Of Color

by Jaswinder Bolina

2020

In Of Color, an essay collection, poet and essayist Jaswinder Bolina explores the complicated ground about being "of color." As the U.S.-born son of Punjabi immigrants, Bolina conveys how the complexity of integration often demands a denial of cultural origins in order to belong: "The word we use for this process, assimilation, shares a Latin root with the word similar, implying that the outsider will be accepted simply by becoming more like his neighbors," he writes. "But such becoming demands the negation of the old identity to make room for a new one, and, in this, assimilation is a destructive, rather than constructive, process." Bolina's book seeks to perform a different endeavor--not erasure, but rather recognition of all that is similar and different among us. His tools--empathy, the ability to face difficult aspects of himself and others, and the gift of language--create a space for both old identities and new, for himself, others, and our society at large.