Review of a Section of — The Good Immigrant
The Good Immigrant, 26 Writers Reflect on America
Swimmer, Nicole Dennis-Benn
I have only just started reading The Good Immigrant, barely a day after President Donald Trump ordered nearly about the hundredth executive order against immigrants and immigration because after all, immigrants are ‘bad, they are job stealers, benefit scroungers, girlfriend thieves, and criminals. Only when they win an Olympic medal, treat you at your local hospital, or rescue a child from the side of a building do they become good.’
The aptness of the editor’s note in Nikesh Shukla’s collection of 26 immigration stories, shelled out from the intimate part of the souls of 26 immigrant writers kept me up on the night I clicked ‘buy’ in my iBooks. But really, if immigrants weren’t seen as job stealers why would Trump be in the news over this latest executive order? While this post will not bemoan the latest in the news, I invite readers to come to terms with the fact that just like apologists that defend ideas like color blindness, anti-immigrant sentiment is a thing! Let no one convince or coerce you into believing that though ridiculous, immigrants aren’t in fact labeled as bad. They are, we are!
I will be focussing on the second story in this beautiful collection which highlights the other side of immigrant life that is often unseen. Immigrants are whole humans with lives who experience alienation, loneliness, and whatever most people experience with a different twist just because being new in a place sometimes has a more grave impact on how a normal day gone south could look like. Immigration throws people into constant ironies of loss and gains, mostly entirely out of anyone’s control with culprits like foreign cultural dynamics, access, and or finances to name a few. In this story named Swimmer, the narrative voice whose father moves to America from Jamaica tells the story of how a relationship with her dad is barely existent. Dad is a cab driver and fixes pools as well. This heavy schedule leaves no room for bonding. There is a stepmom too who though not to be cliche, often has obvious outcomes. ( Narrator actually leaves home because her father is unable to fully show up for her over an altercation with stepmom). Later, the narrator finds herself in an Ivy league, surrounded by kids whose parents are helping them move in with tons and tons of supplies The narrator has only her one suitcase, no supplies, no family and laughs to help move in and no money. Her dad has just dumped her on the front steps of cold and hilly Ithaca’s Cornell like a stack of Goodwill clothes. Before dad leaves though, he tells the narrator, know your place, and work hard.
Unpacking Know your place and work hard.
Know your place and work hard is about the most loaded sentence. The second part of the sentence in my estimation is not as stifling as the first one. After all, almost every immigrant’s project is progress in the very sense of the word, to excel, to move upward, and not to return home the same. However, the idea of being told to be aware of one’s place is as daunting and as intimidating as any first time experience. How does one handle being told to know their place in an entirely new place? Is this an idea that is instantly birthed into action or is this an idea that takes experiential learning to take root? How about practice? How does anyone practice knowing their place? Is it practiced by staying still or practiced by taking flight? The idea of knowing one’s place is an irony that comes with as much limitation as it comes with as much freedom. Its oxymoron is captured in having the liberty to speak but not too loudly or too much in case you irritate listeners. Knowing your place involves having the liberty to run but not too fast, and probably soaring but remembering not to go too high. Knowing one’s place comes with a burden of always ensuring not to ruffle feathers in a quest to advance yourself as a person. Only go as far as you are allowed to and stop when you’re asked to. Some time in my recent past life, my school toyed with the idea of giving up its status as a sanctuary campus, students protested and were arrested by local police. Among the fifty-something diverse students, students of color were processed first. They were of course the more visible immigrants which reminded other students of color to know their place and probably choose other activities to take part in during protest times. Recently post George Floyd, a lot of immigrants have sat tight regardless of a yearning to show solidarity and walk because they know their place. Knowing your place transforms your existence, not into one of spontaneous, natural, and free flight, will, and humanity but into a calculated, unnatural, artificial, and often suppressed and robotic compliant. And yet, while most immigrants know their place, work tirelessly and restrict themselves to exist merely as shadowed versions of themselves, what does the host society gain by continually highlighting untruths? Especially where foreigners overseas do not reduce themselves the way immigrants reduce themselves in the West.
I began to miss home, my family, my real friends. And though I was feeling this way, I could never tell anyone. For how could one be sad in America?
The narrative voice once again opens another issue. This is the one I describe as a third space problem. A problem that traps an individual in a space very similar to a subset, except the area in this subset is bound in more ways than merely visual to the two spaces and yet is not understood entirely by any of these two spaces. One of the spaces is the host country and the other is the immigrant’s home country. And of course, in the subset, only a tiny percentage of people perhaps in a similar situation as the immigrant can attempt to understand the many realities including the question of happiness which the author describes. How can anyone say they are unhappy in America? While the question is valid, it shows how disconnected the perception of immigrant life can be to both groups on either side of the immigrant’s life.
I learned very early that to be an immigrant in this country meant I didn’t have the luxury of choosing what I wanted, only what was necessary. — Nicole Dennis-Benn
