Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares by Aarti Namdev Shahani

Book Review by Ankita Rathour

In July 2021 ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) began dropping off immigrants and refugees at bus stops and local airports in rural Louisiana. In their sudden hypervisibility, these migrants emerged from their lives of shadows, abandoned in the middle of nowhere without any concern for their wellbeing in an inhospitable country that spoke a language most of them didn’t understand. 

Precarity of such immigrant lives forms the base of Aarti Shahani’s memoir Here We Are. Shahani is an award-winning journalist who works for NPR as a correspondent when she is not “chasing the skeletons in [her] family’s closet,” (2). Hers is an intimate, humorous, sometimes frustrating, yet powerful first book. Multiple traumas led the author’s parents, Namdev and Nina Shahani, to migrate to America: the India-Pakistan partition, Nina’s abusive mother-in-law, and a resilient though naïve optimism to find a better life for their children, among others. Despite walking the line and obtaining permanent residency, Namdev Shahani, a filmwalla (film distributor), is imprisoned on charges of conducting business with a Colombian cartel. Shahani was innocent, but he and his family, like many other immigrants, did not know their way around a foreign criminal justice system. The case “destroyed [Namdev Shahani’s] career, his reputation, and his will to live” (5). 

Set in six acts, Here We Are sprawls across decades and continents humanizing immigrants and bringing to light the myriad ways an immigrant life is susceptible to deportation, and in some cases, imprisonment in America. The memoir begins by providing reasons “so many people from far away risk everything to come to United States” (9), exploring human vulnerability and desperation of people largely unknown to typical Americans. Here We Are does an excellent job in pushing immigrant narratives to the center while simultaneously connecting them to other American realties—racism, police brutality, and a dehumanizing justice system. Shahani astutely explores the pangs and pleasures of immigrant lives through her family’s story, a grueling battle with the criminal justice system in what they thought to be their home: The United States. A bildungsroman, Here We Are also captures Aarti’s transformation from a child into a fiery journalist, speaking truth to power. 

Here We Are, though, is anything but a tragedy. It is packed with humor, Bollywood-style love, family lore, quirks of a multiethnic community, people-led activism, hope, despair, Indian wisdom, and most importantly, feminist agency. In this story, women take charge of their undocumented identity and carve a solidly unified community out of it. The author blends humorous one-liners and dramatic moments with social realism that can at times be overwhelming, but nevertheless keeps a reader engaged until the end. 

The book complicates America by revealing its long and ongoing migrant history, history that made this country what it is today. It also disrupts and critiques American bureaucracy, but without demonizing it. Similarly, the memoir swiftly critiques South Asia, reminding us that native land could be as frustrating as a foreign land. It reminds us, too, that people, irrespective of their visa statuses, deserve fair treatment. The memoir is subversive as it locates various subaltern identities and provides one with an understanding of America as experienced by immigrants who “have to be invisible” (29).

Ankita Rathour is a Ph.D. student at Louisiana State University. Her dissertation theorizes postcolonial dead girl trope in Bollywood crime films and Indian Anglophone crime fiction. She prioritizes writing and teaching about marginalized communities, non-western cinema, immigration, and postcolonial gender issues. Her essays, and feminist criticism have been published in Feminism in India, Fair Observer, Women’s Web, and High on Films to name a few. She lives in New Orleans.