Category: GENRE

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ALL Book Reviews The New York Times Book Review

Mother Lode

For the Sunday New York Times Book Review, I review a personal history of Ethiopia by Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam, as refracted through the life of the author’s grandmother.

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ALL Book Reviews Essays The Boston Review

Masters and Servants

For the Boston Review, I write on novels by Neel Mukherjee and V.S. Naipaul and one odd winter in New Delhi that left me unhoused in my own skin.  I consider whether, “in the curved space-time of global history, migration can crack open wormholes to freedom from old rigidities and entitlements,” including the barriers of gender, class and caste.

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ALL Book Reviews The New York Times Book Review

Instruments of Memory

The New York Times Book Review

A Cambodian Refugee Returns Home, to a Landscape Brutally Changed

By GAIUTRA BAHADUR

MUSIC OF THE GHOSTS
By Vaddey Ratner
324 pp. Touchstone. $26.

Vaddey Ratner calls each of the three parts of her tenaciously melodic second novel a movement. And indeed this story of an orphaned Cambodian refugee’s return to her homeland does have a symphony’s elevating effect on emotion. Ratner stirs feeling — sorrow, sympathy, pleasure — through language so ethereal in the face of dislocation and loss that its beauty can only be described as stubborn.

Continue reading in the NYTBR.

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Essays

Paperback Writer

For the Guardian’s Paperback Writer series, I write about my strategies for overcoming gaps and biases in the government archives that document indenture: “The stealing of the voices of indentured women, born into the wrong class, race and gender to write themselves into history, was structural. How could I write about women whose very existence the official sources barely acknowledged? To enter their unknown and to some extent unknowable history, I had to turn to alternative, unofficial sources.”

 

 

Categories
ALL Essays Migration The Virginia Quarterly Review

Wine Dark Sea

Hew Locke’s Wine Dark Sea, an installation at the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery. Photo Credit: Gaiutra Bahadur, 2016.
Hew Locke’s Wine Dark Sea, an installation at the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery. Photo Credit: Gaiutra Bahadur, 2016.

An essay for The Virginia Quarterly Review: “For both artist and migrant, ships are symbols of the universal. A slave, an indentured servant, a tourist, a seaman, a refugee obviously each inhabit a ship distinctly, but aboard, each is ultimately at the mercy of the sea. I share Locke’s instinct for seeking comrades in the hull’s curve.”