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Bezig met laden... Brown Boy: A Memoirdoor Omer Aziz
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Aziz’s memoir follows the familiar arch of the immigrant/minority story in which the protagonist works hard, overcomes racism and poverty, and finds success. His trajectory: Working class Pakistani family in a poor Toronto neighborhood, the shock of finding himself among privileged whites in college, adventures in Oxford and Yale, and then on to the corridors of power. The book is at its most interesting when Aziz goes deeper into particularities: the fear of violence in the masjid, the fear of violence (again) in the ghettos of Paris, the suspicion from both Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem, the tokenism and politics of Yale, and the racism in Trudeau’s administration. There are some unexplained holes in his story: Are we really to believe his life miraculously changed from shiftless "goon" (his term) to scholarship recipient just from seeing Obama speak on TV? What happened between graduation and becoming a foreign policy advisor to the Canadian prime minister? Aziz writes well, if at times too melodramatically for my taste, and I kept thinking of him as the anti-Richard Rodriguez (the author of Hunger of Memory) — instead of falling for the myths of meritocracy and assimilation, Aziz says he wants to help open the world for other Brown people. Let's hope he does. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
In a tough neighbourhood on the outskirts of Toronto, miles away from wealthy white downtown, Omer Aziz struggles to find his place as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy. He fears the violence and despair of the world around him, and sees a dangerous path ahead, succumbing to aimlessness, apathy and rage. In his senior year of high school, Aziz quickly begins to realise that education can open up the wider world. But as he falls in love with books, and makes his way to Queen's University in Ontario, Sciences Po in Paris, Cambridge University in England and finally Yale Law School, he continually confronts his own feelings of doubt and insecurity at being an outsider, a brown-skinned boy in an elite white world. He is searching for community and identity, asking questions of himself and those he encounters, and soon finds himself in difficult situations. Weaving together his powerful personal narrative with the books and friendships that move him, Aziz wrestles with the contradiction of feeling like an Other and his desire to belong to a Western world that never quite accepts him. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)971.07092History and Geography North America Canada Canada Canada 2000-LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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I thought the book was an honest rendering of his experiences, but there were two things with which I was not comfortable. The first was the opening chapter of the book in which the author was pulled out of a group of white tourists to be interrogated by Israeli police? Was this supposed to be a political statement? The second was that his quest to become more highly educated happened in an instant, almost miraculous sudden awakening.
Other than those two issues, the book addresses the issues of a person of color trying to “make it” in an elite, dominant white society. I especially liked the last chapter in which the author visits Pakistan to learn more about his roots. ( )