About the Author:
Fawzia Afzal-Khan is University Distinguished Scholar, Professor of English, and Director of Women and Gender Studies at Montclair State University, NJ. She is author and editor of four previous books, including the bestselling anthology Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out. She has written extensively on Pakistani culture and politics, and is a published playwright and poet. She is also a trained vocalist in the North Indo-Pak classical tradition.
From Booklist:
Not your usual memoir, this sharp, contemporary coming-of-age story swings back and forth over 30 years, from Afzal-Khan’s growing up in Pakistan in a middle-class urban family in the 1980s with her tight circle of girlfriends, through her coming to America as a graduate student, and now as an academic. Always, she weaves her personal conflicts and her country’s political history into the story: her fury at the extremists’ suppression of the poor, of women, and of religious minorities and her equally harsh criticism of her “bourgeois decadent” Westernized family (not for her the view of the U.S. as paradise for immigrants). She is a published poet, and her wordplay is wry and intense, both diatribes against “religious claptrap” and also at her “m/other,” who orders her daughter not to read so much or men won’t want her. Best of all is the irony of the Muslim daughter’s own conflict with her “s/kin.” Living abroad, an emancipated intellectual woman, how can it be that it is Hemingway’s machismo that gives her the courage she needs “to fly from home and back again”? --Hazel Rochman
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