Askaripour is a bestselling author. His first novel, , takes on racism in corporate America with humor and wit. Most recently, he was named as a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” prize.
is his second novel. he New York City subway, 2019. An older man walks on along with a woman I assume to be his wife.
He turns to her, asks where she’d like to sit. Awaiting her answer, he extends his arm, releases his finger, and levels it directly at my stomach, indicating that the space I occupy doesn’t contain a presence, but an absence. Seated and confused, I’d wondered if the man saw me, or if, by some strange, supernatural alchemy, I was literally see-through to his eyes.
A feeling of invisibility clung to me, a second second skin of sweat, for that entire day. This feeling, of being unseen, is not rare or special. It is one that many experience every second of every day.
Foreign to none, including my family. It is a feeling that my grandmother and grandfather, Jamaican immigrants, experienced in their respective jobs of domestic and janitor. It is a feeling that my mother, a Jamaican immigrant, and my father, an Iranian immigrant, lived as they came to this country, took up the titles of “nurse” and “courier,” and, as the story of those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” goes, entered an endless river called striving.
Those who swim and doggy paddle in that river—never float or serenely backstroke—in an attempt to not drown, are.
