An Opera of Immigration - Leah Lax's 'Not From Here'

Award-winning fiction and nonfiction writer, Leah Lax, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her illuminating new book about the immigrant experience, Not From Here: The Song of America. Interestingly, the book came about when Lax was first asked to write an opera for the Houston Grand Opera recognizing local immigrants and refugees in the community. From there, she spent the following year listening to dozens of stories of those who had migrated to the United States and the journey surrounding their arrival. “When I set out to meet people all over this crazy, amazing city and hear their stories, I was discovering, I felt like I was discovering, America… Little by little, I started going, ‘Wait a minute, this is a nation of immigrants. This is a national portrait. This is where I’ve landed. This is the truest truth of where I’ve landed.’ It wasn’t just incidental, the things I was learning, and they were intrepid and they were open-eyed about everything they’d gone through and everything they’d faced as new immigrants at the bottom of the economic chain when they came in, and they still loved this country… I felt like I’d met the American dream and it spoke with an accent.”

Regarding the structure of the book, Lax explains, “It opens with a scene in which, there’s a preamble where I tell a little bit of how this book happened, and I beg the reader to try to hear each voice in its own accent, and picture each person in their own shape and color because this is the great quilt of America. Then, the book opens with me as a Hasidic woman sitting in the backyard with my kids and with our housekeeper who was from El Salvador, and I knew nothing about El Salvador… she says, ‘In my country, there are no birds…’ because of the guns and because people eat them for food… that’s how the book opens, and then it turns directly to the story of the El Salvadoran woman, and along the way, I do provide and expose the American involvement, the history, the context… and it goes from story to story like that… I do not group people by where they come from… I grouped them by what caused them to come… in every case, they tell their own stories, which I think is infinitely more impactful…” While Lax did interact with and talk to many people for her book, she wasn’t able to include everyone’s stories. Rather than excluding them, she featured them in the section titled “Intermezzo.” She said, “In the ‘Intermezzo’ section, it’s anywhere between 2 to 4 pages of quotes, just single quotes, sometimes a whole paragraph… and each one is someone from another part of the world, and sometimes they’re funny, and sometimes they’re quaint, and sometimes they’re shocking, and sometimes they’re just very, very moving… I wanted to give you a sense of what it’s like walking down the street in Houston if you could actually hear their stories.”