Reviews
Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, by Minal Hajratwala
line_so_fine's review
5.0
I am of a cultural group that, at its peak, numbered at less than a half million people. That's the size of the population of Cleveland or thereabouts. Add to this an immigration experience to the US, a place where no one I have ever met has any understanding or knowledge of the culture of my parents and grandparents. This is something I am used to, that I expect, that is part of the air that I breathe. There are very few books written about my cultural group- I have read most I can find, and that hasn't taken me very long. Most of the time my group gets maybe a paragraph or two in a larger book about something else. We are a citation, or a footnote, if mentioned at all. I have never read or seen a book, watched a movie, read a poem, or experienced any art of any kind that reflects any part of my cultural experience that I can relate to or that seems real to me. Not one time. Not even a little bit.
So to say that finding this book --where the author talks about her diasporic heritage in depth, from her great-grandparents in India to her grandparents and parents in Fiji, to her parents' move to the US-- BLEW MY FRIGGIN MIND, is kind of an understatement.
So I read the book. And at first, I was so agog that I was ACTUALLY READING THIS, that such a book actually exists, that I could barely take it in. I read paragraphs over a few times. It was like, right there, IN REAL PRINT, you guys. A whole book. About me, about us. My us, which is such a specific us that we don't really get books all our own.
As I got into the book more, there were so many things about the author's family experiences that were vastly different than mine. At first this frustrated me, in the way that all underrepresented people feel when finally, a story or two about them comes to light. "When my friends read this, they're going to conflate this story with mine, and although this is a great representation of one aspect of Indo-Fijian culture, this is not representative of my family." When you don't get any representation at all, for so long, and then finally you get one shot, that shot is never going to able to speak to the whole of the cultural experience. That's the fucked up thing about having a few representations of something really complex.
Still, despite this frustration, I can't really explain what this book meant to me. It really made me bug out, ya'll.
So to say that finding this book --where the author talks about her diasporic heritage in depth, from her great-grandparents in India to her grandparents and parents in Fiji, to her parents' move to the US-- BLEW MY FRIGGIN MIND, is kind of an understatement.
So I read the book. And at first, I was so agog that I was ACTUALLY READING THIS, that such a book actually exists, that I could barely take it in. I read paragraphs over a few times. It was like, right there, IN REAL PRINT, you guys. A whole book. About me, about us. My us, which is such a specific us that we don't really get books all our own.
As I got into the book more, there were so many things about the author's family experiences that were vastly different than mine. At first this frustrated me, in the way that all underrepresented people feel when finally, a story or two about them comes to light. "When my friends read this, they're going to conflate this story with mine, and although this is a great representation of one aspect of Indo-Fijian culture, this is not representative of my family." When you don't get any representation at all, for so long, and then finally you get one shot, that shot is never going to able to speak to the whole of the cultural experience. That's the fucked up thing about having a few representations of something really complex.
Still, despite this frustration, I can't really explain what this book meant to me. It really made me bug out, ya'll.
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