Immigrant Strong: Seventh Issue
On refugees, bilingualism, Yugonostalgia and more
Book Recommendation
Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You weaves together her story as a refugee from Iran with those of other refugees and asylum-seekers. It’s an urgently needed book for not only explaining the horrific circumstances that force people to flee their homes, but also the many injustices embedded in the asylum process. I found her exploration of the meaning of language and storytelling when applying for asylum particularly interesting, as she demonstrates just how much vulnerable people’s lives depend on how they explain their past—and whether they are believed. The book is Nayeri’s first work of non-fiction; you can find The New York Times review here.
Essays and op-ed
Here is great work from another Iranian-born writer: Naz Riahi’s gorgeous Longreads essay, Eating to America. I remember reading it when it came out last year and it recently popped up on my radar again because it won a notable mention in The Best American Food Writing 2019. If you prefer audio, you can listen to her read it here.
“I looked to make sure there were no other kids around, which meant I was safe from having to speak English, a language I didn’t yet know how to speak. Everyone had said I would learn, but they hadn’t told me how, and I was waiting for it to come, as if by magic.”
Another gripping work from an Iranian writer is Fragments From a War-Torn Childhood, a Guernica essay by Amir Ahmadi Arian that just won a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2019. The author wields language beautifully to describe his childhood, the brutality of war, and its lifelong impact.
“As my hometown is disfigured beyond recognition, my past is increasingly unmoored. I write to make a contribution, however small and pathetic, toward saving the place.”
Rida Bilgrami, who is from Pakistan, discusses becoming a British citizen in this Catapult essay, Why Do Borders and Passports Dictate What Country I Get to Call Home? and the changes that citizenship papers bring and don’t bring.
“That I felt like an impostor on re-entry to the UK as a British citizen was a reminder that I must unpeel the layers of my new found passport privilege. I never want to sit comfortably in the knowledge that a small segment of the world’s population can zig-zag to all corners of the globe unencumbered, while the vast majority’s freedoms to cross national borders are significantly curtailed due to racist and discriminatory visa regimes.”
Here is a New York Times op-ed, The Beauty of Being Bilingual, by Natalia Sylvester, the Peruvian-American author whose latest book, Everyone Knows You Go Home, I’ve recommended in this newsletter before.
“In the Spanish spoken by the children of immigrants, you’ll hear the echoes of cousins laughing at our accents when we visited them in Latin America. If you go back one generation, you’ll hear stories of people like my in-laws, whose teachers in Florida beat them for speaking in school the language they spoke at home.”
I definitely have a lot more Yugonostalgia than Marina Abramovic based on this interview the writer and performer gave to Aurora Prelević for The Believer.
“Even if I’m born in ex-Yugoslavia, I don’t feel like a Slavic artist. Even if I live in Holland for thirty-five years, I’m not Dutch. I work in Germany, I’m not German. I’m now in America, I have green card, and I will never take passport. I never care if I touch passport. I don’t belong to any of this. I love to have this kind of freedom. I see myself as a modern nomad, that’s it.”
The same issue of The Believer—which focuses on borders and has many other great works—includes a fantastic interview by Alexis Cheung with Min Jin Lee (who may hold the record for most mentions in this newsletter).
“I’m profoundly interested in diaspora and what it means to all of us. Because diaspora is going to be the permanent human condition. Geography keeps changing and national boundaries are growing more permeable. Even if we’re not moving around, even if we’re not scattered, we’re interacting with people who are. Diaspora becomes something we have to understand.”
Events
Lit Crawl NYC 2019 will take place on Oct. 12 and has many promising events, including this one (international writers and their translators piece together a story in multiple languages), and this reading by writers and chefs of color on food, memory and identity.
The 20th New Yorker Festival includes an event called American Identity on Oct. 13, featuring this stellar lineup: Daniel Alarcón, Min Jin Lee (!), Téa Obreht, and Ocean Vuong (he was recently awarded one of the so-called “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation).
Thanks for reading,
Vesna