Monday Matter: A new face #OnTheirShoulders and a jingle dress
Your weekly Foreign Bodies roundup
Every Monday, we’ll send readers of immigrant mental health newsletter Foreign Bodies a story (or six) we recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz.
First things first
A little housekeeping
Say hi to this new face! 🤩
We have a new addition to the Foreign Bodies team! Farahnaz Mohammed is a traveling journalist, editor, and mental health advocate. Find her on Twitter @FarahColette or at farahmohammed.com. (Also, you can call her Farah).
She’ll be joining copy editor and fact-checker Hanaa’ in helping make sure we don’t make absolute fools of ourselves. I <3 editors.
The Good Talk giveaway ends Friday
Our last giveaway of 2019 (and the last one open to free sign-ups) closes Friday, Dec. 20 at 11:59 p.m. EST. Enter to win a hardcover copy of Indian American author Mira Jacob’s bestseller Good Talk, an intimate graphic memoir about honest conversations in an interracial family. I’ll send the winner’s holiday gift out within the month packaged with a personalized note from Mira herself. Remember, paying subscriber entries count twice.
Something I wrote… 🍄
Chanel Miller Reminds Us That to Heal, We Must Forage: I mentioned a while ago that I’d be writing an essay for Electric Literature on Chinese American writer Chanel Miller’s Know My Name—how her memoir of trauma and recovery makes a case for spending time with your pain, not trying to forget it.
Resource(s) of the week
Something helpful and interesting and cool
Expert By Experience: A new London-based platform that aims to create dialogue around mental health in South Asian communities with an intersectional lens. They have a cute project on pets and mental health coming up—and Lady and I got to chime in!
Ayana: An app and website focused on connecting marginalized communities, POC, individuals with disabilities and LGBTQIA+ to licensed therapists using an algorithm based on gender, orientation, ethnicity, culture etc. Read a profile on the initiative at Fast Company.
Read this!
Stories we’re loving
My Body & Mind: From Pieces To Peace (Shuranjeet Singh, Expert By Experience): In this deeply personal essay, Singh, founder of Punjabi mental health initiative Taraki, gets real about body image. “For the majority of my life I have felt somewhat detached from my physical body,” he writes. Seeing himself amid the gym’s harsh lighting and walls of mirrors felt “like trying to dance with someone you hate.”
Snow Hare (Alycia Pirmohamed, Guernica): Some poetry magic from a second-generation Canadian immigrant. “You know what it means/to unhome a body,/to collapse a pillar that may have, one day,/become a tower.”
Si Dios Quiere (Lorraine Avila, Catapult): Lovely short fiction from an Afro-Kiskeyana author about an older Dominican gentleman living out his days in the Bronx. What is a Kiskeyana? According to Remezcla, “Kiskeya is a term that belongs to both Dominicans and Haitians.”
The Dress of Exploding Sound Is Still Powerful at 100 (Mary Pember, ZORA): A beautiful essay of indigenous culture appreciation. Ember, a Shinnob-ikwe, writes about learning to honor her Ojibwe culture through the jingle dress and dance. “Ojibwe women in my family are known for their raunchy, indiscreet laughter. Hearing its sound, passing White women have been known to clutch their purses in fear… I thought of all these things as I built my dress, carefully attaching the 365 jingles, one at a time, one for each day of the year.”
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 and well-being.
A Secret Report Exposes Health Care For Jailed Immigrants (Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed News): A Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by BuzzFeed News contained reports of detained immigrants receiving incorrect medication and medical care “so bad it resulted in two preventable surgeries, including an 8-year-old boy who had to have part of his forehead removed.” Not a fun read, but essential and explosive reporting from Aleaziz.
+1
One sorta unrelated news story on my mind
These 3 supertrees can protect us from climate collapse. But can we protect them? 🌳(Eliza Barclay, Umair Irfan, Tristan McConnell, Victor Moriyama, Ardiles Rante and Sarah Waiswa; Vox): With support from the Pulitzer Center, a team of Vox reporters and photographers traveled to protected areas of tropical forest to uncover the superpowers of three tree species that play an unusually important part in staving off global environmental disaster. | Read our issue on eco-anxiety here.
Bookshelf
Books and essays I’m currently reading (plus reader-recommended works!)
Just finished: Little Fires Everywhere by Asian American author Celeste Ng. Eeee I’ve had this on my (actual) shelf for so long and only just gave it a go. A beautiful novel and upcoming Hulu original series about “the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.”
Reader rec from Farhin Lilywala: A Place For Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, a novel dissecting the secrets and betrayals behind the fracturing of a close-knit Indian family. “So many complicated threads and emotions about growing up as an immigrant and the discrepancies between one generation and the next. CANNOT RECOMMEND IT ENOUGH.” Haha, love getting impassioned emails like this. Listen to Farhin. Go reserve your copy at the library! I’ll do the same.
Remember, we always have tons of wonderful stories and resources available at foreignbodies.net.
Love to see it
Shout-outs, thank-yous and more
This #OnTheirShoulders Twitter movement sparked by LA Times reporter Esmeralda Bermudez had me in tears all last week. I appreciated the range of responses—from people who grew up having loving relationships with their parents to those with fraught ones, too. Read a compilation of tweets by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Make some time to listen to writer Hannah Bae in conversation with One in a Billion’s Mable Chan about her family’s experience with mental illness and what it was like penning an essay for the anthology (Don’t) Call Me Crazy <3 (My copy just came in!)
Love the mentioned thread, love following Anna, love the way this platform has connected so many of us in the mental health realm, whether we’re struggling ourselves, reporting on the subject or advocating for better care.
After sending out quite the desperate email last week, the vocalized support for this newsletter (both online and IRL) gave me some real hope. I guess I need a reminder every now and then, and admitting that makes me feel vulnerable. Thank you.
Some love:
Please don’t stop sharing! Foreign Bodies is so, so close to being profitable enough to pay copy editors in January and February (!!)
Leaving you with a few lingering words. Came across this Edmond Jabès quote while reading Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds.
“The road which leads me to you is safe even when it runs into oceans.”
OK, that’s it for now.
Did you absolutely hate this? Open to criticism and suggestions. See ya later!
Love,
Fiza