Review: This Is One Way to Dance by Sejal Shah

Review by Donna Miscolta

This Is One Way to Dance
Sejal Shah
University of Georgia Press, June 2020.
$22.95; 200 pp.
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5723-2

What does a group of essays, together and separately, say to the reader? What do we learn about the author, her world view, how she was shaped and by what forces? How does this information enlarge our own world view? These were the questions on my mind as I read Sejal Shah’s illuminating essays in her beautifully named book This Is One Way to Dance, a title that reminds us of the multiplicity of ways to be in the world.

The blending and hybridity of various themes in the essays reflect the style Shah chooses to write in—a style that rejects the notion of fixed genres. She opens with a poem “Prelude” that functions just as the title indicates, a curtain-raiser to the ideas and images the book will explore:

pppppp…language fractures…
pppppp…Indian, American, and girl
ppppppThe body, bones, raced, erased…
pppppp…a door
pppppp…widening…
pppppp…dance

These themes crisscross each other and percolate through the layers of these chronologically arranged essays.

Shah’s embrace of the lyric essay—a form that allows her to use her early training and natural instincts as a poet—and its appearance alongside the narrative essay gives the book the intimacy and intelligence of a trusted friend. A friend that says let me tell you about myself, my evolution from girl to woman, in which I affirm my Americanness, my Indianness, my Self.

It is a self that is declared beyond the context of her Indian roots and American upbringing. The expectations placed upon her because of what she looks like inspires her to tell her readers up front in a piece called “Skin” that “this is yet another story not about India.” Not that she owes us an explanation. It’s rather an admonishment that the expectation should exist at all.

And yet, they’re there, the stereotypes of who she is—skin, hair, eyes—and what she can be to and for them—an exotic hook-up, partner, bearer of brown children. In “Skin,” Shah uses repetition of language to convey the categorizations she is inevitably assigned:

ppppppThis is what the white boys say…
ppppppThis is what the black boys say…
ppppppThis is what the Asian boys say…

However, Shah points out that just as the simple lines of the ranch house belie its hidden spaces, her straightforwardness belies a more complicated person, one who views houses as places to hide, “to be visible and legible only to yourself.”

Identity is one of the themes of the book and one of the questions at the heart of her essay “Who’s Indian?”  Where are you from? she is asked. It’s a question that really asks, What are you? It’s a question directed frequently at people of color. Shah tells us that her resistance to the question, to having to explain her blend of language, culture, and place, is what makes her story best told outside the limits of a fixed or defined genre.

A few essays later in “Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib,” Shah provides sweet evidence of a childhood growing up with Gujarati girls like herself in their Rochester, New York neighborhood—reading Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and Anne of Green Gables books; adding previously unknown colors of “kelly green” and “strawberry blonde” to their vocabulary; hanging with the “Esprit-wearing white kids.” This existence occupied their weekdays. Their weekends were reserved for their “secret Indian lives.” Shah imagines herself and her friends in her own version of a girl-centered book series, one featuring Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, and Tib whose adventures might be titled “The Gujarati Girls Go to (Hindu Heritage Summer) Camp” or “The Mystery of the Prasaad Plate (A Gujarati Girls Mystery)”. Shah writes, “My friends laugh now about how I grew up, how we grew up. We were more Indian once, I know this. We were something else once.” It’s a lovely, nostalgic observation. And yet, there was also this enigma, which lay beneath the comfort and assurance of their weekend Indian lives:

ppppppWho had the words to talk about that other mystery: how to be American, how not to be
ppppppAmerican?

 Travel seems to have been one strategy for answering these questions. “I think many of us travel for the same reason—to feel the edges of ourselves simultaneously sharpened and blurred.” We follow Shah to Sicily, where she didn’t realize she would

pppppp…be drawn to other Indians in Italy nor that we might mutually wonder about each other’s
ppppppstories of emigration of immigration, and any link we might have beyond some shared sense of
pppppphaving left some place.

The sharpening and blurring of edges of travel can be as much about loss as about enrichment. Shah takes us to Amherst, New York City, and Decorah, Iowa for college, teaching jobs, and fellowships, and to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada for Burning Man. There she tests her survival skills, including the radical self-reliance that is one of the principles of the festival, and discovers her real purpose for having gone ill-prepared, knowing no one, and ingesting hallucinogens—to lose herself.

To her surprise and maybe the slightest disappointment, she returns to Rochester, where she was born and grew up. After eighteen years away, teaching, writing, and seeking herself, the loss of a job sends her back to family, raising the question for her: Where did I want to be? She notes that her parents and brother do not live in the same place in which they were born, her father and brother having been born in India, her mother in Kenya. There is a kind of symmetry or equilibrium in her return, particularly when viewed in the context of a significant and recurring theme of the book – weddings. These are Indian weddings, colorful with saris, and marked by ritual and tradition and full of dancing. Weddings connect her to her community and her heritage. Dancing is the language she uses to express herself without explanation, a partial answer to the question she poses to herself: how do you move in a body often viewed as other?

Weddings are where “the dance floor welcomed everyone,” and where “separate cultures—Indian and American . . . coexisted, even merged.”  But beyond the ritual and color and dancing, there is a profound and immense truth for Shah.

ppppppLife is not about colors and themes or even saris. I know this now, but still weddings astonish me:
ppppppthe threshold, the intention, the cusp, the crucible, the gathering, the hope.

The book, which begins and ends with a wedding, spans two decades, each essay marked with the year it was written. In several essays, two different years appear, the second indicating the year the essay was revised. Shah’s desire to clarify, reflect upon, or amend original thoughts contribute to the sense of continuity in this collection. Questions such as Where are you from? that began in her youth have reached some kind of resolution years later. We see Shah’s journey as an evolution of her thinking of who she is and where she fits, of what’s important to her, of how she reconciles her Americanness and her Indianness, how she asserts this self to herself. And to us, the reader.

Shah’s book is a necessary and absorbing look into what it means to be this particular woman, this particular writer, at a particular time in America. As we see the uniqueness of her, we also see the experiences of many—of being brown in America. In a time when immigrants are blocked from entering the country by racist, scapegoating policies, This Is One Way to Dance reminds us of the richness immigrants and their offspring bring.

Donna Miscolta’s third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories is due out from Jaded Ibis Press in Fall 2020. Her story collection Hola and Goodbye, winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and published by Carolina Wren Press (2016), won an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction. She’s also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced (2011). She has written book reviews for the Seattle Review of Books, Hypertext Magazine, and International Examiner. Find her at donnamiscolta.com.