Drawing the American Dream with Malaka Gharib
"Sooo... what are you?"
“What are you?”
Malaka Gharib, I Was Their American Dream
Producer Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong speaks to Malaka Gharib about her graphic memoir, "I Was Their American Dream."
For some people of color, this is a fraught question. But for Malaka Gharib it was not only practical but expected. She grew up in Cerritos, California in a highly diverse community of largely first-generation Americans like her.
"It was very important in a place like Cerritos, where everybody was a person of color. So knowing that distinction was a very quick and shortcut way of getting to know someone quickly. And also, I almost thought of it as a sign of respect. Like, 'I'm Portuguese. I'm from Azerbaijan. I'm from Turkmenistan.' That's great. It's important to know that background."
As a Filipino-Egyptian-American, Malaka had to figure out ways to codeswitch across many communities. That meant that when she spent time with family, she thought about things like what cutlery to use (spoon and fork with Filipino family; fork and knife with the Egyptian side).
She also had to figure out how to fit in at school, which sometimes meant leaving parts of herself at the door.
One summer while in Egypt, Malaka saw the rockets of Second Intifada from her beach vacation. But when she came back to Cerritos, she didn't tell her mother or any classmates. "I never talked about it because I didn't want to be seen as fobby, which is really sad, actually, now thinking about it."
Now though, she says the 2016 election showed that we're not talking about race enough - the national conversation around race currently lacks the complexity and nuance that she and many other first generation kids grew up intimately aware of.
"I want people to know when they meet me that this is what a Filipino-Egyptian-American, with a Muslim father and a Catholic mother, looks like."
