This Is One Way to Dance
Page 15
The image of garba dancers described as sea anemones originates in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s poem “Garba” in Black Candle (Corvallis, OR: Calyx Books, 1991).
The lines from Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” appear on page 17 of his book of the same name, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (New York: Granta, in association with Viking Penguin, 1991).
The poem that I quote from is called “Counting the Ways” and appears on pages 330–31 of Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, edited by Sunaina Maira and Rajini Srikanth (New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1996).
Anand Vaishnav’s article about matrimonials, “Nice to Meet You. Will You Marry Me?,” appeared in the Boston Globe, March 30, 2002, on the front page of the Living/Arts section.
WHO’S INDIAN?
My title is a nod to Gish Jen’s story collection Who’s Irish?, in which Jen explores Asian American and Irish American identity. An earlier and slightly different version of “Who’s Indian?” appeared under the title “Where Are You From?” in the inaugural issue of Catamaran: A Magazine of South Asian American Literature 1 (2003): 21–28. My thanks to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for a Graduate School Fellowship that supported my travel and to Richard B. Newton (Rick), who led the UMass journalism course and trip to Sicily.
The epigraph to my essay originated in Jasbir K. Puar’s important article “Resituating Discourses of ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Asianness’ in Northern England: Second Generation Sikh Women and Constructions of Identity,” Socialist Review 94 (1994): 21–54. I am grateful to Puar for making explicit the assumptions within the question “Where are you from?”
I referenced James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” about Baldwin’s experience living in a remote town in Switzerland in the 1950s, from Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955, 1984), 159–75.
I wrote “Who’s Indian?” nearly twenty years ago. I am struck by the contrast between the world portrayed in the essay and the current situation of the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa turned away not only from Italy but also from other parts of Europe.
Thank you to my dear friend Ann Gagliardi for sparking my interest in Italy and inviting me to visit her there.
THE WORLD IS FULL OF PAPER. WRITE TO ME.
This essay grew out of remarks I gave at a memorial service for Agha Shahid Ali in 2002 at the University of Massachusetts. I typed up some notes at a common computer in Bartlett Hall and didn’t save them but only printed the eulogy. I found my notes a decade later, after many moves between states, while unpacking boxes in my parents’ basement. I used my eulogy to write a longer essay about Shahid, published by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s journal, The Margins, December 8, 2013, on the twelfth anniversary of his passing and later republished in Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, edited by Kazim Ali (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 12–19. I took the final two lines of Shahid’s poem “Stationery,” from The Half-Inch Himalayas (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 48, as the title of this essay. Reprinted by permission.
I also quote two lines from Shahid’s poem “Farewell,” from The Country without a Post Office (New York: Norton, 1997), 23. The sentence “I too call myself I” in my postscript is the last line of Kamala Das’s poem “An Introduction.” I use the same line in “Prelude.”
KINSHIP, COUSINS, & KHICHIDI
I wish to thank Kirit N. Shah for emailing me the standard diacritical transliterations of several Gujarati words that appear in this essay, even though I decided not to use all of his suggestions. The transliterations in the essay are a combination—of standard and what looked right to my eyes.
When I read Geeta Kothari’s essay “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?,” I admired the segmented form she used. Reading her essay inspired my own. Kothari’s piece appeared in the Kenyon Review 21 (1999): 6–14, and was later republished in Best American Essays 2000, edited by Alan Lightman (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 91–100, which is where I read it. Thank you to Anita Mannur for inviting me to submit work to the special issue on food of the Massachusetts Review she guest edited in 2004; I wrote my essay in response to her call.
STREET SCENE
Maurice Utrillo’s painting Street Scene inspired this essay. The painting belongs to the permanent collection of the University of Rochester’s museum, the Memorial Art Gallery, in Rochester, New York. Thank you to Joanna Scott of the University of Rochester for welcoming me into her Sense of Place course while I was on sabbatical from teaching at Marymount Manhattan College. This essay, as well as “Bird” and “Walking Tributaries,” began as writing for assignments for her class. I am grateful to Mount Holyoke College, where I taught in 2003–2004; my faculty research funds made this trip to Paris possible in 2004.
BIRD
The idea that each relationship is its own animal with its own life and memory came from Abigail Thomas’s memoir Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 141. The idea and image stayed with me, as has her book.
WALKING TRIBUTARIES
Thank you to Jane Hawley, Luther College professor of dance, for inviting me to collaborate with her in the summer of 2008. I am grateful to Marymount Manhattan College for funding this work, to Sandhya and Brian Caton for hosting me, and to Amanda Hamp for further collaboration. Leigh Wheaton, one of the dancers in the collaborative, read my poem “Independence, Iowa,” which was later published in Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2010), 64–65. The lines I quote by Luther College English professor David Faldet are from Oneota Flow: The Upper Iowa River and Its People (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 4. Thank you to the University of Iowa Press for permission to reprint this excerpt.
I quote Toni Morrison from her essay/speech “The Site of Memory,” which I first read in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990), 299–305, excerpt on page 305. I gratefully acknowledge the late Toni Morrison and ICM Partners for permission to reprint this excerpt.
CASTLE, FORT, LOOKOUT, HOUSE
This essay grew out of a prompt given by Abigail Thomas in her writing workshop at the Ninety-Second Street Y in Tribeca: “It was not X I wanted, it was Y. However, I got an X.” Thomas credited inspiration for the prompt to the opening lines of Brigit Pegeen Kelley’s poem “Iskandariya.”
