This Is One Way to Dance
Essays
by Sejal Shah
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Pub Date Jun 01 2020 | Archive Date Mar 15 2020
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Description
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.
Advance Praise
"This is a marvelously observant memoir, not only of Shah’s parents’ generation and their arrival in the United States, but also of her own generation’s search for love, for a notion of home and belonging. While this memoir is frequently heart-breaking, it also dazzles with incandescent humor. One of the most nuanced, wise and tender portraits of immigration I have ever read."
—Kiran Desai, Man Book Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
"A phenomenal first book that travels decades in its excavation, Sejal Shah’s This Is One Way to Dance was well worth the wait. The body in ecstatic dance is a bridge and also an estuary in this prose, equally brave in its precision and its vulnerability."
—Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood
"Sejal Shah’s lyrical This Is One Way to Dance deftly explores what it means to be “American” in our increasingly diverse nation. The writing is vivid, Shah’s observations are nimble and wise, and the result is a book that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking."
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire
“You'll find that these meditative memoranda don't end when they are over but continue to work their magic, an alchemy that transubstantiates both memory and memoir. Here are the maps for here, steps stenciled on the finished dance floor, a Little Giddings rag that brings us back to where we started and there to know the place for the very first time.”
—Michael Martone, author of Brooding
“'Oh, there we are,' I found myself thinking more than once reading Sejal Shah's beautiful memoir in essays. Each of these pieces captures what it means to be a citizen of a country that may never claim you as its own, to imagine your own brilliant fullness beyond its peripheral gaze.”
—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780820357232 |
| PRICE | $22.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 168 |
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