a memory called empire by arkady martine

I’ve never had any illusions about being unique in this. The conflicts of displacement and (un)belongingness are still open and devastatingly familiar to many immigrants today. I felt seen in ways I found difficult to explain a few years ago, when I read this book for the first time. This is a feeling I would come to know, as a post-colonial immigrant student, as a hard and brutal thing: the engulfing sense of being somehow diminished, of being rendered abruptly unreal, disconnected, and-in some inconsolable way- depersonalized.

These few sentences handed me a vocabulary for a hitherto inexpressible private reality: standing “in the midst of the sharp chatter of ambitious young people” (128) who look nothing like me, who speak effortlessly in a language that was not native to me and was therefore still twisting my tongue into spirals, and being aware, to an almost abject degree, of the incalculable distance that separated me from them. I was immediately struck by a powerful sense of recognition. And yet it wormed into her every time she bit her tongue, every time she didn’t know a word or the precise connotations of a phrase.” (128) Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it, she knew that. It made her jealous in a way she recognized as childish: the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen. “She could follow about half of the allusions and quotations that slipped in and out of their speech. In the scene, the protagonist Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the (tenuously) independent Lsel station to the empire of Teixcalaan, is introduced by her cultural liaison to a crowd of Teixcalaanli literati during an imperial banquet: There is a scene near the beginning of A Memory Called Empire that I remember reading with so much clarity.

A memory called empire by arkady martine