Bapsi Sidhwa, a Parsee (Zoroastrian) writer of Pakistani descent, was born in Karachi, then part of pre-partition India, and all her early fiction is set in Pakistan or India. She immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, and An American Brat is her only novel set in the United States.

The novel is narrated from the point of view of a young Parsee Pakistani girl who belongs to the Junglewalla clan featured in Sidhwa’s earlier novel The Crow Eaters (1978). Feroza Ginwalla, the teenage protagonist, is sent by her mother, Zareen, to visit her uncle Manek in the United States. Zareen wishes to dissuade Feroza from following the edicts of the increasingly fundamentalist Islamic society in Pakistan under General Zia in the late 1970s, and she hopes a vacation in America will cure her daughter’s conservatism.

In the first half of the novel, Manek, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is Feroza’s tour guide through New York and Boston, and he initiates the privileged upper-class Pakistani girl into American life. He teaches her basic skills such as how to use deodorant, tear open plastic wrappers, and eventually to come out of her sheltered existence to become independent and responsible for herself. Feroza attends college, first in Idaho and then in Colorado.

She learns about becoming American through her roommates and classmates—Jo, whose father owns a diner and whose siblings live on welfare; Gwen, an African-American woman who climbs out of extreme poverty through a wealthy WASP boyfriend, and inexplicably vanishes (perhaps murdered) by the novel’s end; Shashi, Feroza’s Indian boyfriend who is an expert at benefiting from the allegedly exploitative capitalist “system”; and finally, David Press, her shy, Jewish boyfriend to whom she becomes engaged.

By the novel’s end, Feroza has adapted so thoroughly to American life that when her mother visits the United States to break off her imminent marriage with David, Feroza refuses to do so and instead faces the wrath of her family and ostracism by the Parsee community. The once sexually repressed Feroza also learns to take control of her body and to express desires that are forbidden by her own traditional society.

An American Brat is a novel of manners. Sidhwa’s strength lies in her social realism and acute observation of details of the characters’ first impressions of America and the differences between Pakistani, Parsee, and American attitudes, values, and ways of life. The depiction of the Parsee cultural mores, the multiple well-rounded comic characters of Feroza and Manek’s extended family, the religious rituals before Feroza’s departure for the United States, the elaborate preparations for Manek’s wedding, the tragicomic drama of the Junglewallas’ “family conference” (268) and “formidable think tank” (272) in response to Feroza’s wish to marry a non-Parsee or “parjat,” are all hilarious.

The comic novel does at times seem a bit superficial, and, as one reviewer suggests, it reads like a travelogue of an international student’s first impressions and stereotypical perceptions of America and Americans, including a focus on sex, drugs, violence, materialism, urban poverty and homelessness, and impermanent relationships. Nevertheless, Sidhwa’s style, “boisterous, slightly ribald, and ingenuously irreverent” (69) continues to engage the reader.

The novel is also a bildungsroman, a genre that, according to critic Feroza Jussawalla, is characteristic of the postcolonial novel. According to Jussawalla, “The bildungsroman journey seems to be the basis of every so-called postcolonial . . . novel. It is the initiation process that leads not just to a general self-awakening process, but to an awakening into one’s culture, one’s nationalism and to an understanding of one’s self as located in a particular place and in a particular cultural-political framework” (80).

But the journey of the awakening in An American Brat is specifically feminine. Sidhwa’s works are informed by feminism, and on the treatment of women in patriarchal societies. An American Brat ends with Feroza’s full Americanization: after David breaks up with her, she realizes “she could only do the healing right here in America. . . . She knew that there was no going back for her” (311), as she values her privacy, individualism, space, and First World luxuries too much to relinquish them.

Sources

Allen, Diane S. “Reading the Body Politic in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels: The Crow Eaters, Ice-Candy Man, and An American Brat,” South Asian Review 18, no. 15 (December 1994): 69–80.

Jussawalla, Feroza. “Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa.” In Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, 197–221. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

Kapadia, Novy. “Expatriate Experience and Theme of Marriage in An American Brat.” In The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa, edited by R. K. Dhawan and Novy Kapadia, 187–199. New Delhi: Prestige, 1996.

Powers, Janet M. “Bapsi Sidhwa.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 350–356. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Sidhwa, Bapsi. An American Brat. Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 1993.

Categories: Diaspora Criticism, Literature, Novel Analysis

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