I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir

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.