Daniel Laskin
When Misha Rai sat down to write the introduction for Art and the Moment, the
Kenyon Review’s special project on voting, it was natural that she would turn to personal memories. Rai has an instinct for storytelling, a style brimming with narrative warmth, and a gift for interweaving layers of time and meaning, uncovering flashes when the wider world, with its conflict and complexity, surprises ordinary life.
In this case she evoked two scenes. There is her childhood home in India, where her father would expect young Misha and her brother to read one of the family’s four newspapers every day and then grill them on stories in the various sections. And there is a somber moment in the Florida statehouse in 2017, when the state legislature posthumously exonerated the “Groveland Four,” four young African American men who almost seventy years earlier had been falsely convicted of raping a young white woman.