Immigrant Strong: Sixth Issue
A memoir from South Africa, Pokémon, and being Muslim post-Sept. 11
Book Recommendation
I read Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood a year ago and it had so many things I loved about memoirs — humor, honesty, and reflections about identity, belonging and race. I appreciate learning about other cultures and countries through autobiographical work and this coming-of-age book gives a glimpse of what it was like to grow up as a biracial child during apartheid. It’s been more than a decade since I visited South Africa so it was also a trip down the memory lane for me. (And if you want more on autobiographical writing from South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom is of course a must-read).
Essays
I just picked up Dina Nayeri’s new release, The Ungrateful Refugee. Check out her Longreads essay, When Your Social Worker Thinks You’re Ungrateful. (And if you want to hear her in person, she has a number of book tour events coming up).
“Why should Minoo’s talented children, just because they were born in a brutal dictatorship and have no assets, sit on a bus for forty-five minutes while trust-fund kids sleep an extra hour, and begin their school day fresher, sharper? Why should someone with talent and passion for a sport have to quit his team because of bus schedules? There is no reason for this piling on of advantage. We’ve simply accepted it because that is how the world has always worked.”
This Catapult essay by Nina Li Coomes, In Immigrating From Japan, I Lost Language, Home, and Pokémon, is part of a great column, Mistranslate, which has wonderful reflections on existing between two cultures and languages.
“I felt lonely and thick-tongued, a formerly chatty and book-loving child turned silent and sullen, collateral damage to the immigration I perceived as an unjust violence done unto me.”
Here is a powerful Medium essay by Hilal Isler, I Became Muslim on September 12, 2001.
“I was strange. An alien. Not fully American. A person who turned Muslim on September 12, 2001 and so whose legality, whose belonging could be called into question — would be called into question — indefinitely and independent of the firm and fierce loyalties of her heart.”
A Zora piece by Samantha Mallari, How Frozen Dinners Sustained My Immigrant Family.
“These frozen dinners served as floaties that had saved me from drowning in a sea of cultural whiplash.As a kid straddling two different cultures, I always considered frozen dinners as a happy intersection between Filipino frugality and American convenience.”
A Teen Vogue op-ed from Fiza Pirani, How Telling My Immigrant Parents I Contemplated Suicide May Have Saved My Life.
“Too often, we immigrant children keep our pain locked tight in a metal safe deep within because we feel our problems pale in comparison to the sacrifices our parents made. But our own hardships are exactly that — our own.”
And a New York Times opinion piece by Priyanka Mattoo, We Never Moved Back to Kashmir, Because We Couldn’t.
“I have mapped out the houses, room by room, obsessively, for the past 30 years, so that I can remember them. Because I can’t (or won’t?) revisit, it is my only way to access the happiness of those summers at home in Kashmir. It is why I try to make a home everywhere I go. Feeling at home grounds me. It makes me feel the loss less.”
I Look Forward to Reading…
Antiman, by Rajiv Mohabir, which won the Restless Books Prize for Immigrant Writing and comes out in the summer of 2021.
And lots of great recommendations from this Book Riot list, 16 Beautiful, Compelling, and Poignant Books About Immigrants.
Thanks for reading,
Vesna