‘Another Appalachia’ is as good as everyone says, and better
West Virginia University Press, 2022
Another Appalachia: Coming up queer and Indian in a mountain place is an instant classic. In this book of personal essays, Neema Avashia, an Indian American from West Virginia, demonstrates a gentle fervor for the place she grew up and the people who formed her. Her bittersweet love for her home shines through the page while treading a delicate border between overwhelming love and compassion, and a commitment to accuracy and honesty about her communities. With each essay, she strikes a new chord of her identity: a queer woman, a queer Indian, an Indian West Virginian, a second-generation immigrant. She layers her notes, filtering her experience through the various intersections she occupies to discuss the complex, beautifully dissonant reality of being from multiple places, peoples, and classes. When she shies away from discussing difficult topics, she does so frankly, acknowledging that they need to be processed–but not now. Not just yet.
Avashia addresses questions that daily gain volume within the state of West Virginia and the broader region: How do you reconcile your experience of a loving community with the reality of bigotry perpetrated by its members? How do you determine your rights and responsibilities to an identity that only your own generation of your family can claim? How do you live as yourself and tell your story without damaging the people you love? Some of these fears set me ringing in sympathetic resonance. The fear of hurting my parents or other loved ones by being entirely who I am in public. The fear of watching my home fall apart around my ears. The fear that it will leave me standing while others who are more vulnerable to exclusion are pushed out of their homes, beached by a shrinking job pool.
When I read the description of the photo on the cover, I understood how close to home Avashia was writing. More or less from the first page, something foundational to my makeup attached itself to this work. But as I sit writing my review at 5:15 in the morning after devouring the second half of the book, the gristmill in the photo is less than fifteen miles away. Avashia is West Virginian, and therefore Appalachian, right down to the bone. The kinship her essays evoke, even as she describes an upbringing so vastly different from my own, ties us together. I believe that Avashia has found out what it means to be Appalachian. The line of identity established by the first Appalachian writers continues in her work, a continuous current of longing and love that turns the wheel of our literary practice.
It’s not lost on Avashia that this book is, in part, an elegy. She, too, mourns Appalachia and Appalachian identity. She mourns her cousin, her students and neighbors, her relationships with those she feels she’s lost to radicalized right-wing politics. She mourns her Hindu faith as it frays thin, her severed connection to her parents’ homeland, the way that her unique confluence of identities has been discontinued by the death of the Kanawha Valley chemical industry. She mourns the fact that she is, as she puts it, a pine tree among oaks in the Appalachian literary community, growing as tall as those around her, but with shallow roots in the land she views as her only true home.
As a reviewer, it’s sometimes difficult to talk about a book you love as much as I love this one. It’s hard to know if the chord it strikes inside me rings as true for others of my community as it does for me. Perhaps I’m atypical of my home or generation. But I think the response that’s greeted this book is testament enough to the applicability of its themes. It feels true to the West Virginian experience in a way that I think even its author didn’t anticipate. To her face, I would argue that despite her misgivings, Neema Avashia is as deeply Appalachian as anyone, time-out-of-memory ancestral residence or no. She is Appalachian because she creates Appalachian-ness.
Another Appalachia is, if I can be allowed to make the assignment, required reading. Avashia’s keen sense memory combines with a steady hand and a deep commitment to nuance that make each essay glow like a kitchen window after dark. The places where her perspective aligned with my own were a delightful gut punch, and I can only presume that others feel the same; many have said as much. This book is, to me, a keystone in the ecology of Appalachian literature. It so exemplifies the internal grappling of Appalachian identity that I feel like I need to recommend it as a primer to anyone who wants to know me. I haven’t done anything new in reviewing it, not really. Everyone loves this book, and everyone gushes about how good it is, how important, how needed. This is because all of these things, and more, are true.
