The Language of Baklava

The author of The Language of Baklava, Diana Abu-Jaber is at the center of this very personal memoir. She is the American-born daughter of a Jordanian immigrant father and an American mother of German and Irish background, and this is the key to the dynamic of the book: She grew up in a liberal, progressive suburb of New York, but at home her father tried to maintain the morals and gender norms of Jordanian culture. As the first-person narrator, Diana describes these experiences in close detail, including her feelings, fears, and self-questioning. The book follows her life from early childhood through to her thirties, tracking her development from child to adult through her tumultuous teenage years. She also describes how she became a writer and how she chose the topics and themes that inform her books: family, home, roots, and identity. Her experience as an Arab American resonate with those of other immigrant backgrounds, as she says when talking about her novel Arabian Jazz: “[P]eople from many different cultural backgrounds—Italian, Chinese, Russian, African—tell me they come from a family just like the one in the book” (318).

Diana is a spirited, creative character from childhood, retorting, “English, you silly” at the TV presenter who makes fun of her Arabic surname (3), which clashes with her Northern European appearance.