I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America (2020) by Laila Lalami

This non-fiction book by award-winning, Pulitzer Prize nominated author Laila Lalami discusses Lalami’s journey as a Moroccan immigrant in America. She discusses how the legislative and political systems of the United States maintain white supremacy with the intention of creating an American caste system with white men at the top and “conditional citizens” arrayed below. She asks questions about what it means to be American and to exist as a person of color in a country that embraces one with one arm and pushes one away with another.

A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family and the Meaning of Home (2020) edited by Nicole Chung & Mensah Demary

This anthology of essays features the personal stories of 20 authors on immigration, culture, and politicized rhetoric surrounding these issues. The stories are diverse, featuring narratives about families separated by the US-Mexico border between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, the rediscovery of an ancestral village in China, and the danger of being a migrant after Partition at the border of India and Pakistan. The authors explore their cultural identities as well as what home means to them—two topics that Gharib’s memoir also addresses.

Call Me American by Abdi Nor Iftin (2019)

In his autobiography, Iftin details his life growing up in Somalia. His childhood is colored by frequent wartime, but he comes to love American movies, much like Gharib’s father. He learns English and becomes so well-known for loving American culture that people call him “Abdi American.” While he and his family move around to flee violence, he meets an American journalist and begins secretly reporting on the war. He is eventually smuggled out of Somalia, wins a green card lottery, and moves to America, where he struggles to adapt to American life while supporting his family in Somalia. This autobiography presents a different take on Gharib’s central question about what it means to be American.

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The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui (2017)

This graphic memoir spans from Bui’s parents’ lives in Vietnam before the Vietnam War to their migration to the United States as refugees. Like Gharib, Bui identifies her parents’ stories as central to her own. Her focus on her parents’ lives before, during, and after the Vietnam War foregrounds a Vietnamese perspective on the war; this runs contrary to dominant American portrayals of the Vietnam War. Bui adopts an intersectional approach to how people interpret historical events: The experiences people have and how they are affected by them long-term depend on gender, class, race, nationality, and many other factors.

• The Best We Could Do on SuperSummary

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)

This nonfiction book is composed as a letter to Coates’s son Samori, inspired by James Baldwin’s A Letter to My Nephew. In it, Coates explains the physical and psychological harm inflicted on Black people in the United States, which is still structured by white supremacy and institutional racism. Coates’s account discusses the murders of Black boys by police and the American tendency to try and forget its violent and racist past. Coates deconstructs the idea of the American Dream, which he argues was only ever true or attainable for white people, whose American Dream was “made from our bodies” throughout the eras of chattel slavery, Jim Crow and sharecropping, and police violence and mass incarceration (13).

• Between the World and Me on SuperSummary