Room to fly: a transcultural memoir

Abstract

Room to Fly is a unique journal--or ongoing memoir--by a woman who traces the elusive contours of cultural perceptions East and West, welcoming us into the intimate geography of individual lives. The book takes its shape and direction from a tenet of Japanese Sumi painting: If you depict a bird, give it space to fly. Padma Hejmadi explores the human spaces surrounding language, landscape, literacy and illiteracy, music, dance, legend, the cadence of ancient craft, and the ceaselessly unfolding layers of family relationships. Part autobiography, part lively meditation, Room to Fly represents a new genre with an old diction. Hejmadi's spare, luminous prose combines lyricism with humor and intellectual rigor, drawing us from Bombay to the Bahamas, from Japan to New England, the Greek Isles to New Mexico.