Home Fire
Like Antigone, Aneeka flouts the law of the land (laid down by British Home Secretary Karamat) that those who join terrorist groups abroad can never return to British soil. Isma, like Ismene, is inclined to want to obey the law, but also supports her sister. Antigone the play is very short, and we know almost nothing about the brother. In Home Fire
Home Fire
Once you get past Isma’s tepid first section, this is a gripping, thought-provoking, and important work.
The main character, Aysel (pronounced Uh-zell), is of Turkish origin, but she knows very little about that culture. Her parents split up when she was a baby, and her mother has tried hard to assimilate into mainstream American culture. Her father has a mental illness which caused him to commit a horrible crime against an all-American boy.
The novel begins some years after the crime. Because of her unusual last name and her Turkish ethnicity, 16-year-old Aysel believes that everyone in their small Kentucky town associates her with her father’s crime, and that they always will. She also fears that her father’s mental illness and criminal past may resurface in herself. Therefore, she has decided to kill herself. She finds a “suicide partner” on a web site, and they plan to act in less than a month, on April 7. The novel is structured as a count-down to this day, which effectively ratchets up the tension.
As she and Roman (her suicide partner) discuss the reasons for their decision, they become closer. But will their friendship be enough to save them? Read this compelling, poignant book to find out. (Hint: the ending is hopeful.)
The story is told in first person present tense, which makes sense since Aysel doesn’t want to think about the past, and believes she has no future. The title of the novel (which I love) refers not only to Aysel’s depression, but also her interest in physics. The book includes resources for young people who are depressed and who might be contemplating suicide.
Some of the stories in this collection deal with the immigrant experience in the U.S. “About My Father’s Accent” is a very short piece about American-raised kids reacting to an accent that “sounds like Port-au-Prince, the crowded streets, the blaring horns, the smell of grilled meat and roasting corn, the heat, thick and still” (9). “Voodoo Child” is a funny story about a college student who pretends to know voodoo to freak out her roommate. “Cheap, Fast, and Filling” concerns a recent immigrant trying to survive on very little money.
But most of the collection is devoted to stories set in Haiti, although there is usually an American connection. The longest story, “Sweet on the Tongue,” alternates between a U.S. setting and an extended flashback in Haiti where the main character had a devastating, life-changing experience. The American-born narrator of “In the Manner of Water or Light” tells the story of her mother’s conception in Haiti at a time of terrible violence. The Haitian couple in “A Cool, Dry Place” is planning to flee to Florida.
Gay’s writing style is simple and straightforward, allowing her characters’ voices and personalities to shine through. This entertaining, absorbing, and thought-provoking collection, first published in 2011 by Artistically Declined Press, was reissued this year by Grove Press.
I’ve created a 5-week unit plan for middle school and high school, featuring second generation fiction, memoir, and poetry. This includes daily lesson plans, handouts, and suggested reading. Please access it here: Becoming American: Second Generation American Literature Lesson Plan. This unit can be used in a language arts or English class that is studying American literature.
“Second generation” refers to children of immigrants: people who were born in the United States to immigrant parents, or who were brought as young children to the United States by their immigrant parents.
Studying literature by second-generation Americans can highlight the transition from immigrant to American. As Marina Budhos notes in her book Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers
Julia Alvarez, who immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child, titled her first book of fiction How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Because they are often straddling two worlds, because they can see American culture both from the outside looking in and from the inside looking out, second generation Americans often have a lot to say about what it means to be an American.
Feel free to share this plan with your colleagues. If you end up using it, please let me know how this plan works in your classroom, as well as any suggestions for improvement.
I thought “Floor Show” was warm, interesting, insightful, funny, and authentic—so different from many of the cold, clinical, self-consciously serious stories I often read in literary magazines. I was therefore thrilled to find out that this author was going to give a reading from her new book in a DC bookstore! I was there. I bought her book—How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
I’m going to call How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is a novel-in-stories. Each story can be read and enjoyed on its own, but each story is also linked to the others through the characters and events. All the stories are about a family with four daughters who fled the Dominican Republic and settled in New York. The stories are arranged in reverse chronological order, from 1989 (when the third daughter, Yolanda, is 29) to 1956 (when Yolanda is a small child). The stories are autobiographical, and Yolanda, who becomes a writer, is the alter-ego of Julia Alvarez. Some of the stories are told in first person singular, one in first person plural (“A Regular Revolution” is told by the four girls together, “we”), and some in third person.
