June 9, 2022

Everywhere Radio: Neema Avashia

Neema Avashia

On this episode of Everywhere Radio, we talk with Neema Avashia, author of “Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place,” about her memoir, identity, finding your people, and growing up in West Virginia. This interview was first recorded at Rural Assembly Everywhere, a virtual gathering of the Rural Assembly in May 2022. Avashia is interviewed by Skylar Baker-Jordan, Contributing Editor for Community Engagement at 100 Days in Appalachia. 

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Episode Transcript

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Hello, friends. Welcome to a special edition of Everywhere Radio. Everywhere Radio is a production of The Rural Assembly, and I’m your host, Whitney Kimball Coe. Usually, each episode I spotlight the good, scrappy, joyful ways, rural people and their allies are building a more inclusive nation. But this week I’m doing something a little bit different. This week, I’m highlighting a conversation that was featured at Rural Assembly Everywhere a few weeks ago, between two writers. Skylar Baker-Jordan and Neema Avashia. Skylar, and Neema talk about Neema’s new book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place. There are some incredibly funny and poignant moments in this conversation, and I hope you love it as much as I do. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Hello, everybody. My name is Skylar Baker-Jordan, and today I am very excited to be joined by author Neema Avashia. She is the author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place. It’s out from West Virginia University press, if I’m correct, and it is a fantastic read. Some of you will have read my review of it in the Daily Yonder, but for those of you who don’t, we have a real treat in store for you today because I am very excited to introduce Neema. Welcome. 

Neema Avashia: 

Thank you so much for having me Skylar. It’s so good to be here with you. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

It’s great to have you here. I was absolutely thrilled when Whitney contacted me and asked if I would like to be in conversation with you today because, in case it didn’t come through in my review, I absolutely love, love, love this book. It is, I think, one of the most important and timely books of the year. I think that it puts a human and accurate face on Appalachia, which is not something that we often get. We are often stereotyped. And not in a very correct way. And so this book really does, I think, a great job of correcting the record. After having said that, though, I do want to start by reading a small paragraph, and then having you respond to it because this paragraph really summed it up for me. All right. You were talking about visiting the state parks in West Virginia with your, correct me if I say this wrong, [inaudible 00:02:30] relations, your inherited family, as you call them. And you write beautifully, I think, about the love of place that is so true to so many Appalachians. 

And I just quote here, “Through these trips, I grew to love the wild and wonderful aspects of West Virginia, even as I struggled with the religious and racial elements. Its natural beauty settled into my sensory memory right next to the Hindu Puja. West Virginia is the only home I know, though it is not a home that always loves me back.” Neema, how does it feel to love a place that doesn’t always love you back? 

Neema Avashia: 

I think that’s probably a feeling that is very familiar for a lot of queer people in Appalachia. And not just in Appalachia, but really in 35 states in the United States right now, as we’re seeing anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ and anti-bipoc legislation has come down in state houses all over the country. I wish that was an experience that was only mine, but I actually think it’s shared by increasingly more and more people, who feel like they’re really grounded in place and then the people who make up that place for them, but that the sort of policy narrative around those places has become more and more exclusive of their identities. And I think it’s really hard, I think. It makes you feel this very complex way of like, “I love this place and I can’t imagine how this place has come to want and will such harm on me and on people like me.” 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

It is a very interesting dynamic, I think, because you see so much increased social acceptance throughout the country. And that includes places like West Virginia and Kentucky. I’ve got the Kentucky flag right behind me. It’s my home state. I love it. And I can experience it just on the ground, but you also see it reflected in polling, but like you said, in policy, it seems to be almost going backwards. 

Neema Avashia: 

Yeah. And I think there is this interesting tension of, so you and I know each other, and we have a relationship with each other, and I accept who you are as an individual. But because that policy doesn’t necessarily land on me the way it lands on you, I don’t feel an impetus to fight back against it. I think that’s a really hard thing in this country, is that too often… I think we’ve seen this with COVID actually is a really good example of this, where it’s like too often, if it doesn’t directly affect me, I don’t feel urgency about pushing back. I don’t feel urgency about getting loud. I don’t feel urgency about advocating in the opposite direction. And so then the voices that end up dominating the policy narrative are the angriest voices. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Do you think that the sort of economic stagnation, oppression of Appalachia has a lot to do with that sort of feeling of fatalistic helplessness? 

