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New Books for You to Read
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Transplanted Man
Sanjay Nigam (William Morrow)
I have a new respect for doctors. Don’t get me wrong, doctors are amazing people. My brother — a surgeon — reattached some kid’s hand the other day, for goodness sake. But after years of meeting South Asian American physicians whose idea of literature is the latest John Grisham book, I started to lose some respect. But just recently I saw an Indian American doctor rock the mic incredibly hard and go on to be the alternate for the San Francisco slam team. Hell yeah. Then Sanjay Nigam’s latest novel landed on my desk and I couldn’t put it down. Kind of a South Asian General Hospital, Transplanted Man sucks you into the lives of the doctors, nurses, orderlies, patients and locals around a hospital in an Indian neighborhood in a New York City borough. The large cast of characters includes an intense, sleepwalking resident named Sonny Seth, a dying politician from India with none of his own organs, a hormonally fluctuating British nurse and a restaurant owner who claims to have descended from Indian royalty. What I liked best about this book is that it so thoroughly captures a South Asian American community and all its nuances without excuses or explanations. There are ex-pats and Indo-Caribbeans, ex-hippies and self-haters, steamy affairs between married Indian scientists and interracial love — a true complexity. Bravo to Nigam for moving South Asian literature into the 21st century. And he’s a doctor too — my mom would love this guy.
Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism
Edited by Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman (Seal Press)
An inspirationally honest collection of first-person essays edited by former Ms. columnist Daisy Hernandez and Pakistani American poet Bushra Rehman, this book had me nodding my head and saying “Right on” every other page. Topics include everything from the deconstruction of the Indophile experience by Bay Area educator Bhavana Mody (“I know something is very wrong with white men telling me this and that about India. But I don’t have an official theory from which to critique them”) to Kiini Ibura Salaam’s revelations about female guilt and street harassment. There are confessions from Muslim feminists and queer Filipinas, a whole section dedicated to the struggles of our mothers, and expressions of the love of hip hop and punk rock music. Colonize This! (what a great title) helps explain exactly how women of color fit into the models of feminism that were so clearly defined in the 1970s and critiques those models that push us into the margins. This is one of those books that should be required reading for every young sister out there.
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