I adapted my definitions of “quarry” from several I found online, including in the Oxford English Dictionary and on Wikipedia in 2011.
YOUR WILDERNESS IS NOT PERMANENT
“The Love of My Life,” by Cheryl Strayed, appeared in the September 2002 issue of The Sun. I am grateful to editors Bradford Morrow and Nicole Nyhan at Conjunctions, where this essay first appeared, for making what I had written better and catching what I missed. Thank you to Aviva Grossberg, Christian Nagler, and Anne Mavromatis.
THERE IS NO MIKE HERE
“There Is No Mike Here” was originally published in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop online journal, The Margins, in “After Yi-Fen Chou: A Forum—19 Writers Respond to Michael Derrick Hudson’s Yellowface,” on September 15, 2015. The introduction to the folio states, “Early last week, news broke that Yi-Fen Chou, whose poem is included in The Best American Poetry 2015, is not a Chinese poet, but in fact is a white man named Michael Derrick Hudson. After little success submitting poems under his real name, Hudson decided to take on the Chinese name Yi-Fen Chou—a name, it turns out, shared by a high school classmate of his. His poem was accepted by the journal Prairie Schooner and later chosen by Sherman Alexie for this year’s anthology of Best American Poetry. . . . We asked write
rs within the AAWW community to send us their responses to Michael Derrick Hudson’s yellowface.”
Also included in this introduction was the following excerpt from a piece Ken Chen, former executive director of AAWW, wrote for NPR Code Switch: “American literature isn’t just an art form—it’s a segregated labor market. In New York, where almost 70 percent of New Yorkers are people of color, all but 5 percent of writers reviewed in the New York Times are white. Hudson saw these crumbs and asked why they weren’t his. Rather than being a savvy opportunist, he’s another hysterical white man, envious of the few people of color who’ve breached their quarantine” (“Why a White Poet Posed as Asian to Get Published, and What’s Wrong with That,” All Things Considered, September 10, 2015).
In 2018, three years after I wrote my essay, Sherman Alexie’s harassment of women writers surfaced in the news. I taught Alexie’s story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” collected in Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) 1–21 and originally published in the April 21 and April 28, 2003, issue of the New Yorker, for a long time. I don’t know if I will teach it again. I could say the same thing about a few other writers. I did not cut them out of my work, finally (their writing has influenced my own), but I thought hard about whether or not to allot them space in my book. That lineage is still there, but I chose to reduce some of the space.
The story about Thanksgiving that I mention, “Giving Is Thanks” by Amy Morris Lillie, is included in the textbook Paths to Follow, edited by Ullin W. Leavell, Mary Louise Friebele, and Tracie Cushman (New York: American Book Company, 1956), 262–67.
I stumbled on Angela Jackson’s poem “The Love of Travelers” in The Pushcart Prize, XIV, edited by Bill Henderson (New York: Penguin Books, 1989). The excerpt quoted comes from page 232 of this anthology. “The Love of Travelers” is copyrighted in 1998 by Jackson, in And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New (Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press, 1998).
TEMPORARY TALISMANS
My short story “The Girl with Two Brothers” first appeared in Denver Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2010): 80–87. The excerpts from Christian McEwen’s World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down (Peterborough, NH: Bauhan Publishing, 2011) are taken from pages 172–73.
SIX HOURS FROM ANYWHERE YOU WANT TO BE
In this essay I included my description of western New York as “disturbingly close to Ohio,” taken from my short story “The Half King,” which appeared in the scenester issue of The Literary Review 56, no. 2 (early summer 2013): 23–37. The quotation “The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave” is taken from Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), 228. The poem “Stay Home,” copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry, is from New Collected Poems and reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.
SARIS AND SORROWS
Thank you to Scott Seifritz for the opportunity to read a draft of this essay at his Speakeasy reading series, and to Jacob Rakovan for his smart, insightful feedback after the reading.
During our three-hour wedding ceremony on June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. Making the legal and social benefits of marriage more accessible to all felt momentous and helped mitigate my ambivalence about having such a traditional (and not even in my tradition!) and patriarchal ceremony. I am grateful to have found a person I wanted to make a life with, and fortunate to have had a meaningful celebration. However, getting married is not the prize. I had been single for a long time, and I had been happy (and unhappy) in that life, too. Not everyone wants to get married. And there are many reasons to dance.
CRUX, THE GEORGIA SERIES
IN LITERARY NONFICTION
Debra Monroe, My Unsentimental Education
Sonja Livingston, Ladies Night at the Dreamland
Jericho Parms, Lost Wax: Essays
Priscilla Long, Fire and Stone: Where Do We Come From?
What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Sarah Gorham, Alpine Apprentice
Tracy Daugherty, Let Us Build Us a City
Brian Doyle, Hoop: A Basketball Life in Ninety-Five Essays
Michael Martone, Brooding: Arias, Choruses, Lullabies, Follies, Dirges, and a Duet
Andrew Menard, Learning from Thoreau
Dustin Parsons, Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams
Clinton Crockett Peters, Pandora’s Garden: Kudzu,
Cockroaches, and Other Misfits of Ecology
André Joseph Gallant, A High Low Tide: The Revival of a Southern Oyster
Justin Gardiner, Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic
Emily Arnason Casey, Made Holy: Essays
Sejal Shah, This Is One Way to Dance