Neema Avashia: 

I think it’s probably hard for a lot of people to believe that their voices matter in some way, because so much of the policy narrative has excluded them also, and hasn’t met their needs, and hasn’t been responsive to their reality. So I do think there’s a way in which also… I think about the West Virginia legislature and the things that they seem to prioritize relative to what people care about in the place, right? Like the roads in West Virginia right now are a disaster, but what are they fighting about in the legislature until midnight on the last night of session? They’re fighting about critical race theory. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Yeah. 

Neema Avashia: 

And there’s this massive disconnect between the needs of the people and what the policy makers are invested in. And so I think if you feel that continually, if you just feel like, “There’s no response to my needs,” then yeah, how do you believe that you saying anything is going to make a difference? You can’t get your pothole filled. So the day to day of your lived reality, you’re not getting your needs met, so that’s not happening. It’s hard to believe, I think, that you have urgency or that your voice matters because, because what’s happening, doesn’t reflect your lived experiences. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Yeah. I think that’s a really good point. And I think that a lot of the time people outside of the region think that Appalachia isn’t their concern, and they use it to sort of project the… And I think you really talk about this in your book, with just the way that people reacted to you outside of the region, when you tell them where you’re from. And it kind of reminded me of, are you familiar with the comedian, Dulcé Sloan? 

Neema Avashia: 

Mm-hmm. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

It reminded me of this bit she does where people in New York are saying, “You must be so glad to be out of the south. It’s so racist down there.” And she said, “What part of the south? You mean the part that starts at Canada and ends up Mexico?” And I feel like people inside of Appalachia, and maybe you will disagree with this, maybe not, have internalized that in a way. Do you think that there’s a lot of, I don’t want to say internalized helplessness or internalized hatred of the region. For example, I know that I left the region. In part, I spent more than a decade trying to run away from the mantle of Appalachian. It didn’t sort of gel with the version of myself. I thought that I saw, and it was only much later into my 30s that I realized, “Actually I can be all of these things at once.” 

Neema Avashia: 

Right. So I think that the filmmaker, Ashley York, I don’t know if you’ve seen her documentary Hill Billy. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

No, not yet. I really want to watch it though. 

Neema Avashia: 

Everybody should watch it. It’s phenomenal. And I think that something that she sort of lays out in that documentary is this idea that the stereotypes that exist about Appalachia exists for our purpose. They exist because if you dehumanize people, then it makes it easier to do violence to them, right? And that violence can be like the violence that happened in a place like Germany during the Holocaust, but it can also be environmental violence. It can be sort of like the destruction of a natural world. It can be the stripping of resources from a place. And so I think that that documentary really helped me to sort of think a little bit differently about why people feel the way they do, and why their relationships end up being so complicated, because it is like very much Appalachian people are dehumanized in the narrative. I think that J. D. Vance’s book actually, in a really intense way, dehumanize the people of Appalachia. When he wrote about people as stereotypes or as tropes, he took away their humanity, right? And so what does it feel like when you’re from a place and what does it feel like to be dehumanized? What does it feel like to experience that the narrative about you and about the region that you’re from is that like, you’re not full people. You’re flat, you don’t have nuance. You’re not given complexity. You’re just, “Oh, those people who vote against their interests. They’re hopeless.” When that’s done to you, I think it really messes up your self perception, and it can. It doesn’t for some people. 

Some people are able to resist it, but I think it can really mess up your self perception. I think it can mess up your perception of a place. I think it’s really exhausting and difficult to constantly have that narrative of dehumanization push down on you. And either take parts of it on or feel like I have to reject all of this by leaving. And that sometimes feels like the choices that people are pushed into. I’m either going to accept it, or I’m going to walk away completely. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

What I want to know is, how do people outside of the region react when you tell them that, “Yes, I am from West Virginia. Yes, I am Appalachian.” Do they believe you? Do they know that there’s this significant Indian community?” 

Neema Avashia: 

So it’s interesting. People don’t know. Initially, they don’t believe me, and then they believe me because I’m like, “Well, there’s no reason I would lie to you about this.” 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Right. 

