Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place is a memoir written by Neema Avashia. The memoir describes Neema’s coming-of-age in Cross Lanes, West Virginia. Neema’s family arrived as immigrants to the United States in 1973 after previously residing in India. 

One central theme of this memoir is the generational difference between Neema, a second-generation immigrant, and her parents, who are first-generation immigrants. Neema’s parents display an “ethics of assimilation or the ethics of survival,” (19) as Neema calls it. She believes that her parents’ experience as first-generation immigrants informed these ethics, as assimilating was likely much safer when adapting to a new community. But as a second-generation immigrant, Neema allows herself the space to question assimilation. She wonders: “Would we have been experienced differently, embraced less quickly, if my parents hadn’t assimilated so willingly? Is minority presence in a community only acceptable when we make up less than 1 percent of the overall population?” (48). Neema further explains, “I straddle the culture of my parents and the culture of my Appalachian birthplace” (25). Neema straddles her parents’ culture and that of West Virginia. She feels that she is constantly code-switching between the two of them. This “straddling” mirrors how Neema navigates her queer identity as well. 

Neema is selective about when and how she reveals her queer identity: “I decided to keep my relationship with Laura from him until I had a better sense of who “adult Sam” turned out to be” (68). Here, Neema decides not to make clear her queer identity. Yet in choosing not to disclose her queerness, she is unable to know whether or not a person’s love truly is conditional. In some situations, she never finds out, like with her family friend Mr. B: “I also have to ask hard questions of myself. What benefit did shielding the Bs from the truth about my love life confer? Would our relationship now be less vulnerable if I had been more honest along the way? Or would it have shattered long ago?” (49) The selective disclosure of identity present in Neema’s situation is extremely common in queer communities. Under some circumstances, revealing identity can change a relationship, and this may be undesirable or unsafe in many instances. In Neema’s particular situation, she chose not to reveal her identity. In doing so, she maintained the relationship and her safety, yet she must live with the uncertainty of never knowing whether or not Mr. B’s love was truly unconditional. 

Another interesting aspect of the memoir surrounds the convergence of Neema’s queerness with her Indian identity. This allows Neema an exploratory and unique frame of reference from which she eventually learns to use to her advantage: “My classmates’ ideas about beauty…revolved around pale skin, light eyes, light hair: features that were a biological impossibility for me…What was I supposed to look like? If neither the beauty standards of my classmates nor those of my mother and her beloved Bollywood stars felt like the right ones, then what models existed in the world for me?” (145) 

Since the normative standards of dressing didn’t apply to Neema, she began to experiment with her own look. In the absence of a norm to which Neema could tailor her appearance, she was free to develop her own sense of style, which manifested itself in the form of various haircuts (145). The freedom she feels in expressing herself with hairstyles is not only symbolic of her disregard for norms, but also an embrace of her queerness: “I didn’t conform to the gender norms of either of those cultures—not in my clothing, not in my mannerisms, not in my way of being, and not, ultimately, in my decision to spend the rest of my life with the woman I love…I cut my hair off for good. After thirty-five years on earth, I finally settled on a hairstyle that feels right to me, even if it doesn’t look like anything my Indian family or my West Virginian peers would ever condone” (146). As Neema finally embraces a haircut that feels genuine to her despite external opinions, she increasingly embraces her relationship with a woman despite others’ opinions as well. Cutting her hair is more than just an action; it is indicative of a commitment to living authentically.