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Debut author and community organizer
Prabasi reflects on a life spent in Nepal
and Ethiopia and on the disconcerting political environment that she found in
the United States.
When the Netherlands-born author’s
family moved to Nepal, she was in the
fifth grade and could speak but neither read nor write the native language. She
attended an American international school in Kathmandu and later moved to the
United States to attend college. While visiting Ethiopia, she fell deeply in
love with its “vast expanses, its diversity of landscape and languages,” and its
coffee, too, which is a prized part of the culture. There, she also met her
future husband, Elias, and gave birth to her first child, but she became
concerned about the country’s “controlling and authoritarian political system”
and decided to move to New York City for a safer, freer life and greater
opportunity. The author and her spouse wanted to start a business, so they opened
Café Buunni in 2012, just over a year after they’d landed in the city. Later,
Prabasi was shocked by Donald Trump’s coarse campaign for the presidency—she
became an American citizen just in time to vote in the 2016 election—and she became
anxious that the country where she’d made her home was quickly becoming
inhospitable to immigrants and people of color. The author’s impressionistic
account of her travels is poetically thoughtful, and she has a keen eye for
granular detail, which she evokes in delicate, vivid language. Also, she offers
an inspiring tale of community-based political action; her cafe participated in
a fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union, which will remind some older
readers of decades past, when cafes were hotbeds of political organization.
However, others may find her frenzied depiction of the United States following
Trump’s election to be hyperbolic, as she describes a country that seems solely
defined by its “racism, the white supremacy, the gun violence, the war economy,
the individualism taken to extremes that leaves little room for empathy or
compassion.”
A beautifully written memoir that offers
familiar calls for political resistance but little in-depth political
analysis.
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