Priyam Goswami-Choudh
ury
Cat Debacker
Dhruv Mauria Saxena
by Raksha Thakur
Karthik Manickam
Xenia Edited
Acknowledgments This publication would not have been possible without the guidance, criticism, suggestions and generosity of Dushko Petrovich. Dushko put up with my ill-founded creative decisions and provided me with far superior ones, which saw Xenia transform from a dubiously titled idea into a physical publication about the experiences of people studying and working abroad. I would also like to thank Jefferson Dakota Brown for his invaluable design suggestions. Thanks, also, to the Spring 2018 Publishing as Creative Practice cohort at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose ideas and patience have helped me considerably. Heartfelt gratitude to my family. My sister, brother-in-law and my two nieces have been patient with me, nay, even indulgent of my erratic mealtimes and sleeping hours, as I slowly and steadily went about making multiple rounds of edits. Their boundless love and support buoyed me and saw me through the gestation period of this publication. Shout-out to my mother, all the way in India, for being totally okay with my declining to talk to her on the phone for three consecutive weeks. I plan to rectify this with a hassle-free mid-May phone call. My family has been supportive regardless of distance, for which I am extremely fortunate. All the writers who have contributed have my utmost and sincere thanks. The contributors hail from Germany, the United Kingdom and the US, including one from my very own Department of New Arts Journalism cohort. I am happy my call for pitches was engaging enough for these students and professionals, across different continents to make the identical decision of carving time in their demanding academic and work schedules to write for me. Thank you, Cat DeBacker, Priyam Goswami-Choudhury, Dhruv Mauria Saxena and Karthik Manickam. There would be no Xenia without you. Arunima Nair and Oshin Siao Bhatt played an instrumental role in the way Xenia materialized. Thank you both for contacting me in Chicago and putting me in touch with contributors. You surmounted the herculean combination of full-time work schedules and a ten and a half-hour time difference. I cannot express how indebted I am to your cross-continental communications, which has yielded me an array of different writers whose voices define this inaugural issue of Xenia. You both came through and did me a real solid. Thank you. And thank you, reader, for stopping by and opening Xenia.
About the Name Xenia Xenia is the ancient Greek custom of honoring and respectfully welcoming foreigners into one’s home without question. Problematic aristocratic notions aside, xenia survives today in a starkly different manner. This word emphasising active hospitality is, curiously, also the root word for English words like xenophobia. A word’s complete corruption like with xenia is not unique for the lifecycle of Latin and Greek origin words. Yet, it appeals to me when thinking about the status of outsiders in 2018 CE. It is somewhat symptomatic of narratives about and perceptions of outsiders. There is a particularity about being a foreigner. It is a very specific state of being. When one has the option, people leave their homes for various reasons. I left home for a (second) MA degree. My experience is colored by my status as an international student. I find it a rich position to report from. Foreigners enter systems—weather, social and educational, among others— while emerging from very different ones. I am interested in nuanced individual stories that arise out of navigating these systems. Xenia fits the condition of working and studying abroad in an oddly fitting way. It is a word which captures the warm welcome and the hostility one faces as a foreigner—often at the same time.
