1. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? New York: Orchard Books, 2005. ISBN 978-0-439-91947-0.
2. PLOT SUMMARY
Sixteen-year-old Amal decides she is ready to hear a hijab full-time to show her commitment to Allah and to embrace all of her life-long Islamic teachings, but she has anxiety about how her fellow Australians will react at school and in the community.
3. CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Randa Abdel-Fattah's protagonist Amal is 16-years-old. Her life revolves around her friends, her family, and Allah. In Australia, where Amal lives, there are social difficulties to being a visible Muslim. But Amal chooses to honor her faith and embrace her heritage by wearing a hijab in public.
During the beginning of the book, Amal is worried. She's afraid of the verbal abuse she'll endure, of the social ostracization she may suffer at school, and even of being humiliated by strangers who think that Muslims are all radicalized terrorists because that bigoted stereotype is most often what Australians sees in the news. It's a heavy burden to carry for all Muslims, and Amal's instincts about what trouble wearing her hijab could cause were not unwarranted.
Throughout the book, Abdel-Fattah writes Amal as a very likable young girl, which makes her an approachable character for all young readers, and allows her character to explain several layers of cultural challenges Muslims face in contemporary Austrailian society.
The first layer of complexity is that Amal is the child of immigrants from Palestine. Abdel-Fattah subverts the stereotype that all Muslim immigrants are poor, uneducated refugees, by introducing Amal's parents. One is a doctor and the other is a dentist. Although neither spoke English when they came to Australia, they made their way creating a successful joing medical practice. This divide between how Anglo-Australia views first generation immigrants versus their offspring is one of the challenges Amal faces -- because in her experience, often the women who are first-generation immigrants wear the hijab, but it is not as often that young people or later generations do -- which means that younger Muslims aren't "outing" themselves in public very often.
For example, when Amal decides to wear the hijab, her parents are surprised and concerned. They know the difficulty they experienced when they arrived in Australia, but as people of faith, they want to balance supporting their daughter while realizing that a certain level of harassment may come with her decision.
There is another divide in cultural understanding between immigrant parent and Australian-born child. For example, Amal's parents speak to their daughter primarily in English. Often times her parents use Arabic words of affection like shortening Yallah (meaning come on) and combining it with her name "Ya Amal" (Oh Amal) whenever they want her attention (22). However, when upset, they will use Urdu swear words related to cultural references Amal does not understand. For example, her mother would swear at unsympathetic strangers about their mustaches in public. It helped her get her anger out without Anglo-Australians understanding what she was saying, but Amal is more confused by why her mother is cursing mustaches (111). When Amal asked her mother about her strange anger at men's facial hair, her mother's response was: "You were hatched here, you wouldn't get it" (111).
This divide is also true for several of Amal's friends and relatives. Her cousin Samantha's parents pressure her to fully assimilate into Australian culture. They find tradition like wearing the hijab repressive now that they are Australian citizens. But Samantha admits that when her father found out she had a boyfriend the lifelong lessons she had heard about throwing off the old ways for the new came to a halt. "This coming from the man who thinks the word foreign is the f-word of our times. All our lives George and me get it rammed down our throats that we're supposed to forget our culture and live as Aussies, whatever that means. But then when I do something that he doesn't like, he does a one-eighty turn" (106).
Samantha's father, Uncle Joe, is pretty outspoken about his beliefs regarding wanting his family to be considered part of the native Australian culture. "We live in Australia. So we should assimilate and act like Australians. How can we be accepted and fit in if we're still thinking of Palestine and speaking in Arabic? Multiculturalism is a joke. We need to mix more" (185).
Leila, a long-time friend of Amal's, has a mother who holds a disdain for her daughter's academic success and at age 16 is already bringing suitors to the house to meet her daughter for marriage consideration. Leila's mother was never educated and all that she has comes from being married. At 16, she thinks Leila should also be concentrating on her future as a wife -- not in college.
Abdel-Fattah doesn't just lay out the generational dilemmas in her own Muslim culture, she lets Amal's non-Muslim friends share their points of view, too.
