THIS IS ONE WAY TO DANCE

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.