I was going to present a list of my favorite stories, until I realized that almost all the titles would be on it, so my recommendation is: read them all in the order they appear in the book. Since you’ll be reading into the past, it’s fascinating to understand the precursors to the adult challenges the daughters face, and the stories behind the memories alluded to as the girls get older. Every character, major or minor, is clearly and vividly portrayed, and each character is unique. I so enjoyed getting to know the sisters as well as their parents and many relatives.
When I think about the language of these stories, the word “folk art” comes to mind. Although the book jacket tells me that Julia Alvarez has graduate degrees in writing and literature, yet the language seems as open, alive, and unpretentious as a masterpiece from an unschooled artist such as Grandma Moses. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, instead of calling attention to itself and saying “be impressed!” Alvarez’s language takes us by the hand and leads us to fall in love with the characters and their stories.
I might as well end with the beginning of “Floor Show,” that first story that led me to fall in love with this book 25 years ago:
“No elbows, no Cokes, only milk or— ” Mami paused. Which of her four girls could fill in the blank of how they were to behave at the restaurant with the Fannings?
“No elbows on the table,” Sandi guessed.
“She already said that,” Carla accused.
“No fighting, girls!” Mami scolded them all and continued The Epistle. “Only milk or ice water. And I make your orders. Is that clear?”
The four braided and beribboned heads nodded. At moments like this when they all seemed one organism—the four girls—Sandi would get that yearning to wander off into the United States of America by herself and never come back as the second of four girls so close in age.
American Born Chinese
These stories come together in a poignant, effective way in the end. Even as my students laughed at the racist stereotypes in this book, they recognized them as racist, and understood why Yang used them and what he was trying to convey.
In addition to the messages of tolerance and empathy, this graphic novel can also be used to discuss literary devices such as symbolism and foreshadowing. For example, early in the book, when Jin Wang still lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown, he confesses that when he grows up he want to be a transformer, like the toys he plays with. The Chinese herbalist to whom he is speaking tells him that “it’s easy to become anything you wish, as long as you’re willing to forfeit your soul.”
This book can be read on many levels. According to Gene Luen Yang’s web site, American Born Chinese was the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award.
This is a short book. The English text (translated by Ann Goldstein) is printed on the right-hand pages, while the original Italian is on the left, which makes the actual text only about 100 pages long. The essays explore Lahiri’s quest to learn Italian, her love of the language and the country, and her decision to write in Italian.
The book reveals Lahiri as an intensely private person who is uncomfortable with the fame that has been thrust upon her. She writes about receiving the Pulitzer Prize for her first published book in English: “I became a writer in English. And then, rather precipitously, I became a famous writer. I received a prize that I was sure I did not deserve, that seemed to me a mistake. Although it was an honor, I remained suspicious of it. . . . But a year after my first book was published I lost my anonymity” (p. 167).
She turns to Italian, in part, in order to regain the freedom of anonymity. After studying the language for 20 years, she and her family move to Rome. She begins to keep a diary in Italian, and then to write the short essays that make up this book. Here is a passage from the essay “The Imperfect”:
As a girl in America, I tried to speak Bengali perfectly, without a foreign accent, to satisfy my parents, and above all to feel that I was completely their daughter. But that was impossible. On the other hand, I wanted to be considered an American, yet, despite the fact that I speak English perfectly, that was impossible, too. I was suspended rather than rooted. . . . Here it Italy, where I’m very comfortable, I feel more imperfect than ever. . . . Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new relationship with imperfection? What does it offer to me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness. Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive. (pp. 111-113).
The two short stories included are unlike any stories I remember reading by her. First of all, they are not specifically about Indian-Americans or India. The characters’ ethnicity is not defined. Second, the stories have a dream-like quality (and one of them is actually about a dream). They have a magical realist flavor although I can’t point to any prominent magical or fantasy elements in them.
The writing in this book is simple and spare, but at the same time deeply felt. It is a raw exploration of the struggle to express oneself honestly and the freedom to create, unconstrained by expectations.
