In Devi S Laskar’s devastating, poetic debut about racism in Trump’s America, a south Asian woman lies on the ground in her suburban driveway, bleeding from a gunshot wound. Her life flashes before her eyes in muddled, often conflicting fragmentary snatches, as she tries to understand the question, where are you really from? Because if this is the end, and she is dying, that must be where she will go back to.
She is American, a child of Bengali immigrants, and much of her life has been about the precariousness of that question: where are you from? No, no. Where are you really from? Where are your parents from? Her children are American. She is married to an American, a white man, who spends much of the novel absent, as he travels internationally for his work, and remains in the dark about the amount of racism his wife and children are experiencing. No names are given, but we learn that Middle Daughter is being bullied, and we watch as the acts intensify before turning violent. We get an insight into the Mother’s own sense of identity as she remembers her childhood obsession with Barbie and her ensuing body image issues.
We learn about the Mother’s career as a crime reporter, now demoted to obituaries; the assumptions made about her because of the colour of her skin, ranging from facile to violent; the utter contempt with which she is treated in most aspects of her life. It paints a horrifying picture of the realities of the American dream if you’re from an immigrant background.
And there she is, crumpled on the ground. The present moment is described in ambient, almost blackly comic fragments, as the police search her invasively, looking for ID and crack jokes with emergency service dispatchers. They make generalisations about her life, her identity, her body, as they begin to understand what has come to pass.
This is a powerfully written novel, especially in the way it moves around in time to create a perpetual loop. Each ampersand that breaks up the sections contributes to the onward thrust, moving into a new memory, and each memory tells us about the underbelly of racism in America, how it festers in suburbia. Laskar never seems to polemicise; instead she gravely turns traumatic memories into fragments of poetry, floating in the ether, fighting for survival.
• The Atlas of Reds and Blues is published Fleet (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
