Author Marina Budhos tackles the post-9/11 immigration crackdown in her new young adult novel Ask Me No Questions (thanks, Pooja and SAJA). She’s reading today in Manhattan at 6:30pm (note corrected time). Here’s the blurb:
For fourteen-year-old Nadira and eighteen-year-old Aisha, these are the words that define their lives. Nadira and her family are illegal aliens, fleeing to the Canadian border – running from the country they thought would one day be their home. For years, they have lived on expired visas in New York City, hoping they can realize their dream of becoming legal citizens of the United States. But after 9/11, everything changes. Suddenly, being Muslim means being dangerous. A suspected terrorist. And when Nadira’s father is arrested and detained at the border, she and her sister, Aisha are sent back to Queens, and told to carry on, as if everything is the same.But of course nothing is the same. Nadira and Aisha live in fear they’ll have to return to a Bangladesh they hardly know. Aisha, once the academic star, falls apart. Now it’s up to Nadira to find a way out.
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p>Budhos previously wrote The Professor of Light, House of Waiting, and Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers:
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Jhumpa Lahiri and Marina Budhos |
Marina Budhos was born in Queens, New York, the child of an Indo-Guyanese father and a Jewish-American mother who met in the 1950s when her father worked for the Indian Consulate in Manhattan…She was a Fulbright Scholar in India, during which she wrote about the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India for The Nation. She has also covered international news for Ms… [Link]
… Marina Budhos’s second novel, The Professor of Light, [is] a vivid account of a young American girl’s troubled relationship with her brilliant but disturbed Guyanese-Indian father.
Born and raised in New York City, Budhos is the great grand-daughter of indentured laborers who left India for Guyana about a hundred years ago… [Link]
Her take on the Guyanese diaspora’s links with India is fascinating:
My father’s grandparents came from India. The story has it that one side came from the Punjab and one side came from Bihar. But, you know, history gets a little blurred in the passing of generations. But they immigrated to Guyana in the late 19th century. My father grew up in a small village in Guyana that was entirely Indian. His father converted the family to Christianity because that was the way to rise back then.My father then came to the US as a student. He studied international relations at NYU and actually ended up working for a while at the Indian consulate, in the 1950s, when they were setting up shop in New York. Politically he was very shaped by India. Growing up in Guyana, he would listen to stories of what was happening in India on his short-wave radio. At that time this was common in Guyana…
There are strong links [with India]. For my father’s generation it was extremely powerful. At that time, because of de-colonization, India was seen as a beacon. It was the first. It was the big one that had done it. Also, culturally, even though it was his grandfather who had come over, the village life was very close to Indian life. It was very preserved. There was a very strong sense of that identity. I think that has changed. Guyana has evolved its own identity…
Another thing that was a troublesome issue that came up in my father’s generation was that they were seen as inferior Indians. It was not clear who belonged where. Identities were more mingled. People forgot. They didn’t speak Hindi. So there was a linkage, there was sense of yearning, but there was also a rupture. [Link]
Also, take note that this novel is written for and marketed to young adults (YA), which puts it in different “genre” than her other novels, and even other novels that tackle the post-9/11 immigration crackdown.
Apparently, her next novel is YA as well.
I can’t help but cringe at the veiled woman on the cover art.
Is it just me or is Jhumpa Lahiri getting hotter by day? I’d like to “jhumpa” on that… let me hear you say my namesake! say my namesake!
(Sorry sometimes you just skip the article and look at the pictures)
But now I went back and re-read it; thanks for the red highlighting, btw. Few things struck me as comment worthy:
I’ve got more points but I had better stop here before I start getting offensive
NS – I don’t actually think she’s vieled on the cover. I looked at a larger image of the cover on amazon and there it appears that the cover is mainly black with a pattern on it with a fragment of a girl’s face on it. not technically veiled.
She is wearing a sari and eating a mango with spices though, you just can’t see it.
This seems like a very interesting book and I am off to reserve it at the library right now! Manish, you soooo rock the taj!
Ennis, that cracks me up.
I was going to make a joke about how there’s a barely visible orientalist pattern on the black section of the cover, but then I scrolled up and had a closer look at the cover and guess what. There’s a barely visible…
You couldn’t make it up.
I have the book and there is no “orientalist pattern” on the cover that I can make out. I do, however, think it is supposed to evoke a black veil.
And yes, the book was a satisfying read.
OK, either someone spiked my dal at lunch, or I need to have my eyes checked…
Cause that cover ain’t plain black.
🙂 too funny!
Another SAJA sales person in the news. I am totally sick of the SAJA brand of subcontinental writing. When will these turdburglars change the theme? It is always one of the following.
[] How my orthodox dad screwed me up. [] Look, I am suffering, my cultural baggage is messing me up. I can’t marry Brandon any more. [] I slept with Brandon, Tom and a bunch of other guys and I am not ashamed to be an Oreo. [] Here is an idea, sprinkle words such as Henna, Chutney, Curry, Tandoori, Naan and voila, you have watered down customized prose for the NPR listening, Startbucks sipping, rimmed eyewear adorned population in their volvos. If we get them to buy the book, we are done. [*] Write a steamy account of the conflict between tradition and one night stands. Isaiah Sheffer would announce it on the holy grail of pretentious radio, a.k.a Symphony Space.
It is akin to flogging a dead horse after excavating it. Wait, I take that back. I have used this expression way too often but I love it. It is recreating a horse from DNA, Jurassic Park style, killing it, and then flogging it for the sake of flogging a dead horse.
