Mohja Kahf

This is a coming-of-age novel about Khadra Shamy, the daughter of Syrian Muslim immigrants in Indiana. Khadra’s father works at the Muslim center in an Indianapolis suburb, and she is steeped in Muslim faith and practice in her childhood and adolescence. After a brief failed marriage in college, Khadra suddenly sees shades of gray where there used to be black and white. A trip to Syria, the barely-remembered land of her birth, confuses her even more. She discovers customs that she thought were Muslim are actually Syrian/Arab. She begins to see similarities between adherents of different faiths where before she only saw their outward differences. She needs to work out for herself what it means to be a Muslim woman in late 20th-century America.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It’s longer than it needs to be. Eliminating the repetitiveness and a number of the characters would likely make it a stronger novel. However, I identified with Khadra, who shares enough characteristics with the author to be considered at least partially autobiographical. Based on the timeline of the novel, she seems to be very close to my age. I spent a lot of time in Indiana during the years covered in the novel. My family made the trip north several times a year to visit my mother’s parents and her very large extended family. I sometimes felt like an outsider since the rest of the family knew each other in a way that I didn’t since I lived so far away, so I was very interested in another outsider’s view of Indiana. If I had run into Khadra on one of my visits, I wonder if we could have broken through the cultural barriers to find common ground?… (mehr)