For today’s racialized writers, uplift is a hard sell. There are real dangers to celebrating upward mobility, the kind that involves sacrifice, hard work, and investing in the next generation. It’s not that these narratives are implausible but that they are ideologically charged: one person or group’s success can be weaponized against others. Too much optimism gets in the way of denunciations of racism and xenophobia; too much emphasis on personal merit plays into the hands of right-wing ideologues who would rather blame people for their circumstances than tackle structural barriers.
So it’s no surprise, perhaps, that much contemporary literature about immigration tends toward melancholy and tragedy. Souvankham Thammavongsa’s collection How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize, details the lives of Laotian refugees in Canada. Most of the stories conclude on notes of disappointment. Wajdi Mouawad has examined ties between Lebanon and Quebec; his play Incendies (Scorched, in English) was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film by Denis Villeneuve, of Dune fame, in 2010. Incendies’ unveiling of a family’s history during the Lebanese Civil War is so tragic that it borrows plot points from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, incest and all. Even more-upbeat work, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 hit, Americanah, usually hedges its bets: Adichie juxtaposes one Nigerian’s relative mobility in the United States with another’s deportation from the United Kingdom.
