> ARRIVALS
These five new books examine Western culture through the eyes of newcomers.
The Lost Sister, Andrea Gunraj “I was the cowardly sister,” 13-year-old Alisha tells us at the start of Andrea Gunraj’s second novel. She feels that in her Guyanese-Canadian family, Diane, 15, is the favoured daughter, the great hope for a family living in Toronto’s JaneFinch neighbourhood. When Diane doesn’t come home from the mall, Alisha’s envy turns to guilt, because she may know something about her sister’s disappearance. She finds a sympathetic role model in Paula, a Black woman with a deep understanding of siblings’ complicated love and childhood trauma.
My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, Jennine Capo Crucet This memoir of exclusion is told in nine essays by Jennine Capo Crucet, her first name appropriated by her CubanA-merican parents from Miss USA 1980 because they wanted their daughter to fit in and pursue the American Dream. Capo Crucet is never preachy and always entertaining as she tours America through Latin eyes — studying at Cornell University, visiting Disney World, planning an Emily Post-style wedding, exploring cowboy culture in Nebraska, buying property and more.
The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, Dina Nayeri The title intrigues: Could it be that refugees have issues about their treatment by their hosts? Yes indeed. Dina Nayeri, who left Iran at age eight, tells us her story, and those of other newcomers, in this nuanced look at what it feels like to be a fully realized person reduced to the single word “refugee.” One of the overarching themes concerns the stories that asylum seekers must tell immigration officials to secure a safe haven. Nayeri lives in London and is the author of two novels.
Ransomed/Asylum: Breaking the Fourth Wall, Laura Swart This is a flip book, two stories in one volume, with “Ransomed (anatomy of a refugee)” on one side, and “Asylum: Breaking the Fourth Wall” on the other. “Ransomed” takes us to the Booth, an Alberta refugee centre, where we meet newcomers from Syria, Iraq and several African countries. “Asylum” is an interrogation of immigrants, with history’s great philosophers doing the questioning and Amnesty International as Greek chorus. Songs by Bob Dylan and a leading role by Puck of “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Swart is director of Calgary’s I-AM ESL, which teaches English to refugees using story and song.
Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh Ghosh’s ninth novel addresses big ideas — climate change and mass displacement among them. Deen is a rare-book dealer from Brooklyn, a single man, his 60s looming. At a party in Calcutta, he hears a twist on a Bengali legend, about a gun merchant who escapes the snake goddess Manasa Devi by fleeing to Gun Island, a place free of reptiles. Soon Deen embarks on a journey to India’s nearby Sunbarbans, where a cyclone killed 300,000 in 1970, to the wildfires near Los Angeles and beyond, to Gun Island itself.