Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place

A 5-star read for me, this is memoir-ish, but actually a collection of essays written by a woman whose parents immigrated to the US from India in the late 1960s, and settled shortly thereafter in rural West Virginia, where her father had been hired as company doctor for a chemical firm. Avashia's concept of "home" is firmly rooted in the positive memories of growing up in a neighborhood where everyone was welcome in everyone else's home, where helping each other was bred in the bone, where all the grown-up ladies were "aunties" or extra grandmothers, no matter that they were all White and Avashia and her family were Brown. Nonetheless, prejudice, whether subtle or obvious, unintended or unapologetic, was always in the air. While the show more author speaks of her resistance to traditional gender roles as a young person, and her reluctance to brave her family's reaction to her choice of life partner, the main thrust of this book is the racial and cultural divide she has navigated all her life, rather than the issue of sexual identity. It is amazing to me that she can look back with such clarity on those early years when she was "other" in so many ways, with no apparent resentment for the parts that had to be unnerving. She has always loved and embraced her West Virginia origins, even now that she has spent more of her life elsewhere than she did there. This resonates with me, for whom "home" will ever be the farm I never lived on, where generations of my family beginning in the late 19th century have lived. Highly recommended. show less

[Another Appalachia] is a collection of personal essays making up a kind of memoir by Neema Avashia, a queer woman born to Indian immigrants in West Virginia. While not every essay is directly about her Appalachian roots, each one is certainly informed by them, and the essays that are more about her time in West Virginia offer a fascinating view of the region from "another" sort of voice than we may be used to or expect. Recommended.

Neema Avashia is a Boston teacher who I know through her activism and her Twitter account. In this short collection of essay-length memoirs she reflects on growing up in West Virginia and her present day life in India. Her family emigrated to India as part of a small but significant group of Indian ex-pats who worked in West Virginia's chemical industry. Avashia describes the warm memories of white West Virginians and how the Appalachian and Indian cultural traditions became commingled in her childhood. This is contrasted with how those same white West Virginians who helped her family on arrival support the MAGA ideology that discriminates against immigrants and LGBTQ people. Nevertheless, Avashia fully embraces her West Virginia show more identity and heritage and makes the case that even if people like her are only a small portion of West Virginia's population that they are nevertheless fully West Virginian. show less

Neema Avashia's Another Appalachia is another of the memoirs I've been reading during Pride month. Usually I read mostly fiction, but I wanted to spend some time absorbing people's stories as they understand and speak them.

As the title suggests, Avashia's essay-memoirs have as much to do with growing up in Appalachia as they do with her lesbian identity. Her portrait of West Virginia is fascinating, tracking the economic ups and downs of the region, the regular harassment she encountered as a child, and the ways neighbors who'd lived in the area for multiple generations found common ground with the small community of Indian immigrants who came to the area. These aren't all "kumbaya stories," but there are moments of connection—and not show more just moments, relationships that have lasted for decades—that created a strong sense of community in the neighborhood she grew up in. Some of those relationships have survived the Trump years, some haven't, and her reflections on those changes are both moving and frustrating.

Another Appalachia offers an LGBTQ perspective that will be new to most readers. It also offers a vision of Appalachian life that challenges stereotypes and assumptions about the region.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own. show less

The author of this memoir is a queer brown Indian immigrant who grew up in Appalachia. I had honestly never seen a book from an author like her. I knew I needed to read it. And it was a fascinating and surprisingly relatable read.

Neema moved to West Virginia when she was quite young and she describes her experience being one of very few brown and non-Christian families in a very white and very Christian neighborhood. But despite these differences she talks about a rich network of neighbors who became in many ways very like an extended family. Her memories of having snacks at a neighbors house and another neighbor helping her learn to play basketball and encouraging her were really great to read. However, mixed in with these positive show more formative experiences are stories about how her fellow students spit on her, told her that her food smelled bad, and called her all manner of racial slurs and epithets.

I found common ground in her stories about seeing hateful facebook posts from people she thought of as family. How to react when a loved one posts pro-Trump things that support hateful rhetoric about people who are just like you? What do you do with those feelings and that reality? Neema tries to be understanding, considering the struggles that the posters have gone through that lead them to these thoughts. I don’t think either of us have a perfect answer as to how to respond.

Read This If You, like me, have never read a book from an author like this. It was informative and really resonated with me. show less

Neema Avashia grew up in West Virginia, the daughter of immigrant parents from Gujarat, India. Neema experienced acceptance and love from her neighbors, but racism and hostility in school; she went to college in Pittsburgh and now teaches in Boston, where she lives with her Jewish/Italian-American partner Laura. Her essays are unique, considered, and a valuable perspective on society, culture, and education.

Quotes

The conditions adults create for young people ultimately shape who those young people end up becoming. (18)

Toeing the company line had been their survival strategy; bucking it was mine....I once viewed my father's ethics as the ethics of community. Now I wondered if in fact they had been the ethics of assimilation, or the show more ethics of survival. (19)

...companies, and governments, cannot be trusted to do what is right for civilians...civilians will only achieve just ends when they speak up. (20)

Ultimately, our politics are profoundly personal, our worldview refined through the lens of our own experiences. (46)

There is no word for nostalgia in Gujarati. The closest concept I can find is that of vatan, or homeland....What did it mean to have such a deep connection to a place? (79)

[Hindu] priests act as conductors of ritual, not spiritual advisors. In truth, our religion is largely self-directed and individualized. (87)

...we can slow down when forced to...we can care for each other when the moment demands it of us. ...our failure to neighbor is not a failure of character; it is a failure of the way our society is designed. (112)

The way to stay safe, I thought, was to blend in. (131)

George Ella saw through the false choice I had been presented as a young person by the teachers and mentors in my community: stay and stagnate, or leave and grow. (158)

"Heritage" by James Still: http://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/js2-heritage.htm show less

In a series of vignettes the author describes growing up as a South Asian girl in a small town in West Virginia, something quite different from other narratives of the Indian American experience, which are often situated in large, diverse urban areas. She describes and questions the complex, and sometimes uncomfortable, observations about being cared for, scrutinized, minimized, and harassed by neighbors, classmates, and other members of the WV majority population. Her relationships with her family are also complicated and multi layered. Recommended for all libraries.