In the lyric essay “Skin,” she says the problem with western Massachusetts is that “you are a brown girl here, never just a girl.” Shah constantly felt aware of her Indianness not only in her in her social life (in “Who’s Indian?” she recalls the familiar experience of a guy at a bar refusing to accept that she’s from New York), but also in her writing career. Weddings of friends and family friends served as a refuge for Shah during her graduate school years in New England, where nearly everyone was white. Instead, “to catch all of the references, you had to be Indian, you had to be Indian American-you had to be us.” At her brother’s wedding, by contrast, Indians weren’t in the background. Bollywood hadn’t yet made it over to the US in a significant way, and Shah hardly saw Indians represented in American pop culture, nor were they in The New Yorker or other visible and prestigious places. At that time, there weren’t any South Asian Americans on prime-time television except Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart manager on The Simpsons, whose exaggerated Indian accent was voiced by a white actor named Hank. It was one of the happiest days of her life because, at the age of twenty, it was the first time she saw her Indian and American cultures merge in a semipublic space. It’s still lackluster now, but it was even worse in 1992, when Shah attended her brother’s wedding, held in a hotel.
“Matrimonials” centers on the lack of representation of South Asian Americans in mainstream American culture. Her creative range arises in part from her layered background and from the agility she developed in response to the ignorance of others when confronted with that background. The essays follow Shah’s progression as a writer-from poet to prose enthusiast-and her genre-bending collection mirrors the way she rejects the confines people place on her. This book is about pushing boundaries, both of stereotypes and of form. She is not speaking on behalf of all South Asian Americans she does not want you to use her story to simplify a whole group’s experiences. The collection begins with an introduction, in which Shah explains the title of the book: “I don’t subscribe to the notion of fixed genres-not when I and others move from one culture to another, from one kind of dance to another ” Shah’s life and her way of looking at it are her own. She explores what it means to be Indian in non-Indian places. In her essays, she traces time spent in her mostly white hometown and its small Indian community, her graduate school years in New England, time spent teaching in Iowa, and her trips to Italy and France. The daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya, Shah grew up in western New York, where she still lives. In twenty-five linked essays written over two decades, Shah reflects on experiences from her own life and explores a range of subjects including weddings, representation, intersectionality, place, race, pop culture, and identity. Tanya’s work has been published in Western Humanities Review, Northwest Review, and Crazyhorse-among other journals.Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, is an examination of the hypervisibility and invisibility of South Asian Americans. Tanya Whiton’s story “Marine Life of the B.I.O.T.” won second prize in Zoetrope: All Story’s 2017 Short Fiction Contest, and her flash fiction “Wingman” received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train. Her father is a salesman who nightly drops one shoe. I will remove any traces of what my dad calls “graffiti.” Later I will wash the pastel figures off our concrete steps with a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush. When we get bored with swinging, we return to our squat brown apartment building and draw roundheaded hoydens in triangle dresses, cubist dogs, and other ciphers all over the stairwell. The girl next to me is a flying blonde cloud, a nameless blur with a new box of sidewalk chalk. I grip the chains, tense my thighs, and point my toes.
To hear Tanya read the story, click below: When that same upward momentum transforms to a figurative ascent at the end of the story, the transition feels both wonderfully surprising and inevitable. The piece begins with physical movement, the narrator rising and falling on her swing. As a reader, what pulls me through the piece? What keeps me racing toward the end? In Tanya Whiton’s “Up,” movement works on both a literal and figurative level. Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: Whenever I read or teach a piece of fiction, I always think about movement.
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