Monday Matter: Murmuring bees, Hmong squirrel stew and a giveaway winner
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
We have a giveaway winner! 🎁
Congratulations to Saad Mohiuddin of Alabama for winning a copy of Indian American writer Mira Jacob’s bestselling graphic memoir, Good Talk. Saad is a medical student interested in pursuing a career in psychiatry, chronic pain management, or addiction medicine and aspires to be a beacon of hope for those suffering with mental and physical illnesses alike. He’s extremely inspired by Fiza and her endeavor to de-stigmatize mental illness through Foreign Bodies. (We didn’t pay him to type that!)
Saad and I also go waaaay back and I’m stoked to get this personalized package together for an old friend. Hope you love this book as much as I do, Saad!
This is our last roundup of the year. Save the date for the final 2019 issue!
Our last issue of the year (the one-year anniversary edition!) will be out on New Year’s Eve. Because I just don’t have the time to put together the issue and the next Monday Matter, this’ll be the last weekly roundup of the year. See you in your inbox on Dec. 31st! 🥂
Do you know what makes a great holiday gift?
A subscription to this newsletter! Gift a loved one something a lil’ unique this year.
And please, if you haven’t yet, consider becoming a patron yourself. Since we launched in December 2018, we’ve relied on fellowship funding to create and maintain Foreign Bodies. But to continue this work, we need help from our readers. Your monthly or annual subscriptions directly support my ability to dedicate the time and resources to sustaining this newsletter, not to mention my ability to pay the volunteering team members.
More ways to support us here.
Thread: When was the last time you felt proud of yourself? 🧵
I’ve loved reading the responses to our latest thread Q&A. Here’s mine: I sat down and talked to my grandparents about what's happening in India. I'd been avoiding the conversation, afraid of our clashing opinions. But it was a really thoughtful chat. I learned a lot—and they left the room with print-outs of some news articles I recommended.
Resource(s) of the week
Something helpful and interesting and cool
Iowa Refugee Counseling Center: New program dedicated to providing culturally and linguistically sensitive mental and emotional health support to refugees and immigrants in and around Iowa City. Read more at dailyiowan.com.
Give Me Your Tired: A bi-weekly newsletter on global immigration policy from Tania Karas and Lolita Brayman. Expect links to can't-miss news stories and policy analysis, as well as original reporting.
Read this!
Stories we’re loving
When Your Mental Health Needs Don't Fit Your Parents’ Definition of Success (Nisha Mody, Greatist): A personal essay about growing up in an Indian American family that prided itself on “making it” without leaning on outside help. “But what was the point if all we do is continue the cycle, forcing ourselves to work through lunch instead of taking a break?” Ignoring such internalized, repetitive trauma has severe consequences, writes Mody.
Sans Surname (Khairani Barokka, Catapult): “I was once asked in the UK if my second name is my first name…I don’t mind explaining my name to people—it would harm my sense of self more to have assimilated.” I love stories about how names complicate, challenge or even clarify our perceived identities. (I’m actually in the middle of writing a reported essay for ZORA on choosing to course correct name mispronunciations in adulthood.)
We Learned to Fear Tiger and Love Squirrel (Lisa Lee Herrick, Emergence Magazine): Gorgeous essay on how the Hmong spicy squirrel stew helped unravel a hidden past. For the Hmong peoples, the “path to independence has always been paved with blood,” writes Herrick. “In the rarefied air of the remotest mountain peaks, we found our freedom… We learned to fear Tiger, who is the Demon King of Illusions, and to love Squirrel, who—like us—is chased by his enemies from all directions but never caught.”
Good Muslim/Bad Muslim (Safia Elhillo, POETRY): Some prose from April 2019 I only just caught my eyes on last week. “I’ve been afraid, forever, of performing my identity incorrectly. My Muslimness, my Sudaneseness, my Americanness, my Blackness, my womanhood, all of it… I wasn’t in any of the books I was reading—maybe a sliver here or there, a character with brown skin, with parents from somewhere else, with curly hair, but never the full extent of my intersections.”
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.
10 Years Post-Deportation, ‘Home’ Remains Uncertain (Tina Vasquez, YES! Magazine): Vasquez writes about feeling rootless without documentation through two women. One is Nancy Landa, who was targeted by Immigration Customs Enforcement because a notary hired by her family filed a fraudulent immigration claim on her behalf. The other is former Dreamer Azul Uribe, who has been open about her experience with post-traumatic stress disorder, related to her 2006 deportation to Mexico.
India’s protesting students have found an unlikely ally: therapists (Tanmoy Goswami, The Correspondent): Is political depression a real thing? Goswami, The Correspondent’s Sanity columnist, reports on how recent violence re: India’s “new and bitterly divisive law” has triggered mental health problems among both protesters and onlookers. How can therapists navigate or avoid “clinical neutrality” in such divisive spaces?
+1
One sorta unrelated story on my mind
CW: sexual assault. // Self Portrait as a Human Interest Story (Emi Nietfield, Longreads): “They called me ‘one-in-a-million.’ I was proof of the American dream. On May 24th of 2010, when I smiled in my gray cardigan in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, I carried the torch of an eternal narrative. Until five weeks later, when I was raped.” A beautiful essay questioning how narratives of resilience minimize suffering.
Bookshelf
Books and collections I’m currently reading (plus reader-recommended works!)
Mourning the end of: The Murmur of Bees written by Mexican author Sofía Segovia, translated by Simon Bruni. The novel begins a few years before the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic with the discovery of an abandoned infant cloaked in a blanket of bees. If you’re a fan of enchanting magic realism (think: Gabriel García Márquez) you’ll want to check this out. I especially loved the mesmerizing Audible narration from Xe Sands and Angelo Di Loreto.
Book I ate up in just a few sittings: How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones. Winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, this memoir captures the story of a young black gay man from the South. “An award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful—a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze.” (Simon & Schuster)
Reader rec from a mysterious Hieronymus Jackson: Nothing Ever Dies by Viet Thanh Nguyen, “a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War.” Here’s what HJ wrote about the novel in our first books-we-love chat: “I find it uses the lens of memory to beautifully tie together the politics of remembering and unremembering, the SEA refugee experience, and visibility in the United States.” (I’ll be forever wondering who you are, Hieronymus!)
Remember, we always have tons of wonderful stories and resources available at foreignbodies.net.
Love to see it
Shout-outs, thank-yous and more
It was so very cool to have Tanmoy Goswami, The Correspondent’s Sanity columnist, feature Foreign Bodies in a recent column. “I had not seen a platform quite like this, dedicated to the unique angst of the one community most parodied in western popular culture,” he wrote. Read the full feature here and be sure to follow Tanmoy’s excellent column on global mental health.
Lolol this just made me laugh.
Look at these cute winning faces holding their #4ngiveaway goodies! So grateful for all you authors and readers involved <3 Can’t wait for even more giveaways in 2020.
Some reader love!
Leaving you with an album cover of grandpup Scamper (left) and my fair Lady (right).
To anyone celebrating this month, happy holidays. For those itching for the season to come to an end, whether it serves as a reminder of loss or of darker times—keep going. It’ll be over so soon. Here’s a lovely post from Feminista Jones if you’re struggling to cope with holiday loneliness.
That’s it for now.
Did you absolutely hate this? Open to criticism and suggestions. See ya later!
Love,
Fiza