Photo: Corey Coyle. CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0). Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of ’89, it barely rained. More than fifty days passed without a drop. The corn dried up. The crops didn’t yield. Acres of farmland turned brown in the sun. Neighbors and livestock died in the heat; wildfires tore across the plains. But we were too young to worry, to know what the word drought could mean to a small Midwestern town like ours, or the miles of farmland that surrounded it.

We spent our days in the fields and woods, the sun high and bright through the leaves. We traveled in packs; we wandered alone. We were great in number; we were two at a time. We scuffed up our jeans, scraped up our knees, tore holes in shirts that got snagged on branches. We climbed the trees and yelled into the wind, and no one heard but us. We ran for miles, the dry summer grasses nicking our shins, trying to find the place where land met sky. We hiked through the goldenrod, up to our waists, our eyes swelling and legs itching, and laid down to watch the clouds move east. And then we walked back the way we came, outlines of our bodies on the ground behind us, bright-yellow dust on our skin.

We were people of the prairie. We were people of the trees. We were the maple and birch, the oak and elm. We were corn and wheat and soy, we were the black earth that grew it. We were bluestem and switchgrass, we were rivers and lakes. And out past the horizon of hardwood and pine, we were mountains.

We were girls. We were boys. We were neither and both.

We were small. We were nothing. We were taller than the trees. Read More

Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), ca. 1809, oil on canvas, 43 1/4 x 67 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m living in Indianapolis for the semester on a teaching fellowship. It’s the end of January 2017. I flew into Nashville a few days ago and picked up a Volkswagen Passat that belongs to my mom’s friend’s kid, who is studying abroad for a year. I feel incredibly lucky that this came through for me, because the four or five grand it would have cost to rent a car for the semester is pretty much what I hope to have left over after taxes, living expenses, and my half of the rent on the apartment back in Portland. If not for the gift of this free car, this “writer ­in ­residence” position would be, essentially, a break-even deal.

I call Dad to check up. “How’s it going?” I ask.

“I was sitting by the edge of the bed, something about sitting there, it’s one of the only places—relief, a little relief, this was a week ago, and I’ve been afraid since then, afraid to sit there. One of the few things that was working and I lost it. I’m afraid now. I was sitting on the edge of the bed and I put my foot down. It came down wrong on the floor and it twisted. I rolled the ankle, I slipped. I fell. I fell between the edge of the bed and the desk. You know the room, you can picture where. I fell and hurt my ankle but I was also stuck at this angle, I lifted my arms to try to grab the edge of the desk, I couldn’t reach it, then I did but I couldn’t hold on, then I did hold on but my arms locked. I had no strength to lift myself up but now I could not let go, I was stuck that way, my muscles were exhausted, the pain I can’t even tell you, the pain and shaking still this whole time, my body, so the back of my head, my neck, banging the leg of the desk, it’s still bruised back there, my head my leg, I was drooling, crying, an hour and forty minutes, the feeling came back and I could move some, I got out of there but I haven’t sat at the edge of the bed again, I’m afraid, but why afraid, I don’t know, I mean I know but what I mean is when I was stuck there, that whole hour forty minutes all I thought about was starving to death, how I could starve to death there, and all I kept thinking was I wouldn’t mind, I’m sorry I’m telling you this, if it only didn’t take so long, if it could happen and be done already I really think I would say okay, fine.”

“This was a week ago? Have you been to the doctor? Did Ronni or Fran come over?”

“I didn’t call them. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t tell anyone. I’m only telling you now because you asked how things are going. Well, that’s how.” Read More

Billy-Ray Belcourt. Photo: Tenille Campbell.

My twin brother, Jesse, and I were born marked by a history of colonization and a public discourse of race we can’t peel from our skin. We were made to take on a mode of embodiment that erodes from the inside out with vicious precision. At the same time, we came into being because love is mathematical: when two people desire each other, they multiply, in various shapes and forms. In our very corporeality we are thus a container for the terror of the past and the beauty that it can’t in the end negate. In this way we, like NDN boys everywhere, are subliminal.

