Monday Matter: A brief update and a giveaway winner
Your weekly Foreign Bodies roundup (public)
Every Monday, I send subscribers and gift recipients of immigrant mental health and storytelling newsletter Foreign Bodies stories I recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz. Today’s roundup is public.
First things first
A little housekeeping
Praise the lords, I’m taking a break.
If you know me personally and have any idea how hectic/emotional life’s been, it probably comes as no surprise that I’m…in dire need of a break. Today’s Monday Matter is public and brief. As I’m headed out of the country for a bit, I’ll also be pausing subscriptions and will resume them upon returning in about two weeks. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out and share your favorite recent reads!
We have a giveaway winner! 🏆
Congratulations to Nalani S. (she/her) of Chicago for winning a copy of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma! Nalani is currently learning and thinking about neighborhood compost systems, accessibility in local public meetings, and staying tender <3 Can’t wait to pack this incredible book up and send it your way, Nalani!
A musical start to your Mondays 🎧
One song to groove to, cry to, drive to and share
This week’s pick is a personal favorite by Brazilian singer Nara Leão, who was a beloved Bossa nova and MBP artist known for combining Brazilian regional music styles with jazz and rock.
Resource(s) of the week
Something helpful and interesting and cool (*storytelling opportunity)
Stranger’s Guide: a travel publication that explores the power of place-based journalism to break down stereotypes and foster global citizenship (shout-out to my MFA mentor John T. Edge for sharing this with me!)
*The Rumpus is open for fiction submissions through the end of August. Editor Reena Shah would love to read “your surprising, emotionally complex, propulsive, oddball, line-level beauties.” Stories up to 7,500 words are welcome. More info about submissions and rates at the rumpus.submittable.com/submit.
Read this!
Personal stories I’m loving
Meeting Language at Its Most Elemental Place (Belinda Huijuan Tang, LitHub): “I have often heard it said that love is the antidote to shame. If shame is what I felt then at how few characters I knew, my accented speech, my distance from my own history; then love is what I felt when I translated the words to understand those stories. Love was not a feeling I had towards this history, it was an act that was made through language.” A beautiful piece from Los Angeles-based writer Belinda Huijuan Tang on relearning Chinese. Read here.
My ICU Summer (Alice Wong, Disability Visibility): A photo essay chronicling Disability Visibility founder Alice Wong’s tumultuous summer as a person with a progressive neuromuscular disease and “the very steep costs to a disabled individual and their family when a major medical crisis happens and the significant labor that occurs post-hospitalization.” Explore here.
Parasite (Bilal Hasan Minto, Guernica Mag via Scroll.in): “It is remarkable what possibilities can emerge from the conjunction of a traffic signal, a phrase, and an imaginary worm.” Translated from Urdu by Bilal Tanweer, this stunning work of dark humor braiding notions of masculinity and set in the suburbs of Lahore, Pakistan, “follows the arc of a man’s paranoia as it develops into a death trap.” Read here.
In the news
Relevant news coverage that doesn’t really fall under our larger mission to de-stigmatize through personal storytelling, but is still essential reading for anyone who wants to stay up-to-date on immigrant and refugee mental health as well as general mental health news.
‘We need to take away children’ (Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic): “It is easy to pin culpability for family separations on the anti-immigration officials for which the Trump administration is known,” Dickerson writes in this gutting investigation into the secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy. “But these separations were also endorsed and enabled by dozens of members of the government’s middle and upper management: Cabinet secretaries, commissioners, chiefs, and deputies who, for various reasons, didn’t voice concern even when they should have seen catastrophe looming; who trusted ‘the system’ to stop the worst from happening.” I’m not sure what to say about this painful investigation; I’m grateful it exists but it took me several days to really get through. If you have the space in your heart, and if you’re willing to make that space, please give it some attention. Read here.
Sex and the Citizenship Process (Tanvi Misra, Lux Magazine): “This phenomenon may seem like an amusing, or alarming, quirk in an otherwise grim policy arena, but it’s actually a revealing (sorry) symptom of the assumptions coded deep within the U.S. immigration system,” Misra writes of the trend of people sending nudes to immigration authorities. “Immigration and sex have long been intertwined.” Read here.
New research 📑
The Haitian Well-Being Study: A new initiative from Judite Blanc, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, that aims to identify the most important mental health, overall health, and sleep-related factors affecting the well-being of Haitian and Haitian American groups, as well as how employment, education level, income, immigration status, gender, genomic factors, and type and level of traumatic event exposure affect overall wellness. For more information on the Haitian Well-Being Study, email Haitianstudy@miami.edu.
+1
One sorta unrelated story on my mind
Drivin’ the Dixie Highway: How Florida’s Dream Road Turned to Dust (Moni Basu, Flamingo Mag): “We begin the journey bumpety-bump. Over potholes—blame hulking lumber trucks that hurtle down this historic road—and mounds of dirt and bricks that were baked for three days in an oven and survived a century of neglect. There is nothing around us now but the oaks and the pines and the palms. And the Spanish moss drooping from branches like mourners’ lace.” This is such a compelling narrative exploring the origins of Florida’s controversially-named Dixie Highway. Read here.
Bookshelf
Books and collections I’m currently reading (plus reader-recommended works!)
Currently reading: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a riveting, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of cancer — “from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.”
Reader rec from Aditi M.: Forbidden City, a new work of historical fiction and “act of resistance and reclamation” from Bay Area-based author and journalist Vanessa Hua
Love to see it
Shout-outs, thank-yous and more
Absolutely love these practical tips on value-seeking from Brown Girl Therapy’s Sahaj Kohli:
This is incredible.
That feeling when you realize you’re worthy of all the joy in the world.
That’s it for now.
Did you absolutely hate this? Open to criticism and suggestions. See ya later!
Love,
Fiza
Special thanks to our growing Foreign Bodies subscribers and Sustaining Members for keeping this newsletter going through all my ups and downs <3