Introduction:
Malaka Gharib’s graphic memoir, I Was Their American Dream, details her life as a child of immigrants born in the United States, feelings of cultural disconnect, and the ways in which she has experienced herself in majority white spaces. Gharib is a current editor for NPR, focusing on global topics.
Her comics have been published in numerous editorials including both The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Overview:
Born to a Filipino catholic mother and an Egyptian muslim father, her parents having divorced when she was very young, Gharib grew up at odds between her mother and father’s cultures. Throughout the memoir she describes how with each parent she had to code switch to fit with their respective cultural or religious ideals.
Gharib writes about growing up in a space made of predominantly other immigrant families, often her classmates would be mixed like herself. Despite this, she always struggled to find a space for herself. She was never Filipino enough for the Filipino cliques, and never Arab enough for the Arab cliques. This cultural disconnect grew larger as she attended a private school in New York, across the country from her mother’s family in California.
It was only after moving to the other side of the United States that Gharib realized how vastly different her own experience growing up as a daughter of immigrant parents had been compared to the new friends she was making. In this new space she occupied, Gharib felt tokenized and isolated from her cultures. Yet, through this, Gharib builds a community of friends, gets married, and begins to feel more connected with who she is - not torn between two cultures and communities, but a part of both.
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