This Rolleiflex camera was one of the only objects she brought with her on her journey across the world. The camera is heavy, no longer functional, and fraying with age. I always wondered why she would choose something so impractical and archaic. When I was younger she would That last sentence deserves to sit with us for a moment. Amba did not bring the camera to take new pictures. She brought it to preserve her picture of home. This is one of the defining emotional textures of the immigrant experience: the simultaneous forward momentum of departure and the backward pull of everything left behind. The Rolleiflex cannot capture the new country. It can only hold the old one. And that, for a young woman boarding a plane alone to a foreign city, may have been exactly the point. The camera is also an object of family lineage, it belonged, she says, to a great-great-great grandfather. This collapses time in a way that is distinctly South Asian in its resonance. South Asian family structures are often multigenerational in a way that American nuclear-family culture struggles to translate: the obligations and affections of family life extend backward through generations and outward through extended networks of cousins, aunts, and community elders. To carry a camera that belonged to an ancestor five generations removed is to carry a form of genealogical memory, to say, with a heavy object in a suitcase, that who you come from is not something you can be separated from simply by crossing an ocean.

– Mira Goodman

Relationship:  Im/migrant Im/migrant