This Is One Way to Dance: Essays

If ‘India’ ever comes up in your talk with someone, what do you think about? Is it huge colorful weddings with lots and lots of people? Or do you think about gold jewelry or was it a place that you called home, or still call home? I grew up in India, and when I moved to Canada a couple years back, I wanted to take on this new identity of being Canadian. The last couple months of starting my first job and thinking about marriage has made me dig deeper into my connection with my culture and This Is One Way to Dance: Essays came to my notice on NetGalley at a very good time. It made me take a journey into the habits I have, the childhood I experienced as well as where I want to go from here. I loved this book and I hope you will give it a chance too. Take a look at the synopsis first:

In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah’s ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation, as the daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya. These essays also trace her movement over twenty years from student to teacher and meditate on her travels and life in New England, New York City, and the Midwest, as she considers what it means to be of a place or from a place, to be foreign or familiar.

Shah invites us to consider writing as a somatic practice, a composition of digressions, repetitions–movement as transformation, incantation. Her essays–some narrative, others lyrical and poetic–explore how we are all marked by culture, gender, and race; by the limits of our bodies, by our losses and regrets, by who and what we love, by our ambivalences, and by trauma and silence. Language fractures in its attempt to be spoken. Shah asks and attempts to answer the question: How do you move in such a way that loss does not limit you? This Is One Way to Dance introduces a vital new voice to the conversation about race and belonging in America. 

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Why I chose to read This Is One Way to Dance: Essays

I don’t often pick up books about Indian culture and for the longest time as a teenager, stayed clear of Indian authors and preferred to read authors from other countries because I wanted to read exotic things and not be stuck in a cycle of mundane adventures that my life already was. This Is One Way to Dance: Essays comes at a different time though, when my home is no longer the country I grew up in. Sejal did not grow up in India – she was born to Indian parents in the United States. Her essays explore what her childhood was like in a predominantly Caucasian society, as well as her connection to her family culture and heritage as she grew older.

I moved from India to Canada in 2014 and this book piqued my curiosity: even though I did not grow up in North America and Sejal did not grow up in India, we both possess a deep connection to our culture. I wanted to know how starkly (if at all) my childhood was different from hers and if there are similarities in our experiences as adults South Asians living far from India.

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Themes for Thought

As I read This Is One Way to Dance, I thought about my culture, my language, but through Sejal’s stories, I also wondered about the life that my kids will eventually have in the society I live in. I want to highlight two main lines of thought here:

On Representation

I was listening to Big Little Lies the other day and there was this one scene in the story when the teenager tells her mom to stop letting her younger sister play with Barbies – they cause body image problems with girls. There are so many messages of racism and mental health and image that we want to protect our children from, and it often crosses my mind how many of these messages do kids really take in?

In one of the essays, Sejal mentions the books that she and her other South Asian American friends used to read when she was little, Nancy Drew playing a huge role in her childhood.

We read these books, but there was no one like us in any of them. Did we think of writing our own? To see the girl I was, the girls we were, back when we lived at home.

This Is One Way to Dance: Essays [Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib]

I read a number of works by Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew was one of my favorites too. Like Sejal, I never read stories about girls like me. Unlike Sejal, I grew up in India. Most of the books I read were my parents’ so you can imagine that they read the same materials. Did they ever think about not being represented in these books when they were 7-13 years old say? It never crossed my mind until I read this book. Maybe, we already saw that everyone around us looked like us and it did not matter that those in the books did not. It was all in our imagination.

So truly, me thinking about diversity and representation is a consequence of the place I am at today (North America).

There are many book bloggers out there who genuinely seek out books about diversity. I read what catches my fascination. But Sejal’s words really made me think about representation of my culture in books for kids. Ariel told me about Aru Shah and the End of Time (Pandava Quartet #1) by Roshani Chokshi, and this is one book that I would read to kids one day. They will not grow up in India but my culture is an important part of who I am and, hence, who they will be.

They don’t have to see themselves in the book – I saw myself just fine as I read Nancy Drew, but when I have the tools to find a variety of stories for them, then why not?

On Identities – of Culture and Skin Color

I didn’t need my culture (diasporic, floating, race, language, food) to be acknowledged, but it does differ from those often around me, from those I am often around. And other times, later, race seemed only too inescapable: one will be expected to serve on the diversity committee for one’s primarily white institution and therefore required to provide additional, invisible labor without compensation.

This Is One Way to Dance: Essays [Matrimonials]

Though I have not served on such a committee myself, as a woman in science, people often talk to me about being part of groups that encourage scientific thinking and computing skills in girls. “You will be an amazing role model.” Do I want to be though? No. I am a woman in science because I grew up in a country that looks down on jobs in arts and the way to be independent and self-sufficient (and hopefully marry well) is to have a good education. If I had grown up in Canada, would I be in computing science? No. I would have pursued my love for language and English. So I refuse to be a role model for an agenda – girls have so many choices in this society and I want them to explore and do what they want!

That’s a diversity committee too, isn’t it?

When I first moved to Canada, I could have been part of the South Asian / Indian Students Association. It was almost implied, “You’re part of it, right?” No, I am not. Yes, I would have found people who were in similar position as me, having just left home, and it would have been less lonely but I did not want to. Maybe I tried too hard to become who I was not.

On Self-Definition

If you had asked me two years ago how I imagined my wedding to be, I would have told you I’ll be wearing a white dress with red accents. I love red! In the midst of thinking about representation and identity, I came across a very beautiful description of an Indian wedding that Sejal attended. I was so mesmerized by it that I noted that just reading that makes me want to have an Indian wedding.

Not a full on 3-day Indian wedding, but who is going to stop me if I want to? 🙂 I will not wear white – I will wear the auspicious red. I don’t know which parts of the ceremonies we will embrace (Clinton has a say in this of course it will be his wedding too) but I would want us both to be represented in the ways we want.

My culture, my home country is an integral part of who I am. No matter how much I assimilate into the Western society, no matter where I hide away my Indian clothes because I hardly ever wear them now, I will always be Indian. Sejal is Indian even if she never grew up in India! That speaks so strongly to the fact that we don’t have to live in a place to belong to that place.

So, if you find yourself in a multicultural country like Canada, the US, or England; please pause to think for a moment before asking someone where they’re from. Even if you’re about to ask with the best of intentions, please know that it can be a difficult question for us to answer, especially when we find we have deep connections to more than one country.

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You can tell how much I enjoyed this collection of essays, right? Even if you are not Indian, I encourage you to read it. It will offer a glimpse into a different life altogether, a life that maybe your peers, if not your close friends, lead.

** This Is One Way to Dance: Essays will be available in stores in June so go preorder a copy now! **
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Cover image: Photo by Vitaliy Lyubezhanin on Unsplash