Neema Avashia: 

But they don’t know. And then their immediate response is, “Wow, that must have been really hard,” which in parts it was. But this is, again, a really interesting place where we’re not talking about small numbers of people, right? In the late 60s, after the passage of the Hart–Celler Act, there was a really specific focus on recruiting immigrants from Egypt who were high skilled workers. And those folks, when they were coming to United States, the places they were finding work were places where American, high skilled workers wouldn’t go. So that’s either rural areas or deeply urban areas, but not really anywhere else. And so there were Indian physicians in Appalachia. There are Filipino physicians in Appalachia. Not in small numbers. But it is an interesting thing where it’s kind of erased from the Donna narrative. I was listening to [inaudible 00:11:25] yesterday and they had Professor Queer Billy on, [inaudible 00:11:29] Anton on there. And she said this phrase that I thought was so striking. She called it symbolic annihilation, right? Which is this idea that if you are erased from the narrative, you don’t exist. And I think that that is what has happened to black and brown people, and queer people in Appalachia for a really long time, which is, we get erased from the dominant narrative. And then as individuals, we’re kind of looking and we’re like, “Well, if we don’t exist, what am I? If you don’t think I exist, it’s kind of existential, right? I’m here, but you don’t believe I’m here, and so what does that mean for me?” 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

We’ll be right back after this from The Daily Yonder. 

Xandr Brown: 

Hi, I’m Xander Brown with The Daily Yonder. Check out the Yonder report, a new weekly podcast rounding up the latest rule news, produced by The Daily Yonder and Public News Service. You can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And now, back to Everywhere Radio. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

It’s interesting, we’re talking about Appalachia and yet we’re both people who have left. Well, I’ve come back since then, but I left. I went and spent seven, eight years in Chicago. You dig deep into your upbringing in rural America and specifically in Appalachia yet you also fled to the big city. Why, is my first question? And then I’ll follow up with a more in depth question. 

Neema Avashia: 

Yeah. The why is pretty straightforward. The why is, no adult in my life were telling me that staying was an option. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Yeah. 

Neema Avashia: 

Not teachers, not parents, not neighbors. Nobody presented it as an option. By the time I was graduating from high school, the Chemical Valley, which just the area where I grew up, it was really falling apart. The writing was on the wall. Jobs were just leaving, leaving, leaving, everything was shutting down. And I think the narrative was, “There’s no work here. You’ve got to go.” And I think a lot about what would it have looked like if someone said, “You can stay. 

Here are ways that you can stay.” I didn’t have the vision to see that for myself. I have profound respect for young people who are in Appalachia right now who can see that for themselves. I didn’t have it. I didn’t know how to see that. And so I left, and I think I’ve carried a lot of guilt about the leaving. And then I had a really interesting conversation with someone of a few months ago, who said, “What are you talking about? Leaving is the quintessentially Appalachian thing to do. It makes you Appalachian in a way. That’s what we do.” 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Reading your book, and you asked the question and I’m paraphrasing here, “Do I even have any claim to the mantle Appalachian considering my family came there for a job and then left because they needed to find work?” And I thought to myself at the time, “Well leaving, because you need to find work is about the most quintessentially Appalachian thing that you could do.” 

Neema Avashia: 

Yeah. I actually think you might have written that in your review. I think that might be what I’m thinking of right now. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

I was like, “That’s about as Appalachian as it gets right there.” 

Neema Avashia: 

Which was very freeing for me. I was like, “Oh, okay. I guess I never thought about it that way,” but you’re right, and that’s also hard. And also I am continually so inspired by young people who are making the decision to stay and who are saying like, ‘Whatever you’re telling me about what I can and can’t do or who I can and can’t be, I’m not going to let that define me, right.” 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Got it. 

Neema Avashia: 

I have friends from growing up who are people who still live in the town where I grew up. I know folks who are doing amazing organizing work in all kinds of places, Ray Garringer and the Country Queers Podcast. I’m like, “Oh, my God, to be Ray.” I’m so inspired by Ray. And I’m like, “I don’t know how Ray is Ray. How did Ray become Ray and how am I me?” I don’t know. But I do feel really, really inspired by people who just had more foresight, I think, than I did. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Because you grew up without a lot of blood relations around you, how do you maintain those relationships in general? Because I think the belief a lot of people have is that it’s harder to maintain relationships with people who aren’t related to you. Family, you feel a sense of obligation to reach out, friends kind of go by the wayside sometimes. How do you maintain those relationships through the time and the distance and the physical space between you, but also the political distance between you and some of the people back home? 

