WE TAKE OUR CITIES WITH US

A Pakistani Dutch novelist tells both her own life story and those of her parents and grandparents through the lens of cities where her family has lived.

Khan begins this memoir in essays in 2001 in Ithaca, New York, soon after the tragedy of 9/11. At her elementary school, a few fellow students called her family “terrorists” and threatened them with violence. This terrifying incident sets the stage for a series of essays describing seminal moments in the author’s life, including her Dutch mother’s and her Pakistani father’s deaths in Vienna. In one essay, which begins in Denver, where she met her husband, Naeem, years after their shared childhood in Pakistan, Khan recounts the aftermath of Naeem’s undiagnosed heart attack in Syracuse, New York, marveling at the fact that he lived and cringing that she attended a Ravi Shankar concert on the night when he may have died. In another, the author remembers her grandparents’ home at Five Queens Road in Lahore and recounts how a Partition-era land dispute could not mar her happy childhood. After discussing her lived experiences, Khan investigates her past, examining her maternal grandparents’ dysfunctional marriage and writing about the love letters her parents sent each other while living on separate continents and debating the possibility of an interracial marriage. “The letters,” she writes, “are written on blue aerogrammes and onion skin paper, and sometimes white linen letter pads, and on all surfaces, they stretch with longing and constrict with details….The letters cement their relationship across continents, perhaps the least of their divides.” At its best, the narrative is poignant, lyrical, and insightful, drawing readers into the details of the author’s physical and emotional landscapes. Though the text occasionally feels like a laundry list of historical facts, the collection is heartfelt and deftly constructed, clearly displaying the author’s rhetorical talents.

A poetic memoir about a biracial author’s international life.