Mind Picker: Immigrant, Montana

Immigrant, Montana. Those were the words I suddenly heard on the radio. The name of a place. NPR's Liane Hansen said that federal officers had killed a wolf at a ranch near Immigrant, Montana. I was instantly back in Yellowstone with Nina, listening to tapes as we drove through the forest. Her mock fear of bears when she took off her clothes. And the wolves. That morning in the motel, they were only half an hour north of us!

Immigrant, Montana is a strange collage of a book – part memoir, part novel; full of pictures, newspaper clippings, journal musings, footnotes, and a running interior dialogue between a recent immigrant and the imagined Immigration Court judge who might ask him to justify his presence in America (Airports, Your Honor, are the places where immigrants most feel at home. And also most uneasy.) – and while it all just might add up to a perfect encapsulation of author (and Professor of English at Vassar College) Amitava Kumar's own immigration story, it did little for me: I was reached neither emotionally or intellectually by this narrative; the mind often drifted. Not my cuppa, but it might well win awards. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes might not be in their final forms.)

In Daughter of Earth, Smedley transcribed from her life...Her book is neither a memoir nor simply a novel. And when I read it, I thought Smedley offered us a model for writing.

As the book opens in 1990, Kailash is recently arrived from his birth country of India as a grad student at a NYC university. He notes that his friends have given him the nickname “Kalashnikov”, which some then shorten into AK-47, or AK (the author's own initials), or even simply 47; through the course of the book no one calls him anything but Kailash, but this bit (and that footnote about Agnes Smedley) makes clear that Kailash is Kumar; this narrative a transcription from life. Kailash is a virgin (and if self-abuse were to be omitted from the reckoning, pure of body and heart), and just as he likes to inflame the imaginations of the schoolchildren back home who might read his telegrams for his illiterate grandmother with details of America's bounteousness (mentioning cooking gas that flows through the pipes like water or the fact that even garbagemen have their own trucks), Kailash regards the young women around him as further proof of the delights that are available for the plucking. This book has been released in India as The Lovers, so the three women who form the spine of Kailash's time in grad school seem more than incidental to his story: Jennifer is Kailash's first lover, and while older, she appears distant and disappointed in what he is unable to give emotionally; Nina is an affectionate and adventurous lover, and although she is a constant teller of small untruths, it is Kailash's own infidelities that doom the relationship; and Cai Yan is Kailash's equal in every way, and where her studies will take her India, Kailash is encouraged to pursue his own thesis with a trip to Cai Yan's native China. If this series of relationships is meant to mirror an immigrant's shifting allegiance to America, it is perhaps significant that when Kailash finally becomes a US citizen decades later, he remains unmarried.

As far as I was concerned, immigration was the original sin. Someone owed me something. This half-expressed thought found a home in my heart. It provided me an exaggerated sense of identity, and granted me permission to do anything I wanted. I'm not trying to justify anything; I only intend to explain.

Immigrant, Montana is about much more than Kailash's romances, though: In his studies, Kailash's mentor and thesis advisor is Ehsaan Ali, a Pakistani political scholar (modeled after Eqbal Ahmad); a lifelong activist whose tales involve plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger in order to end the Vietnam War, accidentally inciting the Weathermen to blow up the statue of a policeman at Chicago's Haymarket Square, and eventually, writing articles and making videos that warned, pre-9/11, that American intervention in Afghanistan would eventually come home to roost. Kailash and Ehsaan have many politico-philosophical discussions, particularly about Marxists and other radicals, and in his role as mentor, Ehsaan directs his student to what he should be reading, including Smedley and W. G. Sebald.

I had left home, and the immensity of that departure sought recognition in my new life. I think that was the main thing. What I was learning in America was new and illuminating but it became valuable only when it was linked to my past.

This is not a typical immigrant story: Kailash never wraps himself in the flag and even his studies – funded by the Ford Foundation – don't really concern American interests. That's probably a pretty common phenomena – looking for opportunities in the US doesn't necessarily equal embracing it as home; even if one stays for decades – and it seems of particular note that while the title town of “Immigrant, Montana” doesn't actually exist, there is an Emigrant, Montana. As I started with, this melding of fact and fiction, this collage of forms and media, might very well perfectly capture Kumar's experience as an emigrant from India, but it read to me as a disjointed series of anecdotes; a scrapbook of ideas that never truly engaged me. Again, it might win awards.

I read this book because Maclean's Magazine listed it in the article, "The 15 books you should read this summer", calling it, "compulsively readable" and "at once a tale of contemporary immigration and a sexual-awakening story". I also read it because I recognised the title as an ARC that had been sent to the store; why wouldn't I be interested? Yet, after not getting much out of this read, and not getting much out of scant other reviews since it hasn't even been released yet, I was gratified to read in Kirkus Reviews:

Kumar, though, never quite settles into a comfortable emotional mode—the book is sometimes academically stiff, sometimes pleading (he often delivers asides to “Your Honor,” as if his identity were on trial). As an evocation of the confusions of global disconnection, it’s an effective strategy but not always a narratively compelling one.