Performing Unwritten Family Histories of Migration and Displacement
(l-r) Mai Moua Thao, Skye Reddy, and Kalala Kiwanuka-Woernle perform in Reasons for Moving at the Southern Theater. Directed by Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento, the performers each present the story of their personal migration experience.
Throughout my childhood, family stories have always been mentioned in passing. I’d pick up fragments of my grandparents’ histories from things they and their siblings said, and piece them together into what I thought was the whole story. I wasn’t particularly interested in participating in my cultures when I was younger, whether in performing rituals, or in learning about where we came from.
My parents are of two different South Asian ethnicities, and I grew up with our everyday practices being an amalgamation of the two. I didn’t really want to be either. I wanted to be modern, because to be modern was to be American, and to be American was to be understood by my friends and peers.
It took me a long time to realize that there were things I didn’t know. As a child I was always a receiver of stories. It was only in college that I realized, through writing and performance, that I could be a giver of stories, too.
When I tried to tell my family’s stories, I began to see the gaps in the information I knew. Some were the most basic details: When did my grandfather leave Rangoon? Why was his family there in the first place? Did they leave by boat? How long did it take to go from Rangoon to Chittagong? Where did they sleep during their travels?
I knew about the history of colonization in South Asia — the event that was the Partition of British India (1947) into India, West Pakistan, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), along religious lines. It was only in my adulthood that I learned to connect the history I had been taught with the people I knew.
My Bengali grandparents were born in undivided, pre- independence India. Culturally, their style of preparing food, the words they used to describe certain things, or the way my grandmother wore her sarees belongs to Hindu people from East Bengal. Today, their hometowns are in Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country. They are from places that no longer exist, practicing cultures that no longer have a place.
When I was younger, I never thought to ask them what that felt like. Now, I think about it all the time.
South Asian families like mine have little written history to trace our ancestors’ journeys — we are very reliant on oral recollections. Even on the rare occasion that I find written records of other South Asian families online, they have little in common with the meanderings of my predecessors. There is no single South Asian social history to reference.
So I ask my mom about her parents’ lives: What were their parents doing in “X place” when they were born? Why were they so old? So young? And then what happened?
I’ve learned that my family was at times much larger. I would never have known that there were more siblings in my grandparents’ generation, or that people I knew all through my childhood had lost their own children. We don’t seem to talk about the dead very much.
At a family wedding last year, multiple relatives on my father’s side told me the same story about the flooding of their ancestral village in the 1800s. There’s something fascinating about hearing the same story with different details remembered and passed down to branches of the same family.
I’ve learned there is more to family history that is unsaid. I’ve started to exhaust the easy questions. I accept that many of my questions are unanswerable — information that is lost to time. The best I can do is fill them in with my imagination. That way, they become my stories, too.
southerntheater.org/shows/reasons-for-moving
In Chile, a Group of Women Embroider to Keep Memory Alive
The Bordadoras have influenced my thoughts on the politics of memory, the power of textile art, and the significance of the space that a group of people gathered together creates.
BOOK & ARTS: My “Sea of Grass” Tour at Mia
As the book, “Sea of Grass,” leaves readers with a new consciousness of today’s environmental struggles, the tour inspired by the book at the Mia is a reminder that anxiety about our earth’s future is nothing new.
Guided Cultural Tours Foster Community Connections
Visiting Somali culture in Minneapolis, a tour with the Minnesota Humanities Center.
Learning the History of “The Art Spy” Rose Valland
Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) offers several “Inspired by Books” tours. I attended two tours in July related to Michelle Young’s non-fiction book “The Art Spy,” which tells the story of the remarkable work of little-known heroine Rose Valland, a Paris museum employee who quietly kept track of the significant pilfering of valuable art by German for four years, noted where it was going with her photographic memory, and spent decades after the war helping to recover it.
New Wadaag Commons Affordable Housing Community Opens With Public Art
A $500,000 investment was made in permanent public art that is integrated directly into the new Wadaag Housing development as a defining element of the space. The work features Somali, East African, Muslim-identifying, and women artists whose cultures shape the neighborhood.
Book & Art: Imagery and Reflections From Germany’s Transformation Under Hitler
This is the first of several “Books & Arts” compilations we can offer, thanks to underwriting from the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Travel through the exhibition about German art during the time of Hitler’s rise and fall — accompanied by parts of a related book, “In the Garden of Beasts.”
For 2025 coverage, Minnesota Women’s Press earned a community leadership award, three photography awards, and four editorial awards, including for coverage of social issues and for our Spring 2025 “Know Your Rights” special section supported by Unidos MN. Our publisher was named Journalist of the Year by Violence Free Minnesota for gender-based violence coverage.
