HT reviewer Simar Bhasin picks her favourite read of 2023
Three works of literary fiction stand out for their exploration of migrant narratives and histories of conflict and migration: "If I Survive You" by Jonathan Escoffery, "We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies" by Tsering Yangzom Lama, and "Now You See Us" by Balli Kaur Jaswal. These novels delve into the complexities of immigration and dislocated identities, challenging the dehistoricization of migrant movements often portrayed in the media.
This year, three works of literary fiction stood out for me as both, a research scholar and a reader of migrant narratives – the Booker Prize-shortlisted If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama, and Now You See Us by Balli Kaur Jaswal. All three narratives spoke to different histories of conflict and migration with the authors’ own subject positions informing the politics and the poetics of these works. Through interconnected short stories, Escoffery’s nuanced portrayal of the Jamaican-American diaspora engaged with questions of belonging in a “globalised” world. The three novels also delved deep into the multiple histories of immigration with a nuanced exposition of how these often emanate from neo-imperial exercises in diplomacy by countries belonging to the Global North. Tsering Yangzom Lama’s novel on Tibetans in exile told through several generations was an attempt, in her words, “to tell the story of a nation as well as individuals”. The author achieved this by focussing on a single family unit, much like Escoffery does. She connected personal history with the political and the historical with the spiritual realms of the Tibetan refugee experience.
Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Now You See Us centred on the lives of Philippine domestic workers in Singapore and the myriad ways in which they were the subjects of hyper surveillance. Yet, their care labour was invisibilised through systemic discrimination. All three literary works used English to linguistically depict dislocated identities. Their experiments with the form of the novel as well as their linguistic play with the English language exhibit deterritorialization. This made the works both display and embody the contemporary migrant condition. Widespread cross border movements have been depicted by Western media outlets with a language of excess with the term “crisis” often accompanying “migrant”. Escoffery, most forcefully, has attempted to destabilise the dehistoricization of these movements, which can be traced to political instabilities and war-like situations resulting from colonial legacies or the contemporary neo-imperial tendencies of countries of the Global North. These fictional accounts are especially important as they contend with the supposed factuality of media houses with a wide international reach.
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Simar Bhasin is an independent journalist.