For example Eileen, one of Amal's best friends at school, is Japanese. Her parents were also immigrants and they push the old culture onto Eileen more than she would like (150). And her friend Josh is Jewish, who has a sister who is marrying a man who is ultra-orthodox. Although Josh's immediate family is not, he knows members of his family would be very unhappy if they knew Amal was one of Josh's close friends. Sometimes, though, he likes to push their buttons by being seen with her.
Amal's mother's friend Cassandra is a British woman who converted to Islam later in life. She rejected Christianity and at first became an atheist. She felt her Christian parents' Christian faith also embraced a deep-seated racism. "Africans, Asians, Arabs, Jews, anybody not of Anglo blood was, in their eyes, inferior" (134).
And Amal's cranky Greek neighbor Mrs. Vaselli discussed coming to Australia as a young immigrant unable to speak the language, married to a new husband and worrying about their future. Her anxiety was so thorough that she miscarried her first children during a health inspector's visit to their restaurant and kept working because she thought what was happening to her body was less important than keeping their business going. But in her heart, Mrs. Vaselli was very dedicated to her religion, and when her only son converted, she stopped talking to him (200). Like Cassandra's parents, his acceptance of another religion was a betrayal.
As if the difficult stories of acceptance and finding their way wasn't enough, Abdel-Fattah delivers Amal her greatest fear in a rich white girl at school named Tia. The animosity exists between them before Amal ever put on her hijab and it only gets uglier as the book goes on. The author gives Tia every opportunity to voice her anti-immigrant opinions. "We knew they were trouble as soon as we saw them. They just had that look you know" she says of a group of Asian men at a nightclub she visits (279). "My dad's right you know...He predicts Anglo Australian will be extinct in this country soon" (280)!
But Tia isn't the only hurdle Amal faces. Classmates thing her parents force her to wear the hijab and can't believe that she'd make the choice on her own. She's worried about being a member of the debate team and how she'll be treated or judged at traveling meets. She gets turned down for a job because of her hijab. And her principal tries to claim that her hijab is a violation of the school's dress code until her parents intercede on her behalf.
Abdel-Fattah does a thorough job of outlining how much grief immigrants and minorities contend with simply by existing within the dominant culture each day. But I appreciate how she wrote Amal with a strong backbone to not only stick up for herself but for her family and friends. I like how she analyzes what her role is in Aussie culture and how important the diversity of those in her life has influenced her to have a bigger, broader perspective of the world at large.
"When I think about it, it's mainly been the immigrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie. To be a hyphenated Australian... It's their stories and confrontations and pains and joys which have empowered me to know myself, challenged me to embrace my identity" (359).
4. REVIEW EXCERPT(S) and AWARDS
Australian Book of the Year Award
Astralian Book Industry Award
ALA Popular Books for Young Adults 2013
From Booklist
"More than the usual story of the immigrant teen's conflict with her traditional parents, the funny, touching contemporary narrative will grab teens everywhere."
From Publishers Weekly
"This debut should speak to anyone who has felt like an outsider for any reason."
5. CONNECTIONS
For American students, their understanding of Islam may be limited to what they see in the news each day. Studying different cultures in literature, history, and culture is a great way for children to grow their understanding of diversity. Taking a deeper dive into different cultures can only broaden children's' horizons.
Reading Does My Head Look Big in This? alongside non-fiction books that explain more of the diverse cultures that exist in Amal's social circle will be a great starting point for students to learn more about Muslim and immigrant culture.
Consider using Carla Mooney's Comparative Religion: Investigate the World Through Religious Tradition, which is an easy-to-read non-fiction book on five major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The author uses graphic cartoon panels and has links in the book to internet sources (videos, pictures, etc) that may interest students. (ISBN: 978-1-61930-305-8).
In addition, Sumdul Ali-Karamali's Growing Up Muslim: Understanding the Beliefs and Practices of Islam will is a great resource for understanding the generations of challenges that exist in the Middle East and the celebrations, challenges, and faith that Muslim people bring with them no matter where they live in the world. (ISBN: 978-0385740968).
