Sunday, November 3, 2024
2pm
At Thoreau Farm and online.
FREE. Registration required.
Even when we leave them, our cities never leave us. After her Dutch mother’s death, Sorayya Khan confronts her grief by revisiting their relationship, her parents’ lives, and her own Pakistani-Dutch heritage in a multicultural memoir that unfolds over seven cities and three continents. We Take Our Cities with Us ushers us from Khan’s childhood independence forged at her grandparents’ home in Lahore; to her adolescence in Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad; to Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, where Khan finds her footing as the mother of young, brown sons in post-9/11 America; to her birthplace, Vienna, where her parents die; and finally to Amsterdam and Maastricht, the cities of her mother’s conflicted youth. In Khan’s gripping telling of her immigrant experience, she shows us what it is to raise children and lose parents in worlds other than your own. Drawing on family history, geopolitics, and art in this stunning story of loss, identity, and rediscovery, Khan beautifully illuminates the complexities of our evolving global world and its most important constant: love.
Sorayya Khan is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir, and the novels Noor, Five Queen’s Road, and City of Spies, which received the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair. Her latest work can be read in Lit Hub, Guernica, Longreads, The Rumpus, Oldster, and Journal of Narrative Politics. She is the recipient of various grants, most recently from the American Institute of Indonesian Studies to support her current writing project. The daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, she was born in Europe, grew up in Pakistan, and now lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is currently a Visiting Critic at Cornell University. Find her at www.sorayyakhan.com.