The Coffeehouse Resistance: Brewing Hope in Desperate Times

by Sarina Prabasi

Overview

Part coming-to-America story, part lyrical memoir, and yet another part activist’s call to action, The Coffeehouse Resistance: Brewing Hope in Desperate Times is timely, funny, and poignant. Writing as a mother, immigrant, new American, coffeehouse owner, and international nonprofit leader, Prabasi’s story weaves between Nepal, Ethiopia, and the United States. When Prabasi and her husband move from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to New York City with their young daughter in 2011, they start a thriving coffee business, grow their family, and are living their American Dream. After the 2016 election, they are suddenly unsure about their new home.   

Reclaiming the tradition of coffee houses throughout history, their coffeehouses become a hub for local organizing and action. Moving from despair to hope, this story is ultimately about building community, claiming home, and fighting for our dreams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781732854031
Publisher:	Green Writers Press
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sarina Prabasi has lived the life of a global nomad and is a new American. She was born in the Netherlands to Nepali parents, and was raised in India, China and Nepal, after which she spent formative years in the United States and in Ethiopia. Sarina is a seasoned leader in international development —- working on global health, education, water and sanitation for over 25 years. In 2011, she moved from Addis Ababa to New York City and started Buunni Coffee with her husband. Their small business has become a hub for community conversation and action. Sarina is the proud mama of two daughters, who keep her learning and laughing every day. 

Editorial Reviews

“This transporting, globe-trotting tale filled me with wanderlust. Prabasi describes beautiful, surprising firsts as she travels the planet — from earliest toddler memories, through to adulthood. When she settles in uptown Manhattan and brings an international lens to her local business, the book soars with political and personal ferocity, never losing the warmth of neighbors connecting over coffee.” —Quiara Alegría Hudes, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and composer

“Sarina Prabasi has found a way to help us navigate today’s questions by looking at her own pastexperiences. Full of warmth and bristling with urgency,The Coffeehouse Resistanceis compulsively readableand absolutely necessary. Get it now.” —Maaza Mengiste,author ofBeneath the Lion’s Gaze

“Prabasi’s story of life as an activist, immigrant, and coffeehouse founder, so intimately related on these pages, offers a model of what 21st century resistance looks like—and in the process helps us reclaim the revolutionary roots of coffeehouse culture.”

—David L. Parsons, author of Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era

“The Coffeehouse Resistance is a powerful account of aspirations, hope, and citizenship. It shows that every big change happens a little bit at a time, one conversation at a time, one cup of coffee at a time. At Buunni Coffee she and her husband opened their hearts to the local community and created a hub where people gather to write letters to politicians, sign petitions, and escape their sense of isolation at a time when the whole country seems to struggle. Written as an effort to preserve her experiences of the cultures that have nourished her belief in the life of the neighborhood, and a need to stand up for oneself, Prabasi’s book is a heart-felt account that will bring hope to the rest of us.”

—Dr. Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Burying the Typewriter

From the Publisher

2019-03-26

Debut author and community organizer Prabasi reflects on a life spent in Nepal and Ethiopia and on the disconcerting political environment that she found in the United States.

When the Netherlands-born author's family moved to Nepal, she was in the fifth grade and could speak but neither read nor write the native language. She attended an American international school in Kathmandu and later moved to the United States to attend college. While visiting Ethiopia, she fell deeply in love with its "vast expanses, its diversity of landscape and languages," and its coffee, too, which is a prized part of the culture. There, she also met her future husband, Elias, and gave birth to her first child, but she became concerned about the country's "controlling and authoritarian political system" and decided to move to New York City for a safer, freer life and greater opportunity. The author and her spouse wanted to start a business, so they opened Café Buunni in 2012, just over a year after they'd landed in the city. Later, Prabasi was shocked by Donald Trump's coarse campaign for the presidency—she became an American citizen just in time to vote in the 2016 election—and she became anxious that the country where she'd made her home was quickly becoming inhospitable to immigrants and people of color. The author's impressionistic account of her travels is poetically thoughtful, and she has a keen eye for granular detail, which she evokes in delicate, vivid language. Also, she offers an inspiring tale of community-based political action; her cafe participated in a fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union, which will remind some older readers of decades past, when cafes were hotbeds of political organization. However, others may find her frenzied depiction of the United States following Trump's election to be hyperbolic, as she describes a country that seems solely defined by its "racism, the white supremacy, the gun violence, the war economy, the individualism taken to extremes that leaves little room for empathy or compassion."

A beautifully written memoir that offers familiar calls for political resistance but little in-depth political analysis.

Kirkus Reviews