An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa

Bapsi Sidhwa's An American Brat, though not my favorite novel, has proven to be a pretty good roundup novel for this semester of Women in literature. Mainly, because it ties together a lot of the themes the class has introduced to us. "third world women" verses first world, Situated Knowledge, Postcolonialism, in-between-ness, essentailism, community, etc.

Mainly, for me, it served as a reminder that this is one person's story, not mine and not everyone elses.

One really interesting thing about the novel I thought was how it both maintained and yet went against stereotypes. There was some ovbvious cliches when Feroza's mother intruded on her life in the United States, portraying what seemed to be an overprotective religious mother, Feroza's family still defied expectation by offering her so much freedom to begin with. I don't believ, that at sixteen years age my parents would ever let me move away to a different country to gain a strong inner self. Then again, my uncle isn't as intelligent and/or responsible as Manek, who seems connected (and yet critical) of both of Feroza's worlds. Though their plan to drive Feroza to be more liberal backfires, the fact that they even consider letting her leave for four months, later to allow her to stay for college, is pretty interesting. Feroza on the other hand seems pretty conservative, not only in the beginning, causing alarm in her parents, but the fact that she decides to marry at such a young age. Then again, she is characterized by her impulsiveness.
One issue that I had with the book was that, like the Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, which seemed to loose it's tie with reality by telling the story of every imaginable muslim (black, gay, american, syrian, etc.) to the point where the diversity amongst the muslim characters began to grow tiring, I felt that An American Brat did a little of this same sort of thing. It was a good novel, but, again, I felt Sidhwa went a smidge too far by pairing Feroza and Jo and David all in the same household. I guess she was trying to show how liberal the United States allowed Feroza to be, and wanted to further express the disconect between her and Zareen and Cyrus, but it doesn't feel completely believable.