A Country Called AmreekaWhat does American history look and feel like in the eyes and skin of Arab Americans? In A Country Called Amreeka:  Arab Roots, American Stories (Free Press; October 6, 2009; $25.00), Syrian-American civil right lawyer Alia Malek weaves the stories of the Arab-American community (3.5 million strong) into the story of America, using lively and moving narratives of real people who have lived history all around the country.  Just as the recent award-winning National Geographic Entertainment film AMREEKA, by Cherien Dabis, blazed new ground in its depiction of a mother and son from the West Bank trying to assimilate in America, Alia Malek’s In A Country Called Amreeka brings to captivating life true stories of a wide variety of Arab Americans navigating the divide between their original heritage and their new world in the United States.

Ms. Malek will present her book during a West Coast tour, in Orange County at Chapman University on Monday, November 9; in Los Angeles at Levantine Cultural Center on Nov. 11, in San Jose at the Arab Cultural Center on Nov. 12, and in San Francisco at the Arab Cultural Center on Nov. 13.

Organized around a timeline, each chapter corresponds to one historical event as it occurred in the life of one Arab American, allowing readers to live that moment in history in the skin of an individual Arab American. From the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing in 1963 to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Malek introduces an ensemble cast that represents the diversity within Arab America itself.  

We meet Luba, the wife of a Palestinian refugee who yearns for her hometown of Ramallah as she tries to establish a new life for herself and her family in the outskirts of Baltimore.  We endure Norma Odeh’s horror when her husband Alex, former director of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, is murdered for his political stance. Meanwhile, Rabih, a homosexual Arab Muslim in the Midwest, is afraid to be gay in the Arab world and afraid to be Arab in America. (Until 1990, homosexuals were banned from immigrating to the U.S). And we squirm alongside Lance Corporal Abraham Al-Thaibani in Iraq, where, as the only Arabic speaking soldier in his unit, he must explain to a young Iraqi mother why her two little girls were blown up on a bridge by U.S. soldiers. Civilians taunt, “You should be ashamed of yourself.  You are Arab!  You are coming to an Arab country to kill Arabs?”

Malek traces the Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinian Christians who made up the first Great Migration starting in 1880 and consisted of largely unskilled laborers, who found work in the mines and opened grocery stores in Birmingham, AL.  She examines the effect of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, when refugees from Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Yemen sought asylum from the political upheaval in their own countries to settle in Detroit and work as employees of the Ford Motor Company.  She looks at the politicalization and discrimination of Arab Americans in the late ’60s and ’70s, as the country reacts to the energy crisis, PLO terrorism, and the Iranian revolution. And of course she explores how the devastation and fall-out of 9/11 impacted Arab Americans across the nation.

There are Christians and Muslims; naturalized and native-born citizens; Southerners, Midwesterners, East Coasters, West Coasters, and Texans; urban, suburban, and rural residents; Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Egyptians, and Yeminis; women and men; rich and poor; adults and children; lovers and fighters.  “The purpose is not to separate them out,” says Malek, “but to fold their experience into the mosaic of American history and deepen our understanding of who we Americans are.”

Samuel G. Freedman, author of Letters to a Young Journalist and Jew vs. Jew, proclaims, “If you’re not an Arab-American, then it’s really imperative for you to read this fascinating book…. Alia Malek brings the entire spectrum of Arab America to vivid, three-dimensional life.”  While Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Habibi, says In A Country Called Amreeka “should be a textbook across the nation.”  

For more information on Alia Malek's tour, or to arrange for an interview, contact Levantine Cultural Center, 310.657.5511