Becoming American
   Edited by Meri Nana'Ama Danquah
  2000 Hyperion
    ISBN: 078686589X


Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women from all over the world telling their stories & their discoveries about what it is to be an American.

Having emigrated to America at the age of 22 & felt myself in a buoyancy of rebirth, of re-forming myself in the New World yet struggling with the stereotype cast on me of the land of my birth by Americans, I was fascinated to find out how other women of other cultural stocks came to America, came to become Americans.

I arrived in Chicago from London during the 1960s, without family nearby. This was an adventure for which being adopted & boarding school, prepared me well -- I was curious as to how other women, who arrived under the auspices of family & friends, would view their New World.

Well, I was a bit put off by how almost everywoman sounds as if she's whining at the loss of something she'd never had. As if coming to this land was a default (most arrived as children) rather than a delirious desire, as it was for me. Nonetheless, I read on, fascinated by each woman's unique story -- until I hit the motherlode in their essays where they begin to spin their broken straws into the golden fiber of their new lives.

I found it fascinating what women from the East & from Africa thought important & what women from the Old World thought vital to their welfare. Some women ached in exactly the same way I had -- wanting so much to be the daughter of which our mothers would have been proud. It's such a pity our mothers didn't know about ugly ducklings!

Some women seemed caught up in a haphazard misplacement of relatives & ended up no freer than they'd been “back home” -- until they'd matured & started living on their own -- something unheard of in the land of their birth.

Some women came from a much slower way of life & were whirled up into the torrent that is American urban life, while others, like me, were coming from major cities & had other fears & worries -- societies bound by traditions & rigid classes.

How each woman envisions America before she gets here is a revelation. Let's play a game: What 3 things would you think of as intrinsically American? When Londoners heard I was heading for Chicago they warned me about becoming a gangster's moll, being run over by stampeding steer or lost in a swamp(I have no idea where that one came from.) I chose The Windy City because I way too ugly for Los Angeles & I envision New England far too close to the constraints I was escaping! Chicago seemed to be the heart of America -- & it was!

Women see nationhood from the other side of the looking glass to men, & these two dozen contributors from countries as far apart as Argentina & Korea, Palestine & South Africa, Germany & Egypt, Puerto Rico & Japan, Panama & Ireland, Haiti & England, Burundi/Rwanda & Russia, China & Ghana, Chile, India & Jamaica -- weave the stories of their present through the warp of their pasts.

Each story speaks to their sense of isolation & loss, of horrific tales of racial intolerance as practised by teachers & school mates alike, long before this politically correct era. Some of these women were not only the first girl that came from the land of her birth to attend a school, they were also the only non-white girls. Then too, mother tongues were different as well as standards of politeness & respect.

When I think of it, I had it pretty easy! All on my own with no one to answer to & no one to embarrass or shame.

Do not look for patriotism in the pages of Becoming American -- those sorts of things don't matter to women nearly as much as which identity will we be expected to wear in which place in our life: our families' homes & churches; our schools & our parents' relatives from the Old Country. Becoming American for all these women was an awakening & an adventure as well as a crisis in identity, in finding their own place in this tapestry we call the United States of America.

That kind of freedom -- to find out who you really are -- is not so self-evident. Certainly girls who emigrate to America & grow into women here must search along strange paths upon which their mothers have not trodden.

Becoming American is an absorbing, serious tea party where 24 women who started from all corners the world & grew to adulthood in America, under Meri Nana'Ama Danquah's able editorship, shared their stories. What of our past must we relinquish & what of America need we assimilate? When do we know we've become American?

Well worth the read! Made me do a lot of thinking, & writing too!

Meri Nana'Ama Danquah, a native of Ghana where her grandfather, Dr. J. B. Danquah, was one of its founding fathers, is the author of Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression. She now lives in Southern California.
(10/28/01)

Rebecca