I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir

These chapters introduce the history of Gharib’s parents and her two cultural backgrounds: Egyptian and Filipino.

Even though Gharib’s mother does not want to come to the United States and her father does, they share a desire to achieve the “American Dream.” The American Dream is a set of ideals that say that anyone in the United States can achieve success through hard work and perseverance. Gharib’s parents interpret the American Dream as material success: “A big house with a white picket fence! A two-car garage! Credit cards! Luxury handbags! Enough money to send back home to the parents! A Mercedes Benz or a Lexus! Annual trips to Disney World! Ralph Lauren Polo shirts for the whole family!” (22) Many of these items are symbols of wealth and status.

Gharib’s father develops a dream of living in America because “American movies inspired me. Especially ones about New York, with all the high-rise buildings and the cars and the shops and the malls. Something inside me clicked and said: ‘Yeah, this is what I want’” (14). However, as Gharib learns as a teenager and young adult, media mostly portrays white people and rarely the true and nuanced American experience. While the American Dream is touted as an equitable goal for any hard-working person, it ignores systemic racism, prejudice, and inequality faced by many people of color. Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates has written that “the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies” (Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Letter to my Son.” The Atlantic, 4 July 2015). The American Dream ignores the fact that the generational wealth and success of white Americans were built first on a system of chattel slavery and subsequently on years of exploitative and exclusionary societal structures that disenfranchised people of color. Coates says: “Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream” (Coates).

Though Gharib’s parents share the same idea of what the “American Dream” looks like, their day-to-day practices clash and eventually contribute to their divorce. For example, a panel depicts Gharib’s father reading a book called “A Guide for Muslim Parents in America,” while in the background her mother asks him what he thinks about sending Gharib to Catholic school. Gharib’s mother’s family are devout Catholics. Gharib’s father is Muslim. Spain colonized the Philippines between 1565 and 1821. Over hundreds of years of Spanish rule and colonization, Spain’s dominant religion, Catholicism, grew deep roots in Filipino culture. Islam was brought to Egypt in the seventh century and maintained a majority over the thousand plus years since.

Gharib illustrates her parents arguing and calling each other stubborn in their native language. She shows how raising an interfaith child—a child brought up with two religions—can be a difficult task. She illustrates her mother standing in front of a mirror with an angry expression on her face as Gharib’s father says: “That skirt’s too short. Can you wear something a little more modest?” (23) She shows how different cultures have different expectations of how modestly one should dress. Gharib’s mother is wearing a long-sleeve cardigan, a blouse buttoned up to her neck, and a skirt that goes just past her knees, an outfit that may seem conservative in some cultures.

The decision to dress in varying degrees of outward-facing modesty is a personal one within those who practice Islam, and differs even more in people of other faiths, like Gharib’s Catholic mother. Gharib’s father may have been intending to look after her mother’s well-being, but in doing so he undermines her autonomy and imposes his cultural expectations onto her. Islamic culture values hayaa (also spelled haya or ḥayāʾ), a sense of healthy modesty that denotes that someone has “modesty, humility and self-respect” (Sharif, Najma. “What is Hayaa and Why is it Being Defined by Men?” Muslim Girl, 18 Feb. 2016). One’s hayaa is an important part of their iman, or faith. How this modesty manifests in one’s dress is a personal decision. For instance, some Muslim women like Gharib’s stepmother Hala choose to wear hijab, a head covering that covers one’s hair and neck while revealing their face.

Gharib’s parents do not deal with their cultural differences patiently or openly. Gharib illustrates them arguing, each shouting “you’re stubborn” in their respective language (23). This leads to their divorce. After this, they each instill tenets of their respective cultures onto Gharib, who must work through her childhood to internally reconcile her parents’ cultures in her own daily practices, and experiences Cultural Isolation and Assimilation. She gets mixed up by the differing, sometimes clashing customs of her two cultures, especially in a religious context. In childhood, her solution is to “smus[h] them all together into one faith” (47). However, as she matures and begins to develop Americanized cultural preferences of her own, this becomes increasingly complicated.