I read Into The Heart
Once Yarima decided to stay in the rainforest, her American family had no contact with her. David was devastated, but tried to hide his pain as he was growing up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He even began telling people that his mother was dead. He longed to be a “typical” American boy, and was terrified of people finding out the truth: that his mother lived in a jungle and ate tarantulas. To numb his feelings, he drank heavily in high school. Finally, in college, he began to come to terms with his heritage and, once he graduated, decided to make a trip to the Amazon jungle to find his mother.
David finds not only his mother, but also his half-brother and many uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. During his months in the jungle, he learns to fish, clear land, and shoot with a bow and arrow. He begins to re-learn the language. Despite the difficulties of living in the jungle (lots of bugs, flash storms, and unexpected injuries), he finds a feeling of deep peace and belonging.
Parts of this book are funny. When David arrived in his mother’s village, almost the first thing she did (after crying for joy) was to present him with two “wives”. These young women were already married to other men, but that was no barrier. The women tried to persuade him to perform his husbandly duty so he could give his mother a Yanomami grandchild. He tried just as hard to persuade them that, while he enjoyed their company, he wasn’t interested in being their husband.
This unique memoir sheds light in a compelling, poignant way on the underlying humanity we all share. David Good has set up an organization, The Good Project, dedicated to the cultural preservation of the Yanomami people.
Larsen’s autobiographical novel follows Helga Crane, who was raised by her Danish mother and step-father. We first meet Helga when she is a young woman working at an all-black college in the South. Her mother is dead, and she doesn’t know her father, a black man. She is disgusted with the college’s philosophy of keeping blacks “in their places” and separate from whites.
She finally decides to quit in the middle of the term and to return to Chicago to her mother’s brother, Uncle Peter, who had supported her after her mother’s death. However, when she reaches Uncle Peter’s house, she finds that he has married, and that his wife doesn’t want him to have anything to do with his dusky-skinned niece.
Her search for a place to belong takes her to Harlem, where she finds a job at a black insurance company. While she enjoys the company of blacks, she doesn’t want to shun whites, as many black people made it a point to do.
An inheritance from Uncle Peter gives her the money to travel to Denmark to stay with her mother’s sister. She is greatly admired in Copenhagen, but realizes that she is seen as an exotic being more than as a fellow human. Spurning the advances of a famous artist who paints her and then wishes to marry her, she realizes she misses black life and culture, and ends up back in Harlem.
“How absurd she had been to think that another country, other people, could liberate her from the ties which bound her forever to these mysterious, these terrible, these fascinating, these lovable, dark hordes,” she thinks to herself upon her return. Yet she also insists that “existence in America, even in Harlem, was for Negroes too cramped, too uncertain, too cruel.” She thinks she cannot stay permanently in Harlem, “nor, she saw now, could she remain away. Leaving, she would have to come back.”
Although the ending of this novel seems hurried and false, the rest of the novel gives us a fascinating portrait of an intelligent, somewhat aloof woman caught between two races and countries, and who longs for a place to call home.
Sarah is angry at her white parents for trying to avoid any talk of Korea. She refuses to call them “Mom” and “Dad,” instead referring to them by their first names. She drops out of college and decides on a whim to spend a year in Korea, in a program for young people of Korean heritage. I found Sarah to be immature and self-absorbed (an impression which is perhaps heightened because her sections are told in first person). Still, I was still interested in her journey to find her roots.
She struggles with the language, since most of the other students in the program have Korean parents and are already somewhat familiar with the language. I was puzzled by the fact that almost all the other students reject her because she is adopted. She does make friends with one young man who is half-Korean.
The sections of the novel devoted to Kyung-Sook (Sarah’s birth mother) are told in third person, and take the reader back in time to the Korean War. Lee interviewed Korean birth mothers as part of her research, and from these interviews she creates a sympathetic character in Kyung-Sook, who has to struggle for her every meal.
Sarah attempts to find her birth mother by visiting the orphanage where she was abandoned. There, she finds something shocking about her birth which could explain her parents’ reluctance to bring up the subject of Korea. She also appears on a Korean television show devoted to reuniting family members.
I don’t want to reveal whether or not Sarah connects with Kyung-Sook. The twists and turns of the story are interesting. In the end, Sarah returns to the United States a more mature young woman. And in the end, I learned a little bit about life in Korea.