The first year of Jesse’s and my life was a hotbed of decisions, desires, and disavowals that would hover above our shared emotional worlds deep into adolescence. This isn’t my story to tell in painful and careful detail, so the picture I paint now is one that’s rehashed from a handful of sources, including something like intuition.

Here goes. My mom and dad loved while coated in the ash of history. Twentysomethings entranced by the ecstasy of optimism, they made a family out of nothing but the human need to be a part of something less resonant with toxicity than solitude. They didn’t know how to ask the question Sheila Heti poses in Motherhood: “Who is it for me to bring all this unfolding into being?” Perhaps the philosophical basis for their children’s lives was that they no longer wanted to exhale smoke. Read More

© Brittney / Adobe Stock.

The wasp’s quick, menacing, unpredictable stab. I am crouched beside the tire of a pickup truck in Tennessee, my fists balled around my already burning ears. It’s a Saturday in the summer. On the tailgate, my grandfather, my uncle, and their crew of posthole diggers and concrete pourers have knocked off working for long enough to eat lunch: leftover biscuits, sliced tomatoes, boiled eggs.

I am nine years old, soon to be ten. When people ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I say “country singer,” I say “Braves center fielder,” but what I think I want to be is one of these men. I want to be tough like them, steady-handed. The truth is I’m not sure I could be even if I tried. What I am is in thrall to them, which is to say afraid of making a fool of myself in front of them. At the moment, though, I am more afraid of the wasp.

What kind of meanness is a wasp? Even for flying bugs with stingers, of which there are legions in the hills north of Nashville, wasps seem severe. Sure, a bee can sting you, make you swell, but bees make honey, and besides, a bee will sting you just the once. Their lives tied to their weapon, they strike as a last stand, then leave their weapons behind as if offering concessions. Wasps show no such restraint. They are indiscriminate. They don’t carry a weapon, they are the weapon, knives gone airborne, anger on wings. Read More

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” — Toni Morrison

Some time into my studies at university, as I was walking up the avenue that cut between the green fields of east campus and the wide blue of Lake Michigan, headphones in my ears and daydreaming about something or other, I came across a white classmate who was a rather good friend of mine striding along in a KKK costume.

He was in full regalia: the sheet covering the entirety of his body, the rope tied around his waist ready for lynching, the eye-slitted hood carried under his arm. He saw me and stopped to talk, so I had to stop as well. But, unlike him, I was unable to carry off a nonchalant conversation, and I asked him what he was doing with all that. He blushed, as he began to register how he appeared to me, and said it was for a joke. Then, at my shocked expression, he said it was for a class project. When I asked which one, since we were the same major and in nearly all the same classes that year at Northwestern, he muttered that it was something to do with his fraternity, and that he had to go.

We never spoke of this again. Instead, I remained silent, and we remained friends. He was part of the central group of the privileged, popular, and powerful in my predominantly white university—the kids whose parents’ money or connections already made them players in the careers to which the rest of us aspired. He and I worked on independent film projects together for years, attended the same parties where offers were extended; both my summer internship and the housing situation for that internship were landed because of this group of friends. As second- and third-generation legacies, scions of generational wealth and cultural capital, they had power and access. I, as the first-generation child of refugees, had only the brains and work ethic my parents had gifted me, but which were enough to secure me a tenuous place.

Speaking, I knew even back then, would have meant being shut out of that world. And learning to understand that world, my father had told me, wide-eyed with surprise that I did not yet get it, was the real reason for taking on the student loans and the work-study jobs necessary to afford the elite university I attended. The straight A’s were only half the point, my father had said. The other half was everything else—the cultural capital, the access—which my father, who had worked harder than I could ever understand to survive a genocide and get us to America, knew that I would need in order to succeed in this country.

