This Is One Way to Dance

April 1, 2020
An immigrant memoir in essays "about growing up Indian outside of India, in non-Indian places." In a series of previously published personal essays, creative writing professor Shah recounts 20 years of moving around, forming her ethnic identity in America's cities and towns. The daughter of "Gujarati parents born in India and East Africa," the author ponders how one moves in a "body often viewed as other." How, she asks, "do you claim the I, the person dancing, the person leading the dance?" In "Skin," she introduces us to "a brown girl here [in the U.S.], never just a girl." She portrays a life rich with places visited and lived in as well as family, friends, writing, and exuberant Indian weddings--including, finally, her own, with its vibrant clothing, jewelry, and especially dancing, an "important part of how I understood myself to be Indian." As an adolescent, Shah read serial novels, like those of Nancy Drew, but "there was no one like [me] in any of them." She chronicles how, forever in search of a permanent teaching position, she moved through a series of writer-in-residence jobs, supplemented by fellowships, workshops, and retreats. She recalls watching Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding, listening to its "effervescent" music: "I remember it still as a bodily sensation, the visceral pull toward the screen." Luscious Indian food abounds, but the author shuns cooking: "I didn't want to be anyone's passage to India." Shah also describes her experience at Burning Man, where she drank scotch and dropped acid: "I wanted to burn. I wanted to be free." Despite her significant time in the U.S., the author remains an Indian American (no dash) writer who has lived a bifurcated life, both sides of which she revels in: "Words are surfacing; this is one way to dance. Words are rising: this is how to dance." Despite inevitable repetition, this is a sensitive, poignant collection.

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April 13, 2020
The poetic, probing debut from short story writer and essayist Shah forcefully tackles the complicated intersection of “identity, language, movement, family, place, and race.” Written over two decades, starting in 1999, the selections explore her Gujarati Indian heritage, her upbringing in western New York, and her time in Massachusetts and New York City teaching creative writing. Closely attentive to nuances of race, she reflects on the marginal status accorded South Asian identity in both popular culture and academic writing. Whether remembering what Mira Nair’s early film Mississippi Masala meant to her (“The desire to see one’s self and community reflected runs deep”) or reminiscing on her childhood home (“Ranch houses, when I was growing up, were not cool,” but her family’s was the place she “always felt safe”), Shah is insightfully self-reflective. She also makes lyrical use of language, as when she ruminates on summer nights that have “a particular kind of warm, which is not too hot, not too humid, not anything but enough to make you glad that your skin is the only layer between you and the world.” In this sterling collection, Shah has created a striking self-portrait.