March 15, 2023
Imagining Mother, an American Exorcism
CRAFT
A. Sandosharaj, in her segmented essay “Imagining Mother, an American Exorcism,” employs what Phillip Lopate calls a “double perspective” to examine her mother’s life. “In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the child’s confusions and misapprehensions, say), while benefiting from the sophisticated wisdom of the author’s adult self,” Lopate writes in To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. Exploring her childhood and adult memories simultaneously, Sandosharaj questions how media representations of white girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood influenced non-white immigrants’ understanding of their experiences in the United States.
I grew up during the dawn of the sneaker era, the genesis of which was not only concurrent with the golden age of hip-hop but constitutive of it. In the same poor neighborhoods that spawned rap music, sneakers were a kind of vocabulary for abundance, a way to undercut poverty while underscoring style and toughness. It wasn’t long before the first major hip-hop endorsement deal was signed: in 1986 Adidas partnered with Run DMC. The duo’s laceless take on Adidas’s classic three stripe shell toe was instantly iconic. Demand for these cash crop logos, the greatest of which was Nike’s Jumpman, eventually inspired gunshots and sweatshops. Thirty years later the same sneakers for which teens were robbed now compel collectors to loop city blocks for the chance to buy them.
Nov 4, 2016
We vacationed by car, mainly because it was cheap and private and we were poor and strange, but also because we each loved driving. After five grueling attempts even my mother acquired her driver’s license, the first amongst all the Indian aunties, some of whom never got theirs, spending their American days being chauffeured by grumbling relatives. After obtaining her license my mother promptly began getting into accidents, though she never damaged anyone else’s property. She eventually totaled four cars by diving into a ravine, crashing into two of our other cars, and flipping over a road island.
When I was 17, I stole a painting from high school. It was the climax of a pretty standard adolescent awakening: I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In the book’s characterization, Malcolm X is the kind of impeccable hero teens go for: brilliant charismatic tough guy redeemed, only to be martyred by backstabbers (as an adult, I cringed at Manning Marable’s only slightly defanging biography, so committed was I to this image). I bought the book on a whim; Spike Lee’s new biopic Malcolm X was out. I knew nothing about Malcolm X other than he had been an angry second fiddle to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; he had yet to reappear as he would after the film, showing up in gangsta rap videos and on t-shirts. I was just the type of uptight kid who read the book before the movie. It also happened to be the winter after the Rodney King Riots: 1992.
Winter 2016
Part I: Voodoo On St. Patrick’s Day, a few months after my father died of a heart attack while jumpstarting a truck in a snowstorm, I left my neighborhood bar too drunk for the brakeless bicycle I rode into rush hour traffi c. Weeks later, I had a conspicuous limp from the tiny Toyota that struck me and a $25 moving violation from DC’s Department of Transportation. Th e accident had been all my fault: I was lost. When I hadn’t eaten in days despite ordering all of the Chinese takeout I never allowed myself, I contacted a friend I’d known since college. Despite being a scoffi ng atheist without a speck of religion in my heart, I asked Vanya, a spiritualist, for help. She had recently been initiated into a tradition based in the Congo, what seemed to me Santería and what I disparaged as voodoo because, having grown up religious, I felt I could be dismissive of religion.
When I was 17, I stole a painting from high school. It was the climax of a pretty standard adolescent awakening: I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In the book’s characterization, Malcolm X is the kind of impeccable hero teens go for: brilliant charismatic tough guy redeemed, only to be martyred by backstabbers (as an adult, I cringed at Manning Marable’s only slightly defanging biography, so committed was I to this image). I bought the book on a whim; Spike Lee’s new biopic Malcolm X was out. I knew nothing about Malcolm X other than he had been an angry second fiddle to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; he had yet to reappear as he would after the film, showing up in gangsta rap videos and on t-shirts. I was just the type of uptight kid who read the book before the movie. It also happened to be the winter after the Rodney King Riots: 1992.
Spring 2009
A Reoccurring Envy
American Literary Review
When I first worked at The Lowell School as a teenager, I was uncomfortable. This wasn't because I was lousy with kids or lazy--which I was-- but because I was like many poor kids simultaneously full of loathing and lust for the rich. DC is a choleric place to wrestle with class, succumbing as it does to the main ugliness of capitalism: the lurid proximity of the rich and the broke. In fact, the convergence was visible at The Lowell School: while we excised teary three year olds from Benzes in the front, the homeless lined up for free groceries in the back.
Ghetto Proclivities
Massachusetts Review 45:2
Spying a pedagogical opportunity I ask my English 110 students to read Jamaica Kincaid's "A Small Place" and tell me what they make of her animosity towards the colonizing British on the island of her birth, Antigua, and more specifically, what they make of her line, "Do you ever wonder why some people blow things up?"
podcasts
May 17, 2015
Dead Bird Stories for Nonbelievers
Fiction is First: A Storyview
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A reading of this essay which first appeared in Southeast Review along with interview with Fiction is First curator, Ben Forstenzer.
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March 06, 2006
Model Minority Privilege
Addicted to Race Interview
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Interview with Jen about model minority privilege and how it impacts Black Americans in silent ways.
about
I have a Phd in American Studies from the University of Maryland where I was the Bode Wise Fellow and an MFA in Nonfiction from The Ohio State University where I was a graduate fellow. I love sports, science, and feminism. And animals.
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I have a motorcycle license but I don't ride.
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