Neema Avashia: 

I think the physical distance stuff has been easier to surmount, right? I’m going back next week. I go back. I think in a lot of ways, social media has been a blessing. There’s also curses around it. In terms of staying connected to people, I think it is a way that you can do that. Like I have an auntie group text, it’s awesome. I have ways in which we’re able to stay connected to each other. And those bonds are also so tight that it’s like, you don’t have to talk all the time, right? Like, “I’m going home next week,” And there’s like a fight among the aunties about where I’m staying. 

They’re not literally fighting with each other, but it’s like, there’s some back and forth about, “Where does it make most sense for you to stay?” Which is lovely, and we’ll figure it out. But I think the political lines have been harder to navigate. And I think have eroded some relationships in ways that are really painful. That is the place where I feel like if you have blood in common, maybe you would still keep going back to the table because you share blood, and so you’d have to go to Thanksgiving or you’d end up at that wedding together. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Yeah. 

Neema Avashia: 

I think when you don’t share blood and your political views have become so divergent, it becomes harder and harder to even figure out, “How are we going to share space and should we share space? Does that make sense, or have we just really gone down incredibly different path from each other, and the best thing we can do is just give each other the grace of being like, we loved each other and we’re going to just let that stand?” 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

One of the most interesting parts of the book for me was your attempt to square that circle, and to really try and not only maintain those relationships with, was it Mr. B? I think is what you called him in the book and other folks back home who had some very, very loud and provocative things to say about all sorts of different people who weren’t straight, white, Christian, native, born Americans, whatever the case may be. I wonder how do you find the empathy to do that? How do you dig down and try to… Because so many people have just been so quick to write folks off and you may have written some people off, but the sense I got from the book was that you really tried not to do that. 

Neema Avashia: 

Yeah. And I’m- 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

How do you find the strength and wisdom? 

Neema Avashia: 

I mean, I think the thing is that, you can’t go back to where I grew up and not understand why people would be angry and hurting. No policymaker or politician at all is saying, “Here’s a different vision for this region. Here’s a different explanation for why things are the way they are.” You have the Vance explanation, which is people are lazy and just- 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Genetically predisposition to skullduggery or whatever it is. 

Neema Avashia: 

Cultural poverty, whatever garbage rhetoric that is. These people just can’t do better for themselves. And then you have the… Well, now he’s going into the other thing, which is the xenophobic narrative, which is like, “Oh, everything that’s happening in Ohio and West Virginia and Kentucky is because people are coming over the border, and immigrants are taking your jobs, and they’re bringing drugs into our country.” Those are the narratives that people are being offered Appalachian- 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Which is such a different… It’s a reversal of what they were saying 20 years ago when it was, it’s people in those countries taking our jobs. 

Neema Avashia: 

Right. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Those jobs are going overseas. Now it’s, they’re coming here and taking them, make your mind up. 

Neema Avashia: 

Well, and right. And those jobs did go. That happened, right? 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Yeah, they did, they did. 

Neema Avashia: 

But again, there’s no… That was my biggest beef with that book was, you’re not talking about that. You’re not talking about the fact that was a choice that corporations made and the government let them get away with, which is to take all those jobs and send them somewhere else. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Right. 

Neema Avashia: 

Those were decisions that were made, right? So the narratives you’re being offered are narratives that you’re either culturally deficient or that immigrants are to blame, and queer people are to blame, and black people are to blame. And there isn’t another narrative. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

You talked about being gender nonconforming and Appalachia and coming up as somebody who fell outside of the expected gender roles and norms that, I think, society thrusts upon as at a very early age. 

Neema Avashia: 

I talk about this in the book. But when I brought my partner back to Appalachia, she kind of joked that there’s this game we play called hillbilly or lesbian, right? Because it’s not uncommon for older women in Appalachia to have short hair. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

No, it’s not. 

Neema Avashia: 

[inaudible 00:21:02], and cargo pants or a [inaudible 00:21:04]. It’s not that uncommon. What’s interesting is that those gender norms seem to fall away after about 40. I’m 43 now, right? They are most intense and most oppressive, I think, in your adolescence. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

I think so, yeah. 

