An American Meo
A Tale of Remembering and Forgetting
Anisa Rahim
ISBN 978-1-959556-37-4 218 pages $20.00
"Rahim felt a distance from her own cultural heritage, an alienation she experiences as shame, poignantly depicted here."
Kirkus Reviews
"The work is also a deeply personal journey as I write about the struggles to even write and learn this history as a member of the Meos, albeit an American one. Indeed my vantage point as an American-born Meo is also explored as my parents were the very first Meos, literal pioneers, to migrate to the United States when the 1965 immigration law was expanded to recruit talent from non-European countries."
Anisa Rahim in American Kahani
American Meo is a transfixing meditation on what it means to be of two places. Born in America but deeply rooted in the culture, history, lore and generational trauma of the Meo people, Muslims from the Mewat region of India, Anisa Rahim takes us on a riveting journey through culture, history, family and her own coming of age.
Elizabeth Gaffney, author of Metropolis and When the World Was Young
Anisa Rahim’s An American Meo: A Tale of Remembering and Forgetting, a marvel of archival exploration, is also a vivid, engrossing combination of nonfiction, fiction and myth, uncovering hidden stories of her family’s past but also the history of a people, a region, a language, a world. With Rahim for this journey, we ultimately are able to see how she and her loved ones come to acknowledge profound truths about the past and present, as well as the incalculable value, she tells us of this work, her “writing and reading and remembering and reconstructing, where I reside.”
John Keene, Author of Punks: New & Selected Poems and Counternarratives: Stories & Novellas
Anisa Rahim is a writer, photographer and public interest lawyer. Her writing has been published widely including the anthology New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims, edited by Kazim Ali (Red Hen Press). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Newark. She lives in New Jersey. See more of her work at anisarahim.com.