[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, thank you, Karen.
That was lovely.
Is Danielle Geller here, by chance?
Could you stand for a moment, please?
Since it is an evening of introduction and celebration,
I just wanted to note, for those of you
who did not know, Danielle Geller is one of the six
recipients of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award,
which recognizes early career writers for their promise
and what's to come.
And I just want to make sure everyone knows and we
can applaud you.
[APPLAUSE]
It's an honor to be asked to introduce
Julie Iromuanya to you, as a faculty member in fiction
on behalf of Aurelie Sheehan, on behalf of Kate Bernheimer,
and the entire faculty.
This was supposed to happen last year.
But you'll see in my introduction
why there were some difficulties.
But to describe Mr. and Mrs. Doctor
as a novel about the allure and the perils of assimilation,
or as one that exposes the damage unleashed
by cultural confusion is to face,
truly, the enormity of those--
what those terms actually mean.
Given that we are and will forever be an immigrant nation,
the challenge to our collective storytelling
is in our failure to recognize that some stories can never
change.
And that some stories must be constantly retold.
The story of an arrival, for example,
is not always just a story about a difficult journey,
but the intimate confrontations that happen once you get there.
And the struggle with belonging and trying to belong,
or being reminded that you don't belong.
And this is not an easy struggle,
as our new faculty member will understand and tell us
about tonight.
But in telling of that challenge,
Julie Iromuanya also allows us a consideration
of how we try to answer.
Listen to this remarkable passage,
which is near the end of the novel, in which one
of the main characters, Job, has revealed
a very important secret.
It's to a young boy, someone he doesn't know,
who's helping him at the airport.
And this is the boy's reaction.
"The boy's face has squeezed up in confusion, then protest.
He forced the bag forward, back into Job's arms.
And there wasn't enough English in him
to piece together the meaning of Job's words.
Or it was merely disbelief.
The boy tried harder.
He clutched at Job's other bags, and he rearranged them.
He wiped away the dust that had settled on them.
Instead of merely setting them on the curb,
he raced ahead to the airport entrance lugging all the bags,
including the briefcase, with difficulty.
He believed he had done something wrong,
that he was being scolded."
I think this is a very marvelous and representative paragraph
of what's at stake in Julie's novel.
What happens when we don't understand,
when we cannot comprehend.
And can only trudge ahead with our limited knowledge, destined
maybe to never understand or be understood.
I think that's the peril and the heartbreak of going back only
to what we know.
And it might be precisely why I and maybe lots of other readers
have thrilled to the stories of people who
feel that they have no country.
And that's how this novel upends our understanding
of the so-called immigrant experience.
If we think that we've heard it all before,
it might be simply proof that we weren't really listening
at all.
This introduction and this welcome
of Julie to the U of A community is late,
because she joined us last year.
But her work has been so celebrated
that it's taken her all across the country and abroad,
from France to Central America.
And I just found out tonight her scholarly work is taking her
to Sweden.
Mr. and Mrs. Doctor was nominated
for two very prestigious prizes that
honor first novels, the PEN/Robert Bingham
Award for Debut Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle
John Leonard Award.
And Julie capped her first year with us
with a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award,
which is our country's largest peer jury prize in fiction.
But we're so glad to have her return
to what we hope is now home.
And I hope that you're going to join me in saying bienvenida
to Julie Iromuanya.