8 minute read
INSIDE VOICES
INSIDE VOICES
Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton interview Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia, Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States from India. She has been a history and Civics teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her essays have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Another Appalachia, Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was released to much acclaim in March 2022.
Jeff: You chose to use the structure of individual essays to tell your story rather than employ the traditional narrative for memoir. Talk about this choice with us.
Neema: There is an expectation of completeness with memoir that I don’t feel with regards to my own life, or my own writing. I really appreciate that the essay genre allows for writers to ask a question, and to take the reader on their journey with the question, but there is not an expectation of an answer at the end of the essay. In fact, essays that end neatly, with easy answers, are often received with skepticism because the biggest questions are rarely answered so easily. For me, Another Appalachia is a book of questions that I’ve been living with my whole life: What does it mean to find belonging when the intersectionality of your identity always puts you on the outside? What does it mean to love a place that doesn’t always love you back? What do we do when people we love end up with radically different politics from our own, and politics that clearly seek to erase us? I wasn’t trying to tell the full story of my life in writing this book; I was trying to explore those questions.
Robert: “I experience a double loss each fall, missing both the mountains of my childhood and the many mothers who played a role in raising me there.” This is a quote from the essay “Nine Forms of the Goddess.” Talk about this quote, your motivation for writing your memoir, and the reconciliation of loss.
Neema: In many ways, this book is a response to another book, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. That book renders immigrant communities, queer communities, Black communities, politically radical communities, and all of us who live at the intersection of these communities, completely invisible. So in part, writing this book is an effort to render those communities visible. To assert belonging in a place where outsiders don’t think we belong. But another element of my writing about Appalachian and Desi elements of my upbringing is grounded in grief. Because as I’ve gotten older, and grown more clear about my queerness, it has increasingly put me at odds with Desi and Appalachian spaces where queerness is either explicitly or implicitly not welcome. The more salient my queerness has become to my identity, the harder it has become to feel fully grounded in either Desi or Appalachian communities, and the grief of losing that sense of belonging is part of what I’m mapping in my writing.
Jeff: You navigate several worlds in your memoir: Desi, Appalachian, Queer. What has been the reaction from each of these cultures?
Neema: Very different in each case. I think for lots of elders of my Desi community, my honesty makes them uncomfortable. They weren’t raised to see women as truth tellers, or holders of opinion, and they certainly weren’t raised in a world where it was acceptable for women to write those truths down, and then to publish them. So there’s been a lot of, “You’re so honest, you can’t help it,” and, “What will people say?” and I’ve just had to come to terms with the fact that there’s a generational gap that I’m not necessarily going to be able to bridge. For Desi folks of my generation and younger, the response has been really lovely, with many instances in which folks have said to me that they never thought our tiny Desi Appalachian community would be known to anyone but us, and that seeing it rendered on the page has given them a powerful sense of validation.
In terms of Appalachian folks, the ways in which they find resonance in the book continues to surprise me. I can’t tell you how many White, straight, cis Appalachian men have told me, “I thought I’d have nothing in common with you when I started reading this book, and yet somehow I kept finding myself in its pages.” So many of the throughlines that I thought were about immigrant family dynamics turned out to be about Appalachian family dynamics as well. So many of the questions I’m asking resonate for folks in Appalachia, regardless of whether they happen to be queer or Desi as well.
But above all, the group of folks who have had the most beautiful, meaningful response to this book have been queer Appalachian folks, for whom I think the questions about belonging resonate most deeply. So many baby queers have sent me messages expressing that they feel less lonely knowing that I share their questions, and that it helps them to know that it’s possible to find a soft place to land as a queer person, whether that place is in Appalachia or elsewhere.
Ultimately, I’ve been truly moved by how much resonance folks in all three communities have found within the pages of this book. I wrote it, in some ways, to render myself whole. To create a place in the world where all of me–the queer, Appalachian, and Desi parts of me–could be held together. And yet somehow, in doing that, it seems like I also created a mirror for folks who hold one, two, or sometimes all three of those identities.
Robert: Another Appalachia is a human story, but it’s also a political story. Please discuss why and how you created a personal narrative that makes an important statement about our culture.
Neema: The politics of polarization thrives in the absence of nuance. Politicians who peddle polarizing narratives do so by rendering us all flat, making us caricatures, and then weaponizing those caricatures so that we turn on one another, instead of recognizing the systems and structures that are oppressing all of us. In my mind, the only effective way to combat polarization is by bringing people closer to one another, making them see one another as full, complicated people, and thus interrupting the stereotyped narrative they’re being offered by politicians and media. Maybe it sounds cheesy, but the only solve I can find to the intense polarization of this moment is narrative. It’s stories of self that make it impossible for the stereotypes to go unquestioned. I’m not trying to write the definitive text about Appalachia. I don’t believe there is a single definitive text about Appalachia, or any other place for that matter. But I do believe that if I tell you my story, if I bring you as close as possible to the places and people I love, then it makes it harder for you to dehumanize them, to render harm on them, to support policies that will do them harm.
Jeff: What have you learned about yourself now that you have shared your story, with your family and the world?
Neema: I’ve learned that there is a lot of power in challenging shame narratives, and that once you free yourself of shame, it allows you to speak truth to power in a way that is so, so important. And I’ve learned that though I’ve lived outside of Appalachia for as many years as I lived within it, writing a book about belonging in Appalachia has brought me into closer relationships with people there than I’ve been at any point since leaving. And most importantly, I think I’ve learned that when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable as writers, and let readers into the thoughts and questions that we are grappling with, they meet our vulnerability with their own, and we ultimately all feel a little less alone as a result.
“An essential text to add to the new canon of Appalachian writing—a compassionate and rigorous memoir of the author’s experience growing up as a queer Hindu child and teenager in a small community of West Virginian Indians. Another Appalachia is a bright and deeply empathetic portrait of a complicated place, a place that Neema Avashia allows to be multifaceted in the way it deserves.”—Anna Claire Weber, White Whale Bookstore
Robert Gwaltney, award winning author of southern fiction, is a graduate of Florida State University. He resides in Atlanta Georgia with his partner, where he is an active member of the Atlanta literary community. Robert’s work has appeared in such publications as The Signal Mountain Review and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His debut novel, The Cicada Tree, won the Somerset Award for literary fiction.
Jeffrey Dale Lofton, hails from Warm Springs, Ga. His years telling the stories of playwrights and scriptwriters taught him the pull of a powerful story arc. Today, he is a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love books. Red Clay Suzie is his first work of fiction, written through his personal lens growing up an outsider figuring out life and love in a conservative family and community in the Deep South.
