Review of Alia Malek’s New Book:
In “A Country Called Amreeka,” Malek chronicles the lives of a dozen Arab Americans. Their stories are markers on a timeline that stretches back to the legendary Alabama-Auburn football game of 1948 and runs through the riotous Detroit of the ’60s, the fraught tensions over Palestine in the ’80s, up to the election of George W. Bush. Each chapter focuses on an individual (often, a family) whose personal lives dramatize the political concerns of the age or the timeless personal anxiety of living, as an outsider, in a foreign land. In between each chapter, Malek fills in the historical gaps, recapping for the reader the changes in Middle Eastern politics or in American immigration policy necessary to understand the next narrative.
The book looks at America through the eyes of a minority so often viewed as its enemy. As the book progresses through time, a bigger story begins to emerge. With delicate cues from Malek, the reader begins to see how the image of Muslims has hardened over time. They have always been outsiders; in the early 20th century, politicians went to great lengths to classify newly arrived Arabs as nonwhites, a form of social exclusion. But by the ’80s, the outsider has become the other, the “swarthy-looking,” turban-wearing villain in Hollywood’s good-versus-evil dramas. (Never mind that it’s Sikhs who wear turbans, and Sikhs aren’t Muslim.)
