurotic Together.

“I’m not disregarding belonging. I think it’s also very privileged for me to say to disregard belonging, because, especially if you’re undocumented—if the threat is to be excised from the state, to be thrown out of the circuit—all you want to do is belong. I think belonging is on the way toward freeing everyone else, so it’s just part of the journey.”

I’ll wrap it up with Moeen Farrokhi’s imporant LitHub piece, Dotted Lines: On Writing and Humiliation Under Iranian Censorship.

“When I left Iran, my plan was to observe my homeland from a distance and reinvent my storyteller identity in a new language, within a new life. I never imagined that I still have unfinished business there. However, after the tragic killing of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, it became apparent that the closure would not arrive any time soon.  I had only fled. Over these months, the unmistakable voices of Iranian women and people have grown louder, drowning out the silences. They have arisen against the red lines, and grasped that fighting on the red line with this oppressive regime is foolish, and instead, they must fight with the whole weight of their being against oppression’s very existence.”

Thanks for reading,

Vesna

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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. 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.