Description

A powerful meditation on identity and belonging Sejal Shah explores the tension of being both invisible and hypervisible in a country that struggles with race The daughter of immigrants from Indian and Kenya Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up inand returning towestern New York an area of stark racial and socioeconomic segregation Her work illuminates how we are all marked by family and place by the limits of our bodies by our losses and regrets by who and what we love by our ambivalences and our silences This is a book about growing up Indian in nonIndian places about what it means to be American South Asian American a writer of color and a feminist Shah considers the implications of being asked where are you fromthe geographic and cultural distances between people how these gaps are imagined and real constructed and changing These literary essays will certainly appeal to readers of short stories and poetry as well