Sneha Madhavan-Reese: “I was born and raised in the United States as the child of immigrant parents from India. I became an immigrant myself after my husband and I decided to move our young family to Canada. I often think about how my children are living some of the same experiences I had as a child, growing up far from extended family, with parents whose cultural references and childhood memories all stem from a different place; and I have a greater appreciation for the challenges, far greater than my own, that my parents must have faced. Though I love my adopted country and consider it home, I wonder whether I’ll ever feel as though I completely belong.” (web)
Tanya Ko-Hong: “As an immigrant of the Korean diaspora, I know what it feels like being invisible, voiceless, and powerless. Writing poems has been a long process: even allowing myself to write certain words felt like an impossible transgression. At times I was sick at heart, in pain and angry, but something magical was happening. I was able to expose my own wound through new symbols and images.” (web)
Annie Kantar: “This past summer, Gaza was cut off from all but 1-2 hours of electricity a day. As of publication, Gazans are allocated only 3-4 hours a day. This poem was born of a desire to articulate, in some small measure, the madness in that normalcy.”
I guess you may not receive this letter as you did not reply to my last one or the one before, and that is not like you. We have moved house, and since Sister Asunta died no one can tell me where you live. At first I thought maybe you had forgotten me or started a new family. Mom and Dad say you moved and did not leave a forwarding address. Usually they tell the truth about everything, but when I ask about you they look at each other and say nothing.
I wish you had been at Sister Asunta’s funeral. Instead of flowers from a shop everyone brought wild flowers or herbs, and the coffin was completely green and smelt lovely, with all the lavender and rosemary and bay. Except I don’t like sage, which is too bitter.
I didn’t really say goodbye to Sister Asunta except at the funeral, but Mom says she had a good death because she died in her sleep. I wonder if it hurts when you die. I hope it didn’t. I hope it’s like sinking into a feather pillow and everything getting softer and lighter. I have dreams where I fly above our house. It’s fun, and I am really light. I look down and see Mom planting nasturtiums and Dad reading the paper. I see my school and the tennis courts and the shopping mall. Once I flew so high I brushed past a big bird, and then I saw you. You were riding a horse. You were a brown dot on the horizon as small as an ant or a bug, but I knew it was you, and I woke up smiling. Love you always, Tulip X
Maria Jastrzebska: “I was born in Warsaw, Poland, and came to live in the United Kingdom with my family as a young child. I grew up bilingual but write poetry in English. A lot of my writing has been about growing up different and living between cultures. Polish words have sometimes slipped into my poems. I’ve been translated into Polish and I have translated Polish poetry into English so a two-way traffic continues non-stop. When people ask me what I write about I often say love and war. These new poems represent a departure in that they are textured with Spanish, with cliché and make-believe. Through prose poetry they tell the story of two women’s quests and love. However, war is never far away, for as Cowboy Hat and Ingénue travel, their narrative is interwoven with the stories of a host of other characters from the recent past, refugees and survivors also seeking a safe haven.” (web)
Luisa A. Igloria: “In 1992, I left Baguio, my home city in the Philippines, to come to the United States; I spent the next four years in my Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois in Chicago. That period was also the first time I had to learn how to deal with racism and microaggressions, encountered on a fairly frequent basis. For instance, being told things like ‘You’re from the Philippines? Thanks to your volcano (Mt. Pinatubo had just erupted in 1991) we’re going to have the crummiest winter we’ve ever had in decades,’ or ‘The language you use in your paper seems very expressive but I confess I don’t really understand what you’re saying; oh! it must be because English is not your first language.’ My very first poetry book, Cartography, was on Baguio City’s creation as a hill station for the American colonial government in the Philippines (in the early 1900s) and the ways by which American influence is felt in daily life even before the fact of physical migration. So while I’ve always written about history, heritage, culture, gender, and place, being an immigrant and diasporic person in North America gives these subjects an additional layer of immediacy for me.” (web)
“Sonnet, with Redskins” by Chris HuntingtonPosted by Rattle
Chris Huntington
SONNET, WITH REDSKINS
to Sherman Alexie
1. Sherman Alexie, I read that the Washington Redskins are finally going to change their name. This doesn’t affect me much because I live in Singapore. 2. All of the Indians I know are from India. 3. Still, I often think about the way we talk about skin because I’m half-Chinese, my wife is from New Hampshire, and our son was born in Ethiopia. 4. He is seven. As we watch the World Cup, he keeps saying he wants to play for Africa. Each time, I say: “Africa’s not a country.” 5. When I was 22 I lived in Africa, in a country called Mauritania. Some Mauritanians still kept slaves. It was an open secret. It was hot there, and the air was full of sand. People wore long robes and many women only showed their eyes and fingertips in public. I once locked eyes with a woman across the market and somehow knew she was smiling at me. I knew it. I ached to see her skin. I ached. 6. Six months later, I found myself at the edge of the rain forest just south of the Equator. I lived in a tiny bungalow in Gabon and drank beer on the porch. It was hot there too. We danced the zouk at night. 7. I fell in love with a Bateke girl. Bateke was her tribe. I sent a picture home, and one of my uncles commented that she looked like Tracy Chapman “with that pickaninny hair.” 8. In Gabon, I had no books, but I did have an old issue of National Geographic. One article began with a photograph of a Japanese man in blue jeans standing beside his baby’s crib. The Tokyo skyline filled the window behind him. My girlfriend picked up the magazine and asked, “Is this you?” 9. Sherman Alexie, you once said it made you sad when you went to England and no one recognized you for an Indian anymore. You felt you were the only Spokane Indian for 5,000 miles. 10. And yet, how tiresome it is to constantly find ourselves sorted by color, like Easter eggs or paint chips. My grandparents emigrated from Guangzhou, but my mother was born in Dallas. My father was a red-headed Hoosier. What tribe am I? 11. I was hurt when my girlfriend only saw my skin, my straight hair, my eyes. We’d been together for months. 12. Her skin was a beautiful brown, but I wasn’t interested in its color; I was interested in how it would feel against my chest. I worked hard to see her naked, but it didn’t feel like work because we made each other laugh, and it was the first time I’d ever sung to a girl. I’d never touched a Caesarian scar before, but I had scars of my own. 13. Everything seemed so simple for a while, and then it wasn’t. After I said good-bye, I wept like a child on the crowded train. 14. So, anyway, why can’t it be the Washington Americans? Sherman Alexie, you’re a wise man; tell me the answer. There are only three people in my tribe, and we look nothing like one another.
Chris Huntington: “Two of my grandparents emigrated to Texas from Guangzhou. The other two were from Indiana. I grew up twenty miles from John Mellencamp’s house and hearing ‘Jack and Diane’ and ‘Pink Houses’ on the radio made me sad because they represented everything I thought I hated about my high school and hometown. Since then, I’ve come to love those songs. I live in Singapore now. I don’t think John Mellencamp is a particularly gifted thinker, but I wish he were our president. When I go back to my hometown these days, I feel like an immigrant even though I speak English better than my grandfather did.” (web)
Alejandro Escudé: “It’s weird being an immigrant when you have come so young. The birth country becomes mythological. It becomes this sort of poetry in itself, and you get confused between the dreams you had when you were little and the real place. So it becomes a real storehouse of poetry. … I read to assimilate. I think every poet has their moment. For me it was ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table …’ It was lines like those, and that outsider feeling of Prufrock, that sense that something’s different about me. It was really a kind of longing in that poem that I gravitated toward. My English teacher gave me that poem, and I remember sitting at my desk thinking, ‘What is this?’” (web)