But mostly, I was just afraid.

So, like many Black people in my situation, I stayed silent even as the racism grew. It was training, I was understanding, for the real world after university, which would be more of the same.

*

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Photo: John H. White. Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

You know why they call them Indians? Because Columbus thought he was in India. They’re called Indians because some white guy got lost.

—Herb Stempel, Quiz Show

We called them American bhua and American phupher, the middle of my father’s three older sisters and her husband. As the vanguard of my family’s transplants to the U.S., they’d been assigned these honorifics by their nieces and nephews living then in England. American phupher arrived in Chicago for a temporary stay in the late fifties, then returned permanently with bhua in 1971. Together they raised three children while she labored in an electronics assembly plant, and he worked first as a diesel engineer for the Chicago Transit Authority and later in its managerial ranks. In their earliest years here, they would occasionally receive a phone call from a stranger who had just arrived at O’Hare on British Airways or Air India. The callers didn’t speak much English, and they had no friends or family in the city; they’d simply found a pay phone in the terminal, opened the directory, and dialed the number next to any name that sounded like it came from their part of the world. When these calls came in, my uncle would drive from the family’s apartment in Logan Square to the airport and collect the newcomers, whether they were Punjabi, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi, whether they were Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, and he and my aunt would host them, sometimes for months, until they had secured employment and apartment leases.

This is a kind of generosity that has been practiced by generations of immigrants to and from every part of the world. Among South Asians, such ethnic esprit de corps is captured most succinctly by the term desi, which Vijay Prashad defines to include those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Afghani, Sri Lankan, and Nepalese descent. It isn’t his invention. It’s commonplace enough among my family that I know it to mean one of us in a manner akin to the Italian paisan. Derived from Sanskrit, desi refers to umber skin and curried English, but—like paisan again—its application isn’t entirely seamless. Where outsiders might see homogeneity, immense internecine tensions permeate the histories of the desi peoples. Even among Indians arrived in the West from what is ostensibly a single country, there are chasms of cultural, linguistic, and religious difference that make India more like the fitful cohesion of Europe’s constituent nations than anything resembling the U.S. Uniting all our tongues, gods, cultures, and bodies under a single desi banner is tribalism elevated to a continental scale, and it doesn’t quite work.

Yet desi isn’t a wrong category for us to embrace. When you live in a place that doesn’t recognize differences between you and anyone who looks vaguely like you, you come to accept, even welcome, certain conflations. Partition isn’t much remembered. Who assassinated whose head of state and for what reason doesn’t seem to matter any longer. The cold war over Kashmir, the occupation of Amritsar, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the centuries-long history of persecution and conflict across South Asia—these are hardly known, much less understood, in the West. Here, survival matters. Wellness matters. It matters that we have each other. Growing up in Chicago in the eighties and nineties, it seemed to me that I really might be related to anyone with brown skin and a Bollywood accent. My “uncles” and “aunties” were Gujarati and Pakistani, Hindu and Muslim, Jatt Sikh and Saini. They were shopkeepers and cab drivers, laborers and tailors, professors and physicians. If it takes a village, I lived in a flourishing and richly populated one.

Still, in that village, I have long felt like a freeloader. Though I understand and speak Punjabi and can muddle through a modicum of Urdu and Hindi, though I wore kurta pajamas as a kid and can cook a few sabzis, I know little of the vastness and diversity of the desi nations. From my one visit to India, when I was four, I remember nothing but a sensation here, an image there: a water well between stalks of what might have been sugar cane, saag and corn flour roti cooking under an open sky at night, bathing in the reservoir surrounding the Golden Temple, smoke and the lingering smell of burning hanging over farm fields. This is the entirety of my firsthand reporting on a nation of more than a billion people and its sixty-five thousand years of history. Like every other child of immigrants here, first-generation or fifth-, my distance, my detachment, and my ignorance make me an American. Read More