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.
Themes
Whiteness as a Cultural Norm
Throughout her teens, Gharib is fed the message that she and her immigrant family must strive to be like white people. Though she does not realize it until later, her family’s rhetoric reflects a larger societal issue of positioning whiteness as the cultural norm. Depicting whiteness as “standard” implies that people of color are inferior to white people. Both white people and people of color can use this type of rhetoric, but it ultimately upholds white supremacy.
As a teen, Gharib’s family and the media convinced her that “white > whatever the hell I was” (71). She uses a greater than symbol to indicate her belief that being white is better than being non-white. She lists all the reasons she thinks white people are superior: “Clothes and make up just look better on them! They don’t smell like fried fish and fried garlic in the morning. They’re richer than everyone else! They get to have cool jobs, like magazine editors. They have clean, perfect, huge houses” (71). White Americans have more generational wealth than other racial demographics, largely due to America’s legacy of enslavement and white supremacy. This results in larger proportions of white people owning their own houses and having higher-paying jobs. However, as a teenager, Gharib does not identify these phenomena as being a result of systemic racism in the United States. Rather, she interprets them as evidence of white people’s superiority and conflates this with other assumptions, calling their jobs “cool” and their houses “clean” and “perfect.”
Gharib calls white people “real Americans” (71). Black American novelist Toni Morrison has observed that “[i]n this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” Morrison observes how people of color in America are expected to modify their Americanness by identifying their or their ancestors place of origin. This expectation is not demanded of white people, who are positioned as the default type of American. Sometimes, people of color can internalize this messaging within their own families and communities. Gharib says that she was “taught from an early age that everything white people did was better” (72). When she goes to Syracuse University, her family hopes she can learn to eat, dress, act, and be whiter “because when you get into the real world, that’s how you have to be” (88). Gharib’s family comes to these conclusions based on their observations of the world around them; they see white people in media, with more money, and better-paying jobs. “Whiteness” is awarded with success. However, they do not see that it isn’t because white people are “better,” but because of the historical legacies left over by systemic racism, white supremacy, and enslavement.
Cultural Isolation and Assimilation
Because of her cultural hybridity, Gharib feels isolated from her parents’ Filipino and Egyptian cultures. As such, she tries to assimilate into her idea of American culture, which effectively erases her other cultural identities. Eventually, she works through this and embraces her identity.
Throughout her young adulthood, Gharib struggles with staying connected to her culture. Having Egyptian and Filipino parents makes it more difficult to connect with either side of her culture, as she sometimes finds their practices contradictory. Unlike Gharib and Darren when they eventually marry, Gharib’s divorced parents make no attempts to blend their unique cultural practices together in a way that makes sense for their daughter. As a result, Gharib feels partially isolated from both. Gharib illustrates a “social custom” checklist that compares Egyptian, Filipino, and American cultures. She illustrates a young Gharib filling out the checklist, looking puzzled and saying “erm” (39). This represents her struggle to reconcile diverse cultural practices.
The way her peers treat her also makes her feel isolated from her culture. Her Filipino classmates say her name is weird and ask: “Are you sure you’re Filipino? You don’t really look it” (41). Gharib begins to feel like “even amongst minorities, I was a minority” (79). She identifies her dual Filipino and Egyptian ancestry as a reason she feels partially ostracized from both cultures. After her peers continually point out how she doesn’t look Filipino, she begins to wonder, “[I]f I looked a little more Filipino, would it have been easier to hang out with the Filipinos?” (80) She thinks that it might be her diverse racial ancestry that keeps her from being accepted by other Filipino students. She says that when her sister Min Min, “who is full Filipino” attended Cerritos High after her, “her social life was sorted” (80). Unlike Gharib, her sister is accepted immediately.
Feeling isolated and observing how whiteness is a cultural norm, Gharib tries to “repress all signs of [her] brownness” (190). She tries to assimilate fully into white American culture, following the advice from her family who told her to use her time at Syracuse as “exposure” training to become more like white people. Some children of immigrants are taught to see “assimilation [as] a prerequisite to claiming the label ‘American’” (Natividad, Noelle. “Putting the ‘I’ in Immigrant: Assimilation Pressures Pose Undermining Expectations for Immigrant Americans.” Daily Trojan, 23 Oct. 2020).
