45 pages • 1 hour read
Malaka GharibI Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir
Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Malaka Gharib
Malaka Gharib is the author-illustrator and protagonist of her memoir, which details select events spanning from the immigration of her parents to America to her young adulthood to the beginning of her own family. Gharib illustrates herself with medium-length curly, dark hair and brown skin. Occasionally, she depicts herself with dark facial hair for narrative purposes.
Gharib juggles her Egyptian, Filipino, and American cultures as she navigates childhood and young adulthood. When she is a child, she integrates her parents’ cultures and religions together, mashing them up in her mind into one cogent system. However, as she becomes a teen, her views on her background complicate. She has an Arabic name and “ethnically ambiguous” appearance and does not fully fit in with her Filipino peers. She only spends summers in Egypt with her father and does not speak Arabic or learn certain Muslim and Egyptian social cues, and thus does not feel truly Egyptian either. She initially believes in Whiteness as a Cultural Norm and, because she is brown, does not feel truly American. She has trouble fully connecting to any of her three cultural backgrounds, and at times tries to obscure these backgrounds entirely to assimilate to white American culture. She struggles with both Cultural Isolation and Assimilation.
However, as she navigates adulthood, she develops methods for integrating diverse cultural practices and her background into everyday life. She reconceives of what it means to be Filipino, Egyptian, or American. By the end of the graphic memoir, she has a new perspective on What Keeps People Connected to Their Culture. Gharib finds comfort in the deeply felt, sensory connections to culture, even if she no longer has access to language or certain cultural practices.
Mom
Gharib’s mother, referred to as “Mom,” was born in the Philippines. She is the most prominent family member in Gharib’s memoir. Gharib illustrates her with red hair and brown skin.
When the authoritarian leader Ferdinand Marcos rose to power in the Philippines, Gharib’s grandfather started moving their family one-by-one to America. Gharib’s mother did not want to leave her upper-middle-class life, with their servants, wealth and privilege, just to start over entirely in America. Her experience leaving the country of her birth parallels the experience of many first-generation immigrants who have wealth, status, and graduate or professional degrees in their first country. When they immigrate to the United States, these individuals often must retrain in their professions, accumulate wealth anew, or perform tasks they didn’t have to in their home countries. Before Gharib’s birth, her mother works two daily shifts at a hotel’s front desk. After she divorces Gharib’s father, she works two jobs seven days a week, including major holidays, to afford “a basic middle-class life” for Gharib and her sister (31).
As she grows up, Gharib realizes that “everything I had was because of my mom’s sacrifices” (32). She feels pressure to repay her mother by being “the perfect Filipino kid” (33). Mom refinances their house and asks relatives for money to send Gharib to Syracuse University, another example of the way that she goes to great lengths to give her daughters access to her idea of the American Dream. However, these sacrifices sometimes have conditions. Helping Gharib with school has several, including that Gharib pursue an “acceptable” career that will confer her mother’s idea of high social status.
Dad
Gharib’s father, called “Dad,” was born in Egypt and is one of the main family members in the narrative. Gharib illustrates him with dark hair, a mustache, square glasses, and brown skin.
Gharib’s father fell in love with the idea of America via Hollywood movies. His glamorous, fictionalized ideal proves difficult to attain: He gets an MBA at UCLA’s School of Management, but is given a position of night manager at the same hotel Gharib’s mother works at. Even though he idolized the cinematic version of America, the realities of the country are different. He immediately has irreconcilable differences with Gharib’s mother—such as their ideas of modest dress—that lead to their divorce and his return to Egypt.
In adulthood, Gharib is occasionally resentful that her father didn’t teach her about “being Egyptian.” Even though he leaves the United States, he introduces Gharib to everyone in Egypt as his “American daughter.” Her father’s view on the right way to be American is complex: At times, he touts Gharib’s Americanness and at other times he regrets her American acculturation. The latter is most evident when Gharib tells him she is marrying Darren. He tells her that he “will be punished by God—for not being there to help you marry a Muslim” (135). Though he eventually blesses their union, this tension is not fully resolved; instead, the narrative suggests that there are some sociocultural tensions and conflicts that families struggle with in perpetuity.
Darren
Darren is “the sweet, goofy southerner who Malaka would eventually marry” (5). Gharib illustrates him with glasses, freckles, red hair, and a beard. Gharib denotes his whiteness with an absence of pigment, in contrast to the pinkish brown color she uses for the skin tones of all non-white characters.
A full-page spread lists some of Darren’s attributes, including: “tenderhearted,” “loves Bruce Springsteen, Stephen King, VHS tapes, and horror flicks,” “life of the party,” and more (127). Gharib and Darren engage in a mutual exchange of cultures. She teaches him Tagalog words and introduces him to Egyptian and Filipino food and customs. He teaches her “a lot about white people,” including how “white culture varied by region” (131). Gharib is surprised that Darren’s Southern American culture has many commonalities with her Egyptian and Filipino cultures, such as an emphasis on religion, hospitality, and good humor.
Gharib introduces Darren by explaining how her father used to have her choose between a Muslim and anglicized name; the Muslim name was always the right choice. She then transitions into introducing Darren: “Unfortunately for my dad, I fell in love with a dude named…Darren” (126). This foreshadows conflict with Gharib’s father when she tells him she is marrying Darren. Darren’s considerate and polite interaction with Gharib’s father over Islam ultimately wins his blessing, illustrating what Gharib calls Darren’s “mabait,” a Filipino word that denotes holistic kindness.
