Terroir
Love, Out of Place
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The word “terroir” refers to the climate and soil in which something is grown. Natasha Sajé applies this idea to the environments that nurture and challenge us, exploring in particular how the immigrant experience has shaped her identity. She revisits people and literature across her life, including her experiences as the child of European refugees in suburban New Jersey, taken under the wing of a widowed neighbor; a winter spent waitressing in Switzerland; her marriage to a Jamaican man in Baltimore; and finally her marriage to a woman in Salt Lake City.
This memoir-in-essays combines poetic lyricism with incisive commentary on nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Reminding us that change is constant in our lives, Sajé asks how terroir creates identity. Throughout, the English language is her most fertile ground.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Saj (Vivarium) devotes these eight thoughtful essays to exploring how place develops identity, framing the subject using the French viticultural term for "the whole environment in which something... is grown." Though she acknowledges how her Slovenian father and German mother and their respective cultures influenced her, Saj muses that for immigrants like her, "terroir does more work than family to shape identity." Across several essays, Saj recounts her early marriage to a Black man from Jamaica and his eventual death from lymphoma, honoring her late spouse while also confronting her own white privilege: "I'm chagrined to admit that I thought I had proven my lack of racism by living with Tyrone." In other essays, Saj interrogates her feelings of otherness both in the U.S. and during trips to Europe, where even after extensive travels, Saj concludes that "the traveler is only authorized to be other,' to observe and to participate in superficial layers of the foreign culture." This book will fascinate readers interested in the interplay between identity and place.
