Monday Matter: Witness Mami Roar, a translation crisis and a new giveaway
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
Issue 13 is out! 💌
In the latest issue of Foreign Bodies, we addressed the ubiquity of spirit possession across cultures, but led with stories of jinn, which are believed by some Muslims to possess nonhuman powers. In many societies, they’re blamed for all kinds of misfortune.
For example, in northern Lebanon, one mother said her son, Hussein, was struggling to sleep, could barely recognize his loved ones and would often run away from home. Thinking he must be cursed, she took Hussein to various sheikhs to try and remove the jinn from his body. During these rituals, the sheikhs would violently beat him. When he eventually saw a psychiatrist, Hussein was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Plus a brand new giveaway 🎁
Paying subscribers received an email last week announcing the first exclusive giveaway of 2020: Korean American writer Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, a saga about four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fighting to control their destiny in 20th century Japan after being exiled from their home.
Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and one of the Times’ Ten Best Books of 2017.
I’ll be mailing the winning subscriber a copy of this phenomenal novel, packaged with a note from the beloved author herself. Entries accepted through Friday, Jan. 17 at 11:59 p.m. EST.
Resource(s) of the week
Something helpful and interesting and cool
Sad Girls Club: A Gen Z- and millennial-focused community led by women of color with a mission to de-stigmatize mental health and “create real life safe spaces.” (@sadgirlsclub on Instagram)
The Temper: A publication exploring “life through the lens of sobriety, addiction, and recovery” that, according to its about page, acknowledges the roles of “institutions, cultural forces, and histories of oppression that impact our sense of self, agency, and power.” Especially loved Salvadoran Ingrid Cruz’s story on how creativity helped heal her generational trauma.
Read this!
Stories we’re loving
Portrait of a Boy with Grief (Wale Ayinla, Guernica): A few words from Nigerian poet Wale Ayinla: “you will open your wounds/and make them a garden/& explain to the wind/the origin of pain.” Read here.
Every Moment With My Son Is an Act of Creation (Viet Thanh Nguyen, NYT Opinion): “All the time that my father could not spend with me, I spend with my son.” Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who grew up in a conservative Vietnamese immigrant family that rarely expressed I Love Yous, connects his risky career as a writer with fatherhood, ultimately realizing he is a product of his own parents’ risk-taking. Read here.
CW: Domestic abuse | Witness Mami Roar (Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez, Longreads): At age 5, Rodríguez and her sister crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with their mother. They headed to Chicago to be with Rodríguez’s father where, for years, their mother would endure violent beatings and verbal mistreatment before finally escaping in the middle of the night. “Protecting the secrecy of our status meant we also needed to be silent about the trauma occurring in our home,” she writes. “Letting friends, teachers, or cops know about the violence always meant risking family separation.” 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 and well-being.
Medi-Cal Expanding for Qualifying Undocumented Young Adults (Suzanne Potter, Public News Service): All low-income Californians younger than age 26 who meet the income requirements will now be able to sign up for health insurance under the Medi-Cal program, regardless of immigration status. The program pays for a significant portion of mental health treatment in California. Read here.
Lebanese immigrant shares her experiences; will hold creative writing classes (Juri Love, The Sun Chronicle): Saide Harb-Ranero vividly recalls living in an underground shelter when civil war broke out in her hometown of Byblos. As a teenager, her mental health problems were often read as her being ungrateful. By 19, she had experienced the traumatic deaths of seven friends, most of whom were also suffering immigrants. “Creative writing for me is my way of translating what happens in my mind daily,” Harb-Ranero said. “It is how I transform my fears, my anger towards social injustices… a world I create for me to make sense of life. I write to breathe.” Now she wants to help others find solace in writing, too. Read here.
A Translation Crisis At the Border (Rachel Nolan, The New Yorker): At least half of the Guatemalan migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border speak Mayan languages. For them, a grassroots group of interpreters is often their only hope for receiving asylum. One example: A migrant child was separated “due to father’s alleged mental health problems; child advocates later determined father’s indigenous language may led [sic] to wrong mental health concern.” Authorities had deported the child’s father by the time anyone even acknowledged the misunderstanding. Read here.
New hope for people with serious mental illness (Zara Greenbaum, American Psychological Association): In recent years, psychologists have been conducting research to better understand the link between serious mental illness and social factors like poverty or immigration status. They learned that it isn’t enough to simply treat patients’ symptoms; clinicians must address intermingled social problems, too. Here’s how researchers suggest moving forward—from permanent housing initiatives to vocational support. Read here.
+1
One sorta unrelated story on my mind
How to Avoid Another War in the Middle East (Kelly Magsamen, Foreign Affairs): I’ve been having a hard time finding thoughtful analyses re: Iran. This is one my brother sent along. “In the near term, Iran’s response to Soleimani’s assassination will occasion crucial decisions: Does the United States continue tit-for-tat strikes? Does it escalate, which would involve substantial deployments and additional U.S. military action?” Read here. | Also read: For many Iranian-American families, this moment has us sick and terrified (Mitra Jalali, The Guardian)
Bookshelf
Books and collections I’m currently reading (plus reader-recommended works!)
Can’t stop listening to: Evil Eye by Madhuri Shekar, a bestselling audio play told through phone calls. Evil Eye is a gripping, far too relatable story about an Indian American writer whose mother is convinced the Evil Eye has come for her child.
Just finished: The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer. Historical fiction is a favorite genre of mine, but this book just didn’t do much for me. I’ll go ahead and blame the writing. About the novel: The story fluctuates between the past and present and untangles generational secrets about the life of a Polish girl in the midst of World War II.
Reader rec from Alex Rodriguez: Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair by iconic Chilean writer Pablo Neruda. Definitely picking up this collection of romantic poems. A snippet: “I want/To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
Remember, we always have tons of wonderful stories and resources available at foreignbodies.net.
Love to see it
Shout-outs, thank-yous and more
A massive shout out to Marissa Evans of the Star Tribune for illustrating our lead art in last week’s issue. It was such a pleasure working with you and I can’t wait to see what else you have up your sleeve! 🐯
Thanks to South Asian mental health initiative Expert By Experience for letting me gush about Lady for their unique pets and mental health series <3 You can read my lil’ piece right here.
The Correspondent’s Sanity columnist Tanmoy Goswami shared this personal story about his great aunt in response to our new issue on possession. Give it a read.
“I was 18 when I started to lose my mind.
Some days it felt as though a giant wrench was clasped around my neck, slowly strangling me, until I was ready to squirt all the air, water, and blood inside. Other days, I bloated and bloated like an overblown balloon, ready to burst.
The sensation in the end was always the same: empty.
I am told I had a grandaunt, Mejo Thakuma, who was possessed by a spirit when she was pregnant with one of her three children (each one named after a Hindu god to ward off the evil eye). She’d eat chunks of dirt and speak in an unearthly voice. Her family chained her up, scared she would wring someone’s neck. One day they called an ojha, who beat her with a broomstick and drove the spirit away.
After hearing the story of what happened to Mejo Thakuma, I became terrified of being possessed. And now, I was.”
And we’ll end on these wise words from Sahaj Kohli:
That’s it for now.
Did you absolutely hate this? Open to criticism and suggestions. See ya later!
Love,
Fiza