However, Gharib’s attempts to assimilate to white culture cause her psychological distress. Even though she grew up feeling partially isolated from her Egyptian and Filipino cultures, it isn’t until she tries to forgo both and assimilate into white American culture that she realizes “how much that stuff mattered to me” (104). She begins to wonder “what’s so wrong with being brown?” (112) She starts to think about her heritage differently, wondering, “[S]houldn’t being multicultural make me special? Why do I have to pretend to be someone I’m not?” (112). Instead of seeing her multiculturalism as a bar to fully fitting into either Egyptian or Filipino circles, like she did as a teen, the adult Gharib begins to see it as something unique that informs who she is.
What Keeps People Connected to Their Cultures
Due to her variety of cultural influences and heritages, Gharib struggles with being a “true” Filipino, Egyptian, and American. Like many first-generation Americans, she eventually loses access to many of the things she thinks connect her to these cultures.
Gharib describes a situation faced by many children of American immigrants. Due to the “great emphasis on assimilation into the United States’ English-speaking culture, children of various minorities are not only losing fluency, but also their ability to speak in their native language, at all” (Triebold, Cara. “The Importance of Maintaining Native Language.” University of Pittsburgh, Revised 2 Feb. 2023). Often, the children of immigrants can understand their parents’ native language but not speak it themselves, like Gharib, who “can understand Tagalog and Arabic” (67). In adulthood, she reflects on her friends who know more about “being Egyptian” than her, and finds that their most important attribute is the ability “to speak Arabic beautifully” (60). The accompanying illustration shows her father speaking to another person in Arabic: The text bubble includes hand-written Arabic script. In English, Gharib asks an older woman, “Hi, tant, remember me?” (60). Responding in English, the woman says, “After 10 years of coming to Egypt, you still don’t speak Arabic?!” (60).
The next panels show Gharib becoming angry and annoyed at the parts of her culture she does not have a connection to due to her loss of language. Some first-generation Americans report that language loss can result in a series of related losses, like losing “a connection to her culture, a sense of belonging and even the confidence to identify as an ethnic woman” (Zapata, Karina. “Preserving mother tongues: Why children of immigrants are losing their languages.” Calgary Journal. 12 Nov. 2019). Gharib also loses the confidence to identify with her cultures: At various points she reports feeling “more Filipino” than Egyptian (67), wondering if she is “an egg […] white on the outside, Asian on the inside” (75). She feels too “ethnically ambiguous” to identify with certain ethnic groups at school, and feels “whitewashed” (80).
In addition to losing her parents’ languages, Gharib feels “guilty about being so far away from home. In Filipino culture, there is no such thing as your own life. Your life was the one with your family” (119). As she pursues her professional and personal goals, she deviates from the community-based aspects of Filipino culture. She feels guilt for moving “across the country the moment I had the chance,” after her mother and her family “moved halfway around the world just to be together” (121). Gharib describes a type of “immigrant guilt.” As another author describes it, this results from immigrant children “grow[ing] up conscious of the enormous sacrifices that their parents have made and spend[ing] the rest of their lives proving to their parents that the suffering was not in vain” (Chick, Kenna. “To Be the Child of Immigrants.” Mental Health America). Gharib chooses her college major based on her mother’s idea of acceptable majors and struggles with guilt when she subsequently goes into a profession her mother disapproves of. She also feels guilty about the “many customs I had lost or ignored” (145), such as making certain cultural foods or remembering songs in Tagalog her older relatives sang to her.
Part of Gharib feels that the languages, foods, and customs she loses access to “[were] my identity” (144). Like many children of immigrants, she must find a way to reconcile these losses with her desired cultural belonging. She finds this peace while in Egypt, when thinking about her future children and their eventual connections to her cultures. She knows that she “probably won’t be able to translate Arabic for them…or understand the local customs” (154). However, she knows “they’ll be able to feel the sun on their face, and the wind in their hair” (155), and hopes that “they’ll know, someday, somehow, that all this is a part of them” (156). She resolves that despite her loss of language and cultural practice, there are deeper, sensory connections to people and places that tie people to their cultures.
