South to South: Writing South Asia in the American South - Softcover

Khem K. Aryal (editor); Sindya Bhanoo (contributions By)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1680032968 ISBN 13: 9781680032963

Publisher: Texas Review Press, 2023

Synopsis

This anthology of eight short stories and eight narrative essays depicts diverse facets of the South Asian experience in the American South. Some of them relate to the proverbial longing for what the immigrants have left behind, while the others spotlight the immigrants’ struggles to reconcile with realities they did not sign up for. In Chaitali Sen’s “The Immigrant,” Dhruv is unable to talk about a lost boy because he feels “as if he were trapping the boy with his story,” as if the lost boy’s story were his own story of getting lost in a foreign country. In Hasanthika Sirisena’s “Pine,” a Christmas tree becomes more than “only a pine tree with decorations thrown on it” when Lakshmi’s ex-husband lets her know he is converting to Christianity “to get ahead in this country.” Aruni Kashyap’s “Nafisa Ali’s Life, Love, and Friendships, Before and after the Travel Ban” tell a post-2016 immigrant story in which love is baffling. In “Gettysburg,” Kirtan Nautiyal asks, how does an immigrant become part of the new country’s history? Soniah Kamal’s essay “Writing the Immigrant Southern in the New New South” reflects on what it means to be an immigrant writer and if one can write from two places at once. Together, the stories and essays in the anthology compose a mosaic of South Asian lived experiences in the American South.

About this title

About the Author

Originally from Nepal, KHEM K. ARYAL is a writer, editor, and a teacher of writing. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Isthmus, Pangyrus, Warscapes, New Writing, The Kathmandu Post, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Arkansas State University, where he also serves as creative materials editor of Arkansas Review. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri. He was a long-time editor of Of Nepalese Clay, a literary journal published from Kathmandu.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From “The Weight of His Bones”
 

He breathes out and a half-sob escapes. I close my eyes to his pain, which drips like hot

wax from a burning candle. A few minutes pass and I am drawn into that familiar, welcome
heaviness before sleep descends. When a cold grasp tightens around my throat, I gasp for air. His
weight bears down on me, pinning me to the mattress. I drown in my son’s tears as they rain
down like stinging acid.

They will likely say I was killed by some petty thug who came to rob the store. They’ll

look for Deepu and find him, eventually, jugging and jawing in a parking lot south of LBJ
Freeway, off Skillman Street. Out where the buses don’t run. He’ll do that half-smile of his on
hearing that his old man is dead and being told to go back where he came from. ‘I’m from here,’
he’ll laugh at the night sky, ‘Texas born and bred, just like all y’all.’”
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas Review Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1680032968
• ISBN 13: 9781680032963
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 186