The Road Not Taken: Shedding Xenophobia, Embracing the Other in Umm Zakiyyah’s <i>If I Should Speak<i/>
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v5i1.530Abstract
In Umm Zakiyyah's If I Should Speak (2000), the protagonist, African American Christian Tamika Douglass experiences travelling down the road not taken when she befriends her two minority Muslim American college flatmates, Dee @ Durrah and Aminah. Raised in a predominantly Christian society, Tamika develops a great mistrust of Islam and Muslims. However, her close and personal encounter with the two Muslims transforms her appreciation of the religion. Through Tamika's dialogue with them and personal observations of their daily living, Tamika journeys into the road less travelled by most Americans, one which is foreign albeit close to home. In the course of the narrative, Tamika learns to shed some of the xenophobic attitudes she has adopted growing up in the predominantly non-Muslim environment and embrace the internal conflicts that have crippled her awareness of the “other.†This paper considers the motif of the road as a metaphor for life and explicates how in journeying the road less travelled, Tamika finds a new sense of appreciation of herself and the other.Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Downloads
Published
2011-06-15
How to Cite
M.M., National University of Malaysia (UKM), R., Hashim, National University of Malaysia (UKM), R. S., Yusof, National University of Malaysia (UKM), N. M., & Zalipour, National University of Malaysia (UKM), A. (2011). The Road Not Taken: Shedding Xenophobia, Embracing the Other in Umm Zakiyyah’s <i>If I Should Speak<i/>. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 5(1), 43–53. https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v5i1.530
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Copyrights of all materials published in Asiatic are held exclusively by the Journal and the respective author/s. Any reproduction of material from the journal without proper acknowledgement or prior permission will result in the infringement of intellectual property laws.