By Yaldaz Sadakova
The day after my 38th birthday was not a happy one. I was restless with anxiety.
Nothing could ease my distress. Not yoga, not meditation, not walking, not journaling. It was mid-April, more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the evening, I tried one last thing in a desperate effort to calm and focus my mind: I started drafting a novel.
It’s a story I had wanted to tell for several years, inspired by experiences and observations of mine here in Canada, where I’ve lived for the past eight years. Immigration experiences that I wasn’t seeing adequately depicted in popular culture.
I always knew I would write this novel at some point. I just didn’t think I would do it so unexpectedly.
But maybe it was not unexpected, because I had already started writing this story in my head. Now I was just transcribing it.
I was typing frantically, my mind outpacing my typing speed, each sentence freeing me from feelings and thoughts that were begging to be released.
The other reason why I started writing this novel was to procrastinate. I was supposed to be doing new revisions on my first novel and then sending queries about it.
But a few months earlier I had received a fresh rejection, and it had hurt. Especially since it was a rejection from a program focused on immigration-related fiction. My first novel deals with immigration.
The very thought of sending more queries made me feel exhausted. I hate querying even more than job search. At least with job search you have a greater chance of getting a “yes,” and things move faster. It typically doesn’t take years to land a job, but it’s not unusual for it to take years to sell a book.
So, to avoid querying, I started writing a novel.
During the next two months, I wrote every single day. My goal was to write 1,000 words a day, and most days, I met that goal. Some days I even exceeded it.
I wrote in the evenings and on weekend mornings—the only times when I was free. It was easy to stick to that routine not only because I badly needed to tell that story, but also because I don’t watch TV, which frees up time.
The Single Immigrant Story
Like my first novel, a story of a stateless woman forced into criminality because she’s undocumented in every country, the novel I started drafting shortly after my 38th birthday deals with immigration.
Set in Toronto, it’s about a woman in her 30s who tries to overcome the harmful conditioning of the traditional culture she was raised in back home—and in doing so finally musters the courage to end the dysfunctional co-dependent relationship with her spouse.
She learns how to be selfish. She learns how to be comfortable with the choice not to have kids, something that she discovers is taboo even in the liberal Toronto circles she finds herself in, as motherhood is assumed to be the ultimate thing that all women want.
She also learns how to be confident about the stories she wants to tell as a writer who works in a language that isn’t her mother tongue.
Having a main character who is a writer is so important to me, because immigrants typically aren’t portrayed as creatives, writers and intellectuals in literature and popular culture. We’re not given complexity and nuance beyond our immigrantness.
This is often the case even in books authored by immigrants themselves.
One notable exception is Lara Vapnyar’s novel Divide Me by Zero, which I finished recently. The main character is a Russian émigré who is a writer working in her second language, English. She’s also a creative writing teacher at a prestigious university in New York City.
I hate the convention that if you are an immigrant writer, you have to cast your immigrant characters in an “authentic” story which is all about their immigrantness, modeling them after the immigrant stereotype perpetuated by mainstream media and popular discourse.
In that stereotype, the immigrant is an economic migrant or a refugee, often uneducated, undocumented and dazed by culture shock. Or they are a model minority—a conformist apolitical doctor or engineer who follows the rules and tries to achieve the conventional version of success in their adopted country.
The leftist approach to portraying these archetypes, especially the refugee, is to do it in a way that makes immigrants look inferior and pitiful. The kind of people who should be grateful to accept used clothes and discarded furniture from tolerant generous non-immigrants.
The right-wing approach is to portray immigrants as a threat by using flawed economic arguments as a pretext for racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. They are stealing our jobs! They are draining our resources! They are corrupting our democratic liberal values!
The problem with either of these approaches is that it turns immigrants into caricatures. It doesn’t reveal the full truthful picture of who immigrants are.
There are certainly some universal themes in the experiences of all immigrants. Still, we’re a diverse group. What we go through cannot be summarized in one simplistic narrative featuring stereotypical archetypes that can evoke only two emotions: pity or fear.
There is no such thing as The Immigrant Story, told through the left-right binary. There are numerous immigrant stories.
Immigrating alone as an adult is a different experience from immigrating as a child with your family.
Arriving in a country as an asylum seeker is a different experience from moving there as an international student.
Being undocumented is a different experience from having a visa or being a naturalized citizen.
Moving abroad as your spouse’s dependent is a different experience from moving to pursue a career opportunity of your own.
Living abroad in your own ethnic enclave is a different experience from being an immigrant who has a diverse social circle.
Working a corporate job as an immigrant is a different experience from being an immigrant who is an entrepreneur or an immigrant who drives a cab.
Being an immigrant who is fluent in the local language is a different experience from being an immigrant who isn’t.
Being an immigrant who is a cishet male is a different experience from being an immigrant who belongs to the LGBTQ+ community.
And so on. The examples and dimensions are endless, depending on the various intersections immigrants find themselves at.
The idea that there is one definitive narrative of what it’s like to be an immigrant is insulting and plain wrong.
The Problem With Single Stories
Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the dangerous consequences of perpetuating single stories in one of her famous TED talks.
For example, she says, society constantly tells a single story about Africa—one of poverty and war. That single story reduces Africans to just one thing in the minds of non-Africans.
Adichie experienced this when she left her native Nigeria to attend university in the U.S.
“My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove,” Adichie explains.
“What struck me was this: she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.”
Adichie also had a professor in the U.S. who told her that a novel she had written wasn’t African enough.
“The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore, they were not authentically African.”
Adichie points out that telling a single story about a certain group is an expression of power and dominance over that group. As a result, she says, this practice robs the members belonging to that group of dignity and agency.
“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with ‘secondly.’ Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story,” Adichie explains.
One time when she spoke at a university, a student told her it was a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in one of her novels. Here’s how she responded:
“I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho, and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. Now, obviously, I said this in a fit of mild irritation. But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer, that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America’s cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.”
Rejecting Authenticity
Two months after I started writing my second novel, I had a full manuscript of 60,000 words.
It’s not a perfect draft, because first drafts aren’t supposed to be. They are supposed to be messy.
I’ve now set my draft aside. In a few months, or maybe longer, I will revise it with fresh eyes.
While doing so, I’ll resist the urge to make the story more “authentically” immigrant than it is. Or more “authentically” Bulgarian, Turkish and Muslim, which is my background.
Actually, I doubt that the English-speaking world knows what an “authentic” Bulgarian story is. Because, to my knowledge, there aren’t really any novels written in English by Bulgarian-born authors which are set in Bulgaria or deal with Bulgarian culture.
I guess this is all the more reason to shop around my manuscript. Wish me luck! ♦
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