All the writers who write watereed down prose, including the Jhumpa-Lumpa please, find an original theme.
LoL @ prope//er – brilliant!
I think Prope//er gets the prize this week for the funniest quote on SM in quite a while.
(Although I thought my diatribe about frog-shagging on the Kundi thread was a pretty strong contender).
Hey at least it’s a progression from “I’m an immigrant and every American out to fuck me over and no one can understand why I can’t fit in” I was definitely sick of that shit. I’m happy to see people writing about stuff that is real now and that the current generation can relate to.
It never fails. The Jhumpa love-fest starts and, in the twinkling of an eye, it is supplanted by the Jhumpa hate-fest.
Not that either is too far off the mark. She is lovable for all sorts of reasons: she’s a good writer, and she’s a good-looking writer, and who better to fly the flag for Desi-stan? She writes tightly controlled plots, she’s respectful, and she puts up with the shit no-nothings like us dish out all over the internet.
On the other hand, I understand the hate-fest too. Jhumpa is not just Jhumpa. She’s the beneficiary of two peculiar public desires. One is the tendency in America (and elsewhere) to celebrate the good as if it were the great. A Pulitzer for that Interpreter book? No way. Her prose, as has been remarked before, is mechanical, engineered to within an inch of its microprecise life. She’s the straight-A MFA student: she never met an adjective she didn’t like, and her books read as if a creative writing teacher would love them. To get a sense of how good she isn’t, read her after reading Philip Roth or Alice Munro. Or Rohinton Mistry for that matter, a wonderfully authoritative and expansive writer with genuine insight into the human experience.
The second reason the haters go at Jhumpa is that she’s been crowned the Brown for Now. So, you could just call it jealousy (some of it is), but there is the very real issue of whether all that hype is better at serving mainstream interests than it is desi interests. Of course, this is a reflection of the industry itself, in which everything is stage-managed and handed to you on a plate. But if you talk to those in the know, you’ll realize that there are Indian writers in English who kick Jhumpa’s (ahem…very attractive) booty, but who don’t get 5% of the recognition, and I think this rubs lovers of literature the wrong way, and that’s why they hate on the J-girl. I mean, come on, Chatterjee’s “English, August” should have won the Booker, the Pulitzer and the Prix Goncourt all at once. But you just try even finding it at Barnes and Noble. Total disgrace.
And then there’s all the impressive non-fiction narratives coming out of India and Desi-stan, a body of writing which, in my opinion, is the great brown contribution to contemporary literature: Pankaj Mishra, Suketu Mehta, Amitav Ghosh, Amitava Kumar, Amartya Sen. A truly stunning wave of cultural production. But the hype merchants are only looking for the next Arundati Roy.
The description of this book suggests that it won’t be one of the stereotypical identity conflict novels that brown authors love to write. However, the reason I am uncomfortable with the cover art is because it is stereotypical–a closer look at the picture reveals might reveal something other than a veiled woman, but that first impression is what counts. In this case, a novel about Islam has a veiled woman on the cover, as if that is THE defining symbol of Islam. It is disappointing (and I know that authors rarely have a say in the cover art) that a promising text about Muslims post-9/11 becomes subverted by the cover art.
Al-Jibraiq, I agree with your assessment of Lahiri. As a person of the literati, it’s problematic that Lahiri is the poster child for South Asian Americans, when she doesn’t represent the second generation accurately.
I see your point on the veil, NS. Though, to be fair, the veil is a symbol of Islam and certain Islamic priorities.
As for Lahiri, it’s her artistry I impugn, not her accuracy. I’m sure she’s painfully accurate.
“and I know that authors rarely have a say in the cover art”
i don’t think that’s true for the fairly well established authors who do get to vet their cover art. unless of course the author is happy to leave those details to the publisher. but they always get to see it and can voice their objections/approval.
Not sure what to make of the veil…
If the choice was mine I believe it would have been more honest (and effective) for Budhos to highlight an unveiled, normal teenage girl on the cover, or perhaps instead of the black veil, a red-white-and blue one. In this book the overzealous, antagonistic powers seem not necessarily Islamic, but American.
Oh yeah, the veil strangely reminds me of Kenny from southpark
You didn’t impugn her artistry, just lobbed a few cliches about her writing that amount to an opinion. Not very convincing criticism. Although the stuff about jealousy was insightful, yes, I do believe there is some of that.
I think one of the problems and fair critiques I’ve heard of Lahiri’s work is how much she conceals class/caste differences in her work. Now, one the one hand I think as a fiction writer she has complete freedom in choosing her material, but once her work is interpreted as representative of an entire diasporic population I worry about what is concealed. I think it’s possible to find her work moving and troubling at the same time, and I think that part of the issue here has to do with the ghetto-ising of ethnic literature in general, and letting discrete works speak for entire communities.
Al Jibraiq, I couldn’t help noticing that all the ‘great’ SA writers you mention are male. This has always pissed me off, pardon my lang. Back in desh, the Stephanian men were always claiming they spoke up for an entire generation, nation, movement, species etc etc. Ghosh, Tharoor, Chatterjee–all of the same tiresome breed. Not that I don’t enjoy their writing, but I also notice the correlation between the supposed span and breadth of their claims and their ‘greatness.’ Coincidence? I don’t see why Lahiri has to represent, speak up for an entire generation. No writer really does. They just claim that they do. I can’t help thinking that Jane Austen and the Bronte’s would never have made it judged by the criteria of what and whom they ‘seem’ to represent. The Dickens and Thackerays would have claimed to have the greater handle on history.
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