Our small group discussion on Habibi this past week was very enlightening. My group member posed a question based around the quote “An age, not a place” (Nye, 12). This quote can be interpreted in several different ways. I think this quote represents how times change and that a place can be completely different depending on the current “age”. For example before Liyana’s family travels over to Palestine her Father was imaging how life used to be when he was a boy. Although he knew of the current situation regarding Israel, I believe that Liyana’s Poppy was not completely aware of what life would be like. One point our group talked about was how we felt it was almost unfair how uninformed Liyana was before traveling to a different country. She was unaware of the different cultural traditions. An example of this was when Liyana’s father quickly snapped at her for brushing her hair in public as if she was expected to know acts like these were not socially acceptable. We also discussed the issue of various cultural groups being stereotyped. This novel is very one-sided and does not depict the Jews in Israel fairly. However, we talked about how difficult it is for an author to fairly represent both cultural groups. If a Jewish author was to write this same novel, she or he could most likely misrepresent Arabs in Palestine. This was an interesting topic to talk about in our small groups. Hopefully in class we will discuss these issues more and how to determine what novels are appropriate in the classroom.
*the picture of the Habibi book was found at http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.simonsays.com/assets/isbn/0689825234/C_0689825234.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm%3Ftab%3D1%26pid%3D409833&h=250&w=146&sz=15&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=6gqzmvVRJEiJiM:&tbnh=111&tbnw=65&prev=/images%3Fq%3DHabibi%2Bbook%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
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