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.
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]
