Does My Head Look Big In This?
February 10th 2008 09:10
A while ago I wrote an article about Randa Abdel-Fattah, click here to see what I had to say and how much I've back-peddled with this review. It's not that I disagree with my optimistic appraisal of Abdel-Fattah or her inspiring status as a potential role-model for young Australians, but what I am at odds with is how excited I sound at the end of said article in regards to reading her debut novel, Does My Head Look Big in This?. I was wrong to be excited. The book sounded good, and Abdel-Fattah's skills as a public speaker (no doubt honed by her dayjob as a lawyer) helped sell the book to me. In light of now having read the actual thing I have to admit that the book isn't actually all that good. Which is a shame, especially as so many people recommended it to me.
The basic premise of Does My Head Look Big in This? seems to be to do Looking for Alibrandi with Muslim-Australians instead of Italian-Australians. The main character, Amal, is a 16 year old muslim girl at a predominantly white-bread anglo-Australian private school. One morning she wakes up and decides that it's time to wear the hijab, the scarf that muslim women wear to cover their hair as part of their faith, and the book follows the consequences of this amongst her friends, family and peers at school.
There are various subplots that pertain to what it means to adhere to the islamic faith within Australian society and the book deals with themes of cultural and social identity and all that jazz. Abdel-Fattah works to dispel many myths about Australian muslims and islam in general, and she writes with a breezy, easygoing style in the hope of making it palatable to the average teen reader. The book has won a lot of praise for it's educational qualities and politcal correctness, and I think a few schools have picked it up as a classroom English text. It was roughly 30 pages into the book when I first had to suppress the urge to spew.
I'm sorry, and I understand the need to combat the common mainstream perceptions of muslim-Australian society, but Does My Head Look Big in This? takes it all too far - offering an embarrassingly politically-correct, squeaky-clean story with a heroine crafted far too self-consciously to the author's designs to educate the assumed bigoted masses of white Australia. I fear she may have been preaching to the converted - those who need educating the most are those who wouldn't touch this book with a 3 metre barge pole, and those who willingly pick up a book with a quirky rom-com style muslim girl on the front probably aren't all that prejudiced to begin with either. Amal comes across as too infallible and overly precocious rather than the headstrong smart-arse she describes herself as. The continuous rallying against the misconceptions of those around her get very tiring to read and after a while it feels like a bad fish-out-of-water sitcom or disney film where the put-upon protagonist teaches her co-stars (in this case mainly made up of up-tight anglos and anglo-wannabe muslims) how to live life and love it.
Maybe my own atheist leanings made it impossible for me to be less than heavily-subjective as this is, after all, a book about remaining faithful to one's religion. As a result I found all the hoo-haring hypocrisy about Amal liking some guy to be terribly overdone and overwrought, and at the end of the day I just found it to be as alienating to me as all the anti-muslim attitudes probably are to the author. I really wanted to like this book but every page of the way I found it a struggle and full of too many subplots with too little substance, and when I reached the last few pages I wasn't convinced that anything of any consequence had really happened since the novel's beginning. In light of this, a more apt title for this book would probably be Muslims are OK, as this is pretty much all the book has to say. Who knows, maybe I just can't read predominantly-girly teen-fiction... there's bound to be at least one whole genre of writing I don't like, and maybe I just found it. That doesn't really excuse my misgivings about this book though, but it should at least dissuade me from reading any other books like it in the future!
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