A Book I Wish More People Knew About Vol. 5

Neema Avashia on a book by Julietta Singh

Here’s a happy story about books. In 2022 Neema Avashia’s Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place was one of publishing’s stealthy hits, earning national attention on best-of lists from the New York Public Library and Book Riot (which named it last year’s best LGBTQ memoir), as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, and through reviews and interviews in places like CNN and New York Magazine.

Neema used (and continues to use) this recognition for good, donating books to queer kids threatened by red-state legislatures, raising money for Appalachians displaced by flooding, and more. And at the center of things is a book about overlapping identities that aren’t popularly imagined to coexist—about embracing Appalachian roots as a queer Asian American activist, even while your deeply imperfect homeplace seems to resist loving you back. That conflictedness about home is the spark that has, I think, made Another Appalachia as popular in New York as in West Virginia.

I was proud to have a front-row seat for Neema Avashia’s many successes as her publisher and friend, and I’m pleased that she’s agreed to share an essay here at The Biblioracle Recommends where, if you didn’t see John’s announcement from Monday, I’m now helping out as an editor. For the feature “A Book I Wish More People Knew About,” Neema recommends work by Julietta Singh.

A Book I Wish More People Knew About: Neema Avashia on The Breaks by Julietta Singh

My partner and I had our baby at the end of November. In many ways, I’ve found these early months of motherhood to be all-consuming. No time to write, no time to read, most of our (many) waking moments taken up with the labor of mothering.

And yet, even as I attend to the sheer physicality of mothering Kahani, who is the happiest baby on earth until you try to make her take a nap, it’s been impossible to keep the big world at bay. The Supreme Court has handed down decisions denying my daughter the right to bodily autonomy, and given owners and employees at private businesses permission to deny her and her mothers service if our presence offends their sensibilities. Smoke from climate change-exacerbated wildfires in Canada has polluted our air to such an extent that on many days, we’ve been told by health experts that we shouldn’t take Kahani outside. And every time I manage to scan the headlines in the news, I am reminded that Kahani has entered a world where the generation that precedes hers is weighed down by mountains of student debt; by melting polar ice caps, flooding, and fires; by a society that refuses to reckon with the legacies and realities of institutional racism; by a wealth gap that feels nearly medieval in its scale.

In the few cerebral moments I encounter each day, I often find myself preoccupied by questions: How do I raise my biracial daughter to love herself in a world that repeatedly communicates its lack of value for her? How do I teach her to reject nihilism and cling firmly to hope? To believe that a better world is possible? To fight for that better world, when so many of the adults in her world at present flat out refuse to do right by the young people who come after them, choosing short-term benefit over the long-time survival of humanity? How do I grapple with the guilt I feel over bringing a child into existence in a country that, with every policy decision it makes, communicates how much it absolutely hates our children?

In those few moments of nettled lucidity, I find myself returning to Julietta Singh’s book The Breaks, published by Coffee House Press in 2021. This slim volume, a 168-page essay structured as a letter from a queer, Brown mother to her six-year-old biracial daughter, is described by Coffee House as “a profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.” And sometimes, it feels like the only map I have for how to mother in this moment. I clutch it tightly, read and re-read its pages, hoping that by cleaving to the ideas within, I, too, can find a way to be the mother that my daughter needs me to be in this moment, in this world.

Over the course of the book, Singh explores multiple breaks—the breaking of her bones, the breaking of conventional family structures, the continual breaking of the world we live in. Breaks may be painful, but they are not inherently negative. They are opportunities to reconsider our direction, and potentially change course. She posits that in order to mother now, it requires her, and us collectively, to break with oppressive structures from the past and build new ways of living and being in community. And she encourages her daughter to be willing to do the same—to examine what narratives and moments from her past no longer serve, what new ways of being she’ll be required to create in order to be part of building a more just and verdant world. She writes:

I want to offer myself to you as a base, not so you can build yourself up from a fantasy of solid ground, but so you can discover the breaks, cracks and sinkholes that constitute the lives that come before you. So that I might become for you a map of broken things, a recyclable archive that will spur you to fashion other ways of being alive, of living. I want to hand myself over so that you don’t have to go in search of me, so you can draw forward what you need to reinvent the world.

But Singh’s writing does not only provide a map for her daughter; it also provides that map for me. It is only through breaking, Singh argues, that we are able to build anew. Through the repetition of the phrase “break with me,” she models the kind of mother that I seek to be—one who, rather than being bound by past or present notions of what should be, is willing to listen to their child, to view the world through their eyes, to follow when they seek to take the lead, and to imagine the new ways of being required for the moment we are living in.

I’ve done my fair share of breaking over the past few years: Breaking my family’s paradigms around shame and silence to publish a book of personal essays. Breaking from a two-decade long career in teaching. Even, this very week, breaking with gendered expectations around clothing in the attire I’ve chosen for my cousin’s very traditional, very elaborate Indian wedding. Each time, the break has come when I consider the implications of my choices relative to my child: How is she served when I allow patriarchal tools of silence and shame to prevent me from speaking truth to power? When I let an education system riddled with inequity sap me, and my students, of our humanity? When I hide my authentic self to avoid causing discomfort to those around me? What do I teach my daughter when I uphold ways of being that don’t work for me, and that will not work for her?

In the seven months since I became a mother, Singh’s lessons have never left my mind: We break in order to survive. We break in order to transform. Motherhood, then, becomes an ongoing process between mother and child, of breaking and building as we struggle to create the world we seek to live in together.

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Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a middle school teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her essays have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.

Previously in “A Book I Wish More People Knew About”

Vol. 1: The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, recommended by Phyllis Mann.

Vol. 2: Laura & Emma, recommended by Teddy Wayne.

Vol. 3: The Woman Lit by Fireflies, recommended by Christine Sneed

Vol. 4: This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love., recommended by Casey Plett