Photographs and Memory in Malaka Gharib’s “I Was Their American Dream”

Recently, I reread Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream. Gharib’s graphic memoir details coming of age as a first generation American immigrant, the daughter of a Filipino mother and Egyptian father. She explores the ways that she struggled with her identity, and the ways that she felt pulled, a lot of the time, in at least three directions in this regard: her mother’s culture, her father’s culture, and white American culture. All of these aspects are important to discuss, and they are topics that I will talk about with students when I teach Gharib’s text next fall. However, today I want to focus on chapter one where Gharib narrates her parents’ lives before the immigrated to America, their meeting in America, and their divorce.

What intrigued me about chapter one, apart from the narrative, was the stylistic choices that Gharib deploys when conveying her family’s past. She frames her parents’ histories around photographs, something not unique to her text, but what caught my attention was the way that she brings us, as readers, into the photographs alongside her. Gharib begins by presenting three horizontal panels on a page. In the panels, she opens her parents’ dresser drawer and pulls out photographs.

The first panel shows the younger Gharib looking around to see if anyone is watching her as…