Neema Avashia: 

I mean early childhood through adolescent, but I think there is a point at which they seem to stop for women or people who present as women. Maybe they wane a little bit, because this is not unusual. Short hair. My hair maybe is a little bit more like… My stylist would kill me if I said like they hadn’t done anything, but it’s a little bit more styled maybe than that late 40s, early 50s Appalachian cut. But yeah, I do think that- 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

I know exactly the type of women you’re talking about too. 

Neema Avashia: 

They were pumping gas at the gas station today when you were there. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

It is a very, very Appalachian/lesbian chic aesthetic. 

Neema Avashia: 

And you’re not really sure which, they could be both. They could be one, they could be the other, you’re not sure, and it’s fine. It’s great. But I do think the intensity around those norms is highest for young people, which is part of why I felt this book was so important to write and part of why that hair essay, I feel like, I’ve used it with my students, and I want people to use it with young people because I think it is most intense when you are trying to figure out your identity, and you’re getting messages about, “This is what you should look like, and this is what you shouldn’t look like, and this is right and this is wrong.” That’s the point at which I think young people are trying to really be like, “Wait a minute. Where am I in this? Where do I fall in all this? How do I figure out who I’m supposed to be?” It’s also what’s so intense for me with these laws that are being passed where they’re like, these politicians calling LGBTQ teachers groomers, I feel… They clearly don’t know how hard it is to figure that stuff out, and how much one person offering you a hand and saying, “I can maybe help make this a little easier for you,” how much of a difference that can make for a young person, right? For that to be criminalized, it’s so painful to me because I didn’t have those people. I didn’t have anyone to be like, okay, “I kind of understand maybe what’s going on with you and maybe I can be helpful.” And that stuff, it’s life or death stuff. It’s not small. People don’t understand that, but it really is for queer kids, it can make a big difference. Being seen and being invisible. Those things are life or death things. So this mentality that if you’re a teacher and you’re out, or if you’re a teacher and you make space for kids in your classroom you’re “grooming,” I find it so upsetting because I think it’s profoundly violent. I think that these people are casting themselves as protectors and they’re actually 100% the opposite of protectors. They are harming children, queer children who are going to just really suffer because they won’t have guidepost, or if they do, their teachers are in… There was just a teacher in Kentucky who literally wrote on their board, “You’re loved and you’re welcome,” and lost their job because of that. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

I know. 

Neema Avashia: 

It feels to me like a real crisis that again, I just don’t think the volume is loud enough. I think there are a lot of good and caring people in Appalachia who don’t think this is their fight. And it’s their fight because they have queer kids as neighbors, they have queer kids and their families. They coach teams with queer kids on them. It is their fight. Whether they see it as their fight or not, it’s their fight. Because those kids are really at risk with this stuff. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

There’s a little girl somewhere in Appalachia. This seems like a really good time to ask this question, but there’s a little girl somewhere out there. Maybe she’s a person of color, maybe she’s the daughter of immigrants. Maybe she’s queer, maybe she’s gender nonconforming, maybe she’s some combination of these or all of these things. Let’s assume that little girl is watching this right now. What would you say to her? 

Neema Avashia: 

You’re going to make me cry. I think I would want to say that there’s going to be a lot of really hard moments, way too many more than anybody should have to experience, but that if she can just hang in there and find her people, she’s going to be okay. And that every person is not going to be your person, and they don’t have to be, but you have to find your people. And your people might not be your family. Your people might not be your church community. Your people might not… You might not know where they are right now, but they’re out there. And that for all of us, the thing that makes this life worth living and bearable and in some cases, even wonderful is when we find our people. And so I think reducing your expectations that the people around you are automatically going to be your people and making it instead… Giving yourself permission to be like, “Yeah, these people aren’t it, and that’s okay,” because they’re out there and I’m going to find them. I think if I could help young people to have that frame and be able to hang in there until they can find their people, I think that’s all I want for them. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Wow. I can’t wait to see what comes in the future for you. And I want everyone out there to go and pick up Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place. It is available wherever you get your books now, and it is absolutely one of the most important books you’ll read this year. It really re-contextualizes what it means to be Appalachian. And I think a very accurate, and flattering, you really write very warmly about the region that brought you up. 

Neema Avashia: 

Yeah, I have a lot of warmth for it. So, thank you Skylar for doing this. I really appreciate it. 

Skylar Baker-Jordan: 

Neema, thank you so much. You have a wonderful evening. Bye everyone. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

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