On Becoming a Person of Color
I finish counting and start over, trying, always, to solve the equation of myself.
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Posts Tagged: America
TORCH: Twitch
America: land where anything can and does happen. Doors blow open by magic when you step on a rubber mat.
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Dispatches from the Swamp: The Babble in the Bubble
To the extent that America—that great big word that makes us all so anxious—exists at all, it exists as a vast and noisy sheet of bubble wrap.
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TORCH: Movement, Its Depictions, and Two-Way Tickets
The experience of migration lies not in binaries—pleasure-pain and triumph-catastrophe—but rather, like life itself, it resides in the space in between.
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Loving America: Reading Carlos Bulosan with My Students
Can one love one’s country into a better version of itself? And can that love better the self?
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To Look for America: A Road Trip, a Soundtrack
One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
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I Am Here to Make Friends
I’m not here to wallow in what feels like our new dystopia, no. Me? I am here, to rest up before the next bout. I am here to watch The Price Is Right and make friends.
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Staying Syncretic: A Conversation with Kool A.D.
Kool A.D. discusses his debut novel, OK, the war on drugs, systemic destruction of left-leaning movements by the government, and the inability to escape American capitalism.
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A Specific Kind of Loneliness: In Conversation with Geeta Kothari
Geeta Kothari discusses her debut collection, American xenophobia, and the immigrant narrative.
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Reclaiming Patriotism: Telling a New Story of America
America is a broken window pane—shards of glass, each reflecting a different light.
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All Writing Is Political: A Conversation with Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid discusses his new novel, Exit West, hope in fiction as a form of resistance, the necessity of learning to accept social change, and how much America and Pakistan have come to resemble each other.
...moreCall for Submissions: Redefining Patriotism
Raised in Texas, I was taught to hold my hand over my heart when the flag was raised, to thank everyone in uniform, and to organize my life in this order; God, Country, Family. Even now, tears spring to my eyes in some sort of Pavlovian response when I hear Lee Greenwood warble, “I’m proud to […]
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Mothers of My Diaspora
It paralyzes me to think about the sacrifices my family made before I was in my mother’s womb. When they came here they knew they would lose a part of their language, their memories, their sanctity of self.
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Corinne Lee and Finding an Antidote to America’s Toxicity
Poet Corinne Lee on writing her epic book-length poem Plenty and finding new ways to live in a rapidly changing world.
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Sunday Rumpus Poetry: Six Erasure Poems by Alison Thumel
Give amnesty. / Which birthright / is perpetual / and whose is made? / One sentence / should be kept: / I had a body / to believe.
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Looking for Russia in America
Everyone around us is speaking Russian, and I feel like we are in Russia, the old one, before the wall came down. For a moment, I even feel like I belong.
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Sunday Rumpus Poetry: Five Poems by Jan-Henry Gray
Dry-mouthed, standing shoulder to shoulder, / They watch the carousel spit out black bags / And mumble “not mine” over and over.
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Call for Submissions: New Rumpus Series on Immigration
Torch: Stories of America is a series devoted to showcasing personal essays, interviews, and art about immigrant and refugee experiences. Edited by Arielle Bernstein, and featuring the work of diverse writers from around the globe, Torch aims to shatter stereotypes and encourage greater understanding and empathy in a world where immigrant and refugee communities are often misunderstood and marginalized. […]
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The Rumpus Review of Rogue One
So, what would populist ideology even look like in Star Wars?
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #13: Such Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
Do you keep a dream journal? I started as a teenager, and continue on-and-off. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a memory. Does this happen to you? Or am I confessing to something strange and pathological? Where is the line between pathology and creativity?
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Multitudes: The Practice of Forgetting
I want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Never Let Me Go
“You can’t hold on to the past,” Elif once told me. “You don’t know how. You don’t know what to keep, what to throw away. So you keep it all. And you can’t do that. No one can.”
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Tinfoil Astronaut
Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark the outline of my body with blinking stars and black thread.
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From the Editors: Election 2016
This election is critical. We are code-red. We might elect our first woman president, or we might elect a man who is at best dangerous and unqualified and at worst the end of democracy as we know it today.
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Color at the Mercy of the Light
What if I said: while people still believe they are white in America, that delusion, and the dream upon which it is founded, needs to be seriously examined.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 1): “The Idea of Ancestry”
I know / their dark eyes, they know mine.
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