Contents
Title delhi; open Pittsburgh Grad Life To Be American Homecoming
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delhi; open
by Priyam Goswami-Choudhury
I, the 3,755,937,243rd-most efficient person on the planet, never saw the sun in the morning. I have always been a nocturnal soul. I have witnessed hangovers, but there is nothing as wretched as a late night gone wrong. Waking up at 11:30 am used to have a strange languorous effect on the body. The body would shut down while the brain felt like a jelly throbbing inside an equally incompetent leaking container. When the landlord first showed me the house behind Gullu Meat shop in Malka Ganj hesaid that it was the only thing that I could complain about. For the entire time I would live in that apartment, the address for letters—both personal and official,—and packages would arrive with the comic and pathetic, “Ms. C-, behind Gullu Meat Shop, Delhi – 110007, India”. When I moved later, people never believed me. I handle tomatoes in Kreuzberg as the Turkish shopkeeper looks at me around midnight. I never buy his tomatoes; only fruits. He never asks me why I pretend to come to the shop around midnight. There is a relationship with silence that has deepened within me. In getting used to this, I have started relishing the silence that Berlin brings to me. It’s the strangeness of a world left untouched by the form that is you and to still want to touch and grasp that silence. Delhi opened me up like a ripened fruit on a hot summer day. The feeling of a raw, urgent belonging. This was home. This is what I miss the most. I reconcile with it in my dreams. I dream about the smell of sweet rotting bananas on a table on a long bus-ride to Croatia. I dream of looking out to Shadipur on my U-bahn as it passes Prinzenstrasse to reach Kottbusser Tor. Sometimes, the smell of cooked kebabs in Neukolln on the way to work is Old Delhi to me. The dream of finding the ground fresh after a snowfall in Berlin and upon arriving, marking territory with your footsteps just as you dream of a warm winter day in Delhi. It is already dark there, I think. The places are still there, John Banville wrote, it is the living who wear themselves out. Priyam Goswami-Choudhury is an Assamese poet who lives in Berlin. Her work was shortlisted for the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for Poetry in 2016 and has appeared in two anthologies of Indian poetry and journals like Rattle, Eclectica, The Bombay Literary Review, Vayavya, The Sunflower Collective, Jaggery etc. 1
Pittsburgh Grad Life After spending the first twenty-two years of my life in Delhi, India, I moved by Dhruv Mauria Sexena to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for gradutranslates to anything from a hike to ate school. Pittsburgh is not too big and a weekend ski or snowboarding trip crowded like New York City or San Franin the mountains in Colorado. cisco, nor is it too small and desolate. There is always something new and fun I love playing soccer, although I reto do around the city. I like it here. cently suffered an injury. I tore my A group of friends is one of the most im- right Anterior Cruciate Ligament portant things to have when you move (ACL) during intramurals. Fortunateto a new city. Peers that make you feel ly, though, my university’s health included are crucial. Granted this is insurance plan covered 100% of my probably easier in grad school than in a medical bills. I also happen to live in work environment, yet, most everyone I a city with some of the best medical have met has been really open to engag- professionals in the country. I was treated by an incredible surgeon. In ing in fruitful conversations. addition to that, an amazing set of I have met some of the smartest, most physical therapists worked with me humble and helpful people from all during my rehab. over the world. They tend not to let their existing biases and opinions ensconce Apart from an understandably rough them in echo chambers and are gener- first ten days, I have not had any troually curious about the world. This has ble returning to my normal daily rouled to open and informative dialogue tines since the surgery. My injuries and debates where we all learn from did not require any extra arrangements. I do not need any special aceach other. commodations at a restaurant, a bar, I cannot emphasize enough the impor- or a movie theater. Neither did I need tance of having a solicitous group of handicap parking stickers. I have no people around. It helps especially when trouble getting around the city on you are in a research-driven program at foot, using public transport or takschool like I am. There is always some- ing an Uber or a Lyft. My surgeon and one to offer a different point-of-view for physical therapists tell me that I’m the particular problem you might be progressing rapidly in my recovery. working on and to turn to for help. The only thing I have not been able That being said, my peers and I insist to do is play soccer yet. on occasional downtime for ourselves. The restaurants and bars in town are Dhruv Mauria Saxena is a PhD stugreat, and the sports teams are some dent in the Robotics Institute at Carof the best in the country. We go out negie Mellon University, working on around town and try new food or new motion planning for robots. He retypes of beer. It often involves getting ceived his Master’s in Robotics from together to watch movies or, more im- CMU in 2017, and an undergraduportantly, TV shows. We all try to main- ate degree from Delhi Technological tain a healthy lifeststyle. “Exercise” University in 2015. 2
