Brown Women Have Everything

As a child growing up in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta wanted to go on adventures involving shipwrecks and treasure chests. Her parents wanted her to stay in school instead. She satisfied her curiosity by drawing maps, inventing languages with friends, and reading everything: English adventures, Russian folktales, Hindi comics, Bengali ghost stories. 

Brown Women Have Everything embraces the same spirit of wonder as we follow Dasgupta, now living and teaching in the United States, to cathedrals in Italy, pirate graveyards in North Carolina, hair salons in Idaho, her aunt’s kitchen in Bangladesh, graffiti-lined streets of Colombia, the hierarchical world of academia, and her marriage to a handsome Sikh. As she moves through the world, she examines issues of the body, violence, travel, and belonging with a mix of humor, joy, pride, and outrage. While the eighteen interwoven essays in this collection call out bigotry, bias, and othering, they ultimately celebrate the ties that bind our disparate, global lives together.

Sayantani Dasgupta is associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.