Foreword for A Migrant’s Path (the book edition)

How do we define ourselves when we know we don’t fit in? This is the question this beautiful book asks: a question to which there are no simple answers or wrong ones. Each of the eighteen women in these pages is from many places at once; each one belongs and doesn’t belong in her own ways, in the various contexts she inhabits. Multiple intersecting identities come across in both the images and the text. The determination to preserve links to ancestral cultures through clothing, food, festivals, and memory co-exists with an embrace of the new home and its own rituals and histories, for keeping the old culture alive does not mean rejecting the possibilities of the new. Indeed, the migrant or child of migrants is uniquely placed to coax the very best aspects of the new culture to its surface. Syncretism, flexibility, complexity: these are already present in Aotearoa, the chosen home of these young women and/or their parents. The very choice to refer to the country as Aotearoa rather than New Zealand is a foregrounding of this complexity, a positioning with regard to that history. Where complacence can and often does breed a blindness to that complexity, the effort that migrants and their children have to expend to find or make a place for themselves in society has the opposite effect, throwing complexity into relief and empowering these young women to hold their new societies accountable to their highest goals.

None of this is explicitly articulated in these images or narratives, and the book is all the stronger for it. These are stories, offered simply and with trust. The stories we tell about ourselves are a more powerful testament to our shared humanity than any polemic on multiculturalism or identity. When you have a face and a story before you, connection – even if it is transient, and even if it co-exists with an awareness of difference – is inevitable. Every one of us, migrant or not, has thought about how we present ourselves through our clothing. Every one of us has had to endure unwelcome commentary from strangers or family members. Every one of us has felt out of place at some point in our lives. These experiences are universal, and that presence of the universal in the specific is why humans crave stories: the irreplaceable and transformative sensation of seeing yourself in another who is nothing like you on the surface.

As a verse I learnt from a Māori friend many years ago goes:

Ask me what is the greatest gift of all

And I will tell you

It is people

It is people

It is people.

To open one’s eyes and see the other in all their contradictions and complexity is not just a kindness; it is a gift to the self. We are at our best when we see each other fully.

Preeta Samarasan

November 2021

Le Chalard 

-

Preeta Samarasan was born and raised in Malaysia but moved to the United States in high school. After spending several years ostensibly working on a dissertation on gypsy music in France, but all the while writing fiction, she decided to switch tracks. She recently received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where an early version of this novel received the Hopwood Novel Award; she also recently won the Asian American Writers’ Workshop short story award. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and another novel, and lives in central France with her husband and dog.