To Be American
by Cat DeBacker
Like most children, it was my dream to run away to a far-off land filled with mysterious creatures and sumptuous green forests. So, that’s what I did. When I turned nineteen I called it quits on pretending that I had the emotional capacity to cope with the lingering hormones of female puberty laced with the thrumming adrenaline of a turbulent childhood. I took one suitcase full of clothes and another stuffed with shoes and hopped on a plane to New Zealand. I was smart enough to plan in advance and have my current manager at a notorious handmade cosmetics company call the manager on location in downtown Auckland. For five months I dressed in black and slung soap – my quirky flat American dialect that could push luxury soap into the hands of Kiwis, slaking their thirst to absorb my sounds as it buoyed my flagging self-confidence. During my time in Auckland, I rented out a vivacious older woman’s second bedroom in her small flat. She didn’t know how to connect me to the internet and didn’t try. She told me to go do volunteer work but didn’t point me in a certain direction. She was a life coach but so far had only succeeded in incisively pointing out my faults. I quickly became an acting manager, stocking bath products and chugging expensive coffee to fuel my nine-hour shifts. I slipped by. My speech was a delicacy for ears trained to consume the American way. I was a currency that could be exchanged and passed off as good service. Internally I felt fake. Not in the way that most workers do, putting on a brave face to get through retail. As one does. A trip that was meant to roll over into a new life, a fresh start in a lush country bursting at the seams with nooks and crannies to hide in, became a stifling snare. But coming to the strange realization that the appreciation I was receiving had little to do with me and my chosen identity and everything to do with how America had wrapped, stamped, and sent me to be seen by the rest of the world. A piece of the globe that could be categorized as Westernized. The pervasive material that makes up the United States— our media, the land of internet influences, — became the mesh with which I was woven. What was meant to be space that would allow me to remove the shackles of a past, to remove my histories from my sleeve – I became defined in an entirely new sense. My Americanness. A scarecrow, propped in a South Pacific field for the kiwis to chirp at. I wasn’t a foreigner to them, I was truth. A taste of the new American dream, where I have a lifetime pass to Disneyland and New York is a cheap one-hour flight from the west coast. 3
I hadn’t realized that I’d been painted with a second layer. I had lost the ability to self-identify. Cat DeBacker is a full-time cat mom and arts writer. Her experience growing up in rural America inspired her to share the stories of her travels abroad. You’ll find her home on a Friday night drinking tea listening to Heart on vinyl.
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Homecoming by Karthik Manickam “Don’t you know how to play cricket?” “How dare you whistle in front of a teacher?” “This assignment is typed. Do it again by hand.” “Okay so, what’s with the accent?” “How can you address your teacher without saying ‘Sir’?” “Firangi!” “You’re a science-y. Science-ys can’t take part in non-Science activities.” “How do you not know who Shakuntala is?” “You wrote the right answer, but you didn’t use the right technique. The Board won’t give you marks for this.” “How have you not heard of Vicki & Vetal?” “Why are you so comfortable talking to girls? You shouldn’t be talking to girls. You will get in trouble.” “No, really, where are you from?” “How do you not know how to cross a road?” “So— what coaching institute are you joining?” “So how come you don’t know how to speak Hindi?” “Why did you come to school today? Everyone else is at home preparing for the Board Exams.” “Don’t you know any Bollywood films?” “You’re Tamilian, and you moved here from Sri Lanka? So, you’re not Indian?” “Why is your handwriting so bad?” “You mean you’ve never attended a wedding?” “So how come you don’t know how to speak Tamil?” “Don’t you know any Bollywood songs?” “Oh man. Why didn’t you just cheat? Or ask Ma’am for grace marks?” “You don’t know what grace marks are?” “Everyone shut up! He’s trying to speak Hindi, listen it’s hilarious!” Studying abroad was easy. Coming back was the hard part.
Karthik Manickam holds Masters Degrees in Physics and Economics, which means he knows a whole lot about nothing useful. He moonlights as a bad writer in between bouts of researching how to join the Blue Man Group. 5