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III. Feminist Five
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Titled after her able-bodied, identical twin’s nickname The Pretty One: On Life,Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write aboutAkwaeke Emezi’s fourth book, “Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, ”All About Love: New Visions is perhaps one of bell hooks’ most famous works. ItNight: The novel is only 100 pages in length, but its impact has been Pop Culture, Disability, and Otherbeing undocumented for the firstprovides this perennial questionis a collection of essays thatlong-lasting. Elie Wiesel engagesReasons to Fall in Love with Me is an honest,time using her own name. It was right after thewith a definitive answer. Yes, the author seemscumulates into an argument that challengesin some of his most poignant themes in Night. challenging, and hilarious collection of essays that detail Keah Brown’s life, love,election of 2016, the day she realized the story she’d tried to steer clear of wasto say, we are monsters. But only if monstrosity is defined as the explicit refusalsociety’s image of what love is. hooks writes, “The word ‘love’ is most oftenThese include father/son relationships, death, and the loss of religion. The and pop-culture obsessions. As her quote below confirms, Keah Brown uses Thethe only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer’s phoneto abide by the binaries that surround us. In a world predisposed to queerdefined as a noun, yet…we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” anvalues that he and his family hold dear start to fall apart almost as soon as the Pretty One to push past the need for her cerebral-palsy to be a source ofnumber on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tellvillainy, “Dear Senthuran” claims monstrosity as a space of intentional rejection.idea that, on its own, has left a legacy.novel begins. Eventually, Eliezer realizes that in this new world, it’s going to be inspiration and instead encourages her readers to seethe stories of her fellowan incredibly hard task her disability as just one of her many other interestingundocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden keyto remain the person he was and care for his father as and powerfulto her own. traits and accomplishmentsThe book ishe’d like to. (including her love for cheesecake!)a metaphysical journey told throughThe Pretty One has receivedIgbo cosmology. Emezi, who praise from well-known artists and writers like Roxane Gay, Lena Dunam, and Deepak Chopra.grew up in Aba, Nigeria, invites the reader to “imagine being ogbanje, like me.” Divine spirits born to human All About Love contains 13 chapters that expand society’s limited understanding of “love” as a merely romantic Looking mothers,beyond the flashpoints of theogbanje are liminal deities inborder orconstant the activism of thetransit. In order to DREAMers, Cornejo Villavicenciorejoin the spirit world, they die exploresover and concept to contain conceptsThe book Night follows the of clarity,terrifying justice,journey honesty, commitment,of Eliezer Wiesel and spirituality, values,his familyfrom theirgreed, home community,in Sighet in The Pretty One also unpacks Keah Brown’s viral social mediathe lives of the undocumented—and the mysteries of herover again, deliberately leaving their human families bereft. campaign own life.#DisabledandCute. Initially a personalShe finds the singular, effervescent mutuality,Hungarian romance, loss, healing, and destiny (as hooks names the chapters). In theseTransylvania through the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust chapters, sheduring World makesWar II. hashtag posted by Brown tocharacters across the nation celebrate her personal journeyoften reduced in the media to with self-love, #DisabledandCute has transformedpolitical pawns or nameless laborers. The stories connections between lessons weWhile at first, no one believed learn as children and how they impact our perspective of love as adults andthat something like the murder of innocent men, women, and children as into an online community ofshe tells are not deferentialIn context and content, “Dear disabled people celebrating themselves andor naively inspirational but show the love,Senthuran” is molded by departure and what proving that “being disabled andmagic, heartbreak, insanity, andit requires. The book is structured unpacks possible, thethe fraughtravings idea that we are expected to know howof Moishe the Beadle, Elie’s teacher, are to love despite the absence ofsoon proven true. Before being instructionstransferred into being cute aren’t mutually exclusive.” Like most onlinevulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects.as a series of letters from the author to their friends, lovers, content created byother writers, divine Black creators, however,and human family. In them society. All About Love is just one example of how bell hooks’ writing beautifully heals its readers.concentration camps, the Wiesel family is forced to live in a ghetto within their own village. #DisabledandCute is occasionallyEmezi recounts episodes in their referenced without crediting Keah Brown. Solife, from their gender confirmation surgeries totoall of our lovely BALIpurchasing a home readers(a place that might want to contribute to the hashtag, make sure to tag her @Keah_Mariathey call their “godhouse”), to betrayal at the hands of literary mentors. Each !letter chronicles a tension — between Western constructions of gender and “people like me: embodied but not human, terrified that
In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited into the federally funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11. In Miami, we enter the ubiquitous botanicas, which offer medicinal herbs and potions to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options. In Flint, Michigan, we learn of demands for state ID in order to receive life-saving clean water. In Connecticut, Cornejo Villavicencio, childless by choice, finds family in two teenage girls whose father is in sanctuary. And through it all we see the author grappling with the biggest questions of love, duty, family, and survival. In her incandescent, relentlessly probing voice, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio combines sensitive reporting and powerful personal narratives to bring to light remarkable stories of resilience, madness, and death. Through these stories we come to understand what it truly means to be a stray. An expendable. A hero. An American.
they’re going mad, unable to talk about it, and estranged from the Indigenous Black realities that might make some sense of it all.” But also between the euphoria and heartbreak of love, professional triumph and personal failure, the finality of life and death. Emezi proves these oppositions artificial, while establishing the very real solitude and weight of being uninterested in them. Incrementally, the chapters inch closer and closer to a frightening reality. “There is something bright and brilliant in me,” they write. “It doesn’t make me feel special. It makes me terribly alone.”
“Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
" ―ElieWiesel
“Idon’tmindbeinganinspirationifitisforavalidreason, suchasadmiringhowmany slicesofpizzaIate, anessayoranarticleIwrote, myclothingchoices, orhowquicklyIcan learn the lyrics to songs . As long as the inspiration doesn’t come with pity or self-congratulatorypatsontheback, Iamallforit . Letmyloveforcheesecakeinspireyouthe wayitwillonedayinspireanation . Atleastyoucansayyouweretherefirst . - KeahBrown In addition to being an author, Keah Brown is a notable journalist, actress, and screenwriter. Brown has written for and been featured in established publications including Essence, Cosmopolitan, and Teen Vogue. Keah Brown is also featured in Tarana Burke and Brené Brown’s transformative anthology You Are Your Best Thing.
“The twisted inversion that many children ofimmigrantsknowisthat, atsomepoint, yourparents becomeyourchildren, andyourownpersonalAmericandreambecomesmakingsure theyageanddiewithdignityinacountrythathasneverwantedthem .
“People can do spectacular things if you forget to tell themit’simpossible .
Elie Wiesel (1928 - 2016) was a Romanian-born Jewish writer who became famous for providing a vulnerable account of the Holocaust. Wiesel grew up in a small Hasidic community in Sighet. In 1944, the Germans invaded and Wiesel and his family were taken to Auschwitz, where his mother and one of his sisters Akwaeke Emezi iswere killed. The a Nigeriannext year, lgbo afterand he Tamil writer and video artist,and his father were sent to abest knownslave labor for theircamp,2018 debut novel Freshwater. Featuredhis father died and Wiesel was freed inon the cover of TIME Magazine asApril 1945. After Wiesel’s escape, he settled in France and a Nextworked asGeneration Leader (Junea journalist. In 1956, he 2021) formigrated their debut memoirto the United States DEAR SENTHURAN,and taught at both Akwaeke Emezi (b. 1987) is an artist and writer based in liminal spaces.City College of New York and Boston College. Wiesel was first encouraged to write about his experiences in the Holocaust by French novelist François A National Book Foundation '5Mauriac, and the very first storUnder 35' honoree, Emezi was borny he wrote was his world-renowned in Umuahianovel Night and raised in Aba, Nigeria.(1956). Wiesel went on to Theywrite were named oneThe Town Beyondof The New Hollywoodthe Wall (1962), Souls Guard: Writers byon Fire (1972), The Vanity FairTestament and their romance debut(1980), and many others. YOUAll of MADE AWiesel’s FOOL OF DEATH WITH YOUR BEAUTY is forthcoming from Atria Books in 2022, with thenovels explore different layers of the Holocaust and more broadly question how such awscreen rights sellingful events can come toto be. Wiesel’s work is cherished for the thoughtful and somehow beautiful way he describes the loss of Amazon Studios in a seven-figure deal with Emezi as executive producer. Their debut poetry collection innocence in such a terrifying experience, and for this reason, Night is still a staple found in classrooms across CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING is also forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2022 and their sophomore the country. Later on in his career, Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace and was appointed as the YA novel BITTER is will be published in February 2022 by Knopf Books. first chairman of the US Holocaust memorial.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (born 1989) is an Ecuadorian-American writer and the This, however, is just the beginning for Keah Brown. In 2022, she will publish her first children’s book, titled author of The Undocumented Americans (2020). She has written about her experiences as an undocumented Sam’s Super Seats. Illustrated by Sharee Miller, this upcoming book will follow a young girl with cerebral palsy immigrant from Ecuador to the United States. In October 2020 it was shortlisted for the National Book Award as she goes back to school shopping with her best friends. Though more information has yet to be released, for Nonfiction. Keah Brown is also set to publish a book geared towards young adults in the next few years. Brown has big dreams when it comes to television, many of which have already been accomplished, but for now, we should all take the time to read her extensive works and wait to see what she does next!Cornejo Villavicencio was born in 1989 in Ecuador. When she was four or five, her parents brought her to the United States. She has a brother. The family lived in the New York borough of Queens. She graduated from Harvard in 2011 and believes she is one of the first undocumented immigrants to do so. As of September 2020 she is a PhD candidate in the American studies program at Yale. She was an Emerson Collective fellow.
