Amitava Kumar Brings the Immigrant Imagination to the Reher Center on April 18

When I sat down to speak with Amitava Kumar ahead of his upcoming reading and talk at the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History in Kingston on April 18, the Hudson Valley-based novelist, essayist, and perennial border-crosser—of both the geopolitical and literary variety—was fresh from a class on postcolonial literature. “Tomorrow we’re reading a writer from Zimbabwe,” he told me. “Last week we were reading about a Palestinian performance of ‘Hamlet.’ And in a few weeks, we’ll be reading The Penguin Book of Migration Literature.”

Kumar, who teaches English at Vassar and has written more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction—including Immigrant, Montana, A Time Outside This Time, and the recent My Beloved Life—moves fluidly between the political and the poetic, between the urgency of the moment and the slow churn of craft. At the Reher Center event, he’ll read selections from his recent work and talk about how he imagines, and reimagines, the immigrant experience—on the page and in real life.

“I’m thinking about how to present the essence of what I try to say in the classroom,” he tells me. “How do we imagine the immigrant? How do we tell their stories in a way that allows others to see them as fully human?”

The answer, for Kumar, starts with language. “They have language. They have their own stories. If we learn those stories, we recognize their humanity too,” he says. “We should not—if we are a humane society—render them unhuman and put 2,000 of them in a space for 500, where people are standing unable to sleep, or given a single cup of water, as they’re doing at the Chrome Detention Center in Florida.”

If that sounds like a rebuke, it is. But it’s also a plea—for compassion, for nuance, for narrative complexity in a time when political discourse seems determined to sandblast away the details.

Born and raised in India, Kumar came to the US as a graduate student, “not intending to stay.” For years, he avoided forming close attachments, assuming he’d eventually return home. “And then,” he says, “I stayed. I built a life. I had children.” His own citizenship—granted after years of studying, writing, and teaching—has not insulated him from the ambient suspicion that shadows many immigrants. “There’s a feeling that’s never really left me,” he says. “Of always being addressed by someone who wants to know what I’m doing here.”

He recounts a recent altercation in a supermarket parking lot where an older man—white, angry—shouted something ugly, something that made Kumar wonder, briefly, if he’d just been told to go back where he came from. “I wasn’t sure whether he said, ‘Do you speak English?’ or not,” Kumar says. “Where does one even begin to respond to that?”

It’s a complicated dance: to belong and not belong, to feel rooted and alien at the same time. Kumar talks often of feeling both a part of American life and somehow always standing just outside the room where it’s being decided.

This doubleness—insider and outsider, observer and participant—suffuses his work. In Immigrant, Montana, the narrator is a thinly veiled version of a young Kumar: bookish, horny, constantly negotiating the gap between desire and perception, between what he wants and how he is seen. “You look at him and think he wants your job,” the narrator says, “and not that he just wants to get laid.”

At the Reher Center, Kumar hopes to convey more than anecdote. He wants to spark recognition—especially among those in the audience who might not see themselves as immigrants. “I want to express fear and anxiety,” he says, “but also outrage and dismay.”

“There’s a terror my students feel,” he says, referencing the recent abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk by ICE agents, “after seeing the video of the Turkish PhD student in Somerville, just lifted off the street by plainclothes agents. It’s like Kafka’s The Trial—you know you’re under surveillance, but not what for, or when it began.”

Kumar’s own citizenship provides a certain measure of security, but it also brings responsibility. “The only reason I feel a certain calm is because I am a US citizen. Otherwise I’d say: ‘Hell no, I’m not going to talk to you about this,’” he says, laughing. “But because I am a citizen, I have to say something. I feel like I have a greater responsibility to stay and fight.”

That fight, in Kumar’s work, often happens on the level of the sentence. “I want to think: What is the best story I can write?” he says. “Maybe it’s not as immediate as signing a petition. But what can I do, as a writer, that might stay with someone longer than a news cycle?”

He cites Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: The artist’s Olympian calm is vital to the creative act. In other words, don’t confuse silence with apathy. “You have to stay calm in order to engineer, in the most imaginative way, an art that is effective precisely because it is indirect,” he says. “What’s the story you can tell that opens someone’s eyes? That creates an epiphany?”

Amitava Kumar Credit: Jennifer May

The rise of authoritarian rhetoric globally—in the US, yes, but also in Kumar’s native India, in the UK, Italy, Turkey—troubles him deeply. “We have nothing to envy the US for,” he says. “Everything wrong that the US is doing, India has already done. We’ve built the jails, we’ve changed the constitution, we’ve jailed students without trial. It’s all there.”

And the climate crisis, he adds, will only make things worse. “Borders will become meaningless,” he says. “The waters will rise in the Sundarbans and in Miami. The displacement will be enormous. And all of these small, insular, unimaginative immigration policies we’re pursuing now? They’ll be revealed for what they are: Temporary walls against a tidal wave.”

It’s a dark forecast, but not without its moments of light. Kumar finds hope in his students. In his children. In his continued ability to write. In the possibility that a story might create a crack in the wall of someone’s certainty. “Our ethic,” he says, “has to be one of neighborliness. Not just to the person next door, but to the person in Bangladesh who grows your tea, or the nurse from the Philippines who will care for you when you’re sick. That’s the only way we move forward.”

Before we sign off, I ask Kumar if he imagines a particular reader when he writes. “Someone who doesn’t yet know they need to hear this story,” he says.

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