A brilliant, piercing, and funny exploration following one woman’s journey in navigating the fraught higher education system during the COVID-19 pandemic as an international student.
In 2019, Ber Anena, a writer from Uganda, opened up her email and was enthusiastic to find that she’d been accepted into Columbia University’s prestigious MFA writing program. Then, reality struck: it would cost approximately $150,000 in tuition and fees alone for the two-year program, with no additional support for funding.
“If you counted my family’s wealth going ten generations back, you would not find that money, even if you included my Mama’s ducks or Grandma’s pigeons and goats.”
The Lies We Tell for America is equal parts incandescent and uncompromising as Anena uncovers the lengths students from “shithole countries” go through to seek an education in the West. Studying in the United States quickly morphs from an ideal to an ordeal as she scrambles to secure funding, leaving the security of her stable income, apartment, and family in Uganda for the great uncertainty abroad.
In New York, the picturesque version Anena grew up with quickly diminishes. From maneuvering icy roommates, to grappling with food insecurity, to calling out racism in her writing workshops, Anena begins to rewrite the narrative she had once accepted. These strikingly beautiful pages lay bare Anena’s own cultural assumptions, while shining light on a particular kind of migrant experience. After everything—was taking this plunge worth it?
The Lies We Tell for America is an essential read from a remarkable new voice in literature.
Hello!
This is Anena, a Ugandan writer, teacher, editor, and performer. I’m the author of A Nation in Labour, a poetry collection that won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Until then, poetry had always been a private affair—a means through which I made sense of life, sought clarity to uncertainties, and created a world fancier than the one I was born in.
Since discovering I won’t lose much by sharing my writing with the world, I have published poems and prose in The Atlantic, Commonwealth Writers (adda stories), The Caine Prize (A Memory This Size and Other Stories), Brittle Paper, The Plentitudes journal, New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, The Kalahari Review, among others. My short stories have been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2018) and longlisted for the Short Story Day Africa Prize (2017 & 2018).
I went to Makerere University in Uganda where I got a Bachelor’s in Mass Communication and a Master of Human Rights. I’m a 2021 graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Writing program and pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.