Of Color

June 15, 2020
A writer of South Asian descent wonders how to live--and write--in a country that both "values and devalues" him. Poet Bolina explores race and other topics in 10 personal essays rooted in his experience of growing up as the only child of Sikh Punjabi immigrants in the Chicago area. His perspective tends to be stereoscopic, especially in his first essay, "Empathy for the Devil," which deals with the killing of Osama bin Laden: "When I hear that he's dead, I don't feel anything resembling sorrow, but watching the young men in trees outside the White House waving flags and chanting USA! USA! I don't feel any kind of pride either. Both sides of the conflict seem barbaric. They killed one of them. Neither side includes me." Bolina's gift for seeing diverse viewpoints resurfaces in later essays. In "Writing Like a White Guy," he considers how to write truthfully when a privileged education has left him with "only the parlance of whiteness to express my brownness." In "White Wedding," he reflects on his marriage to a white woman, on brown-white romances in the media, and on Americans' tendency to see pop stars of color as a "racial vanguard." "As much as any vanguard represents progress," writes the author, "these trailblazers aren't evidence of a nation's sudden embrace of diversity so much as evidence of the majority's self-congratulatory tolerance of it." Most of the essays unfold as a series of vignettes or scenes, some so brief that they short-circuit the development of promising ideas. Along with other limits, that underdevelopment makes the book a minor collection in this arena. However, the author shows flashes of promise on which to build in the future, and given that many of the pieces deal with the intersection of race and writing, the book will interest creative writing students and programs. A slender collection of essays explores the role of race in poetry and life.

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