{"id":10722,"date":"2025-09-08T08:00:32","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T16:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=10722"},"modified":"2025-09-06T14:19:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T22:19:18","slug":"the-search-for-self-what-is-home-mum-by-sabba-khan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=10722","title":{"rendered":"The Search for Self: What Is Home, Mum?<\/em> by Sabba Khan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"WhatWhen I was contacted to do a backlist review in honor of Street Noise Books<\/a>\u2019 5th<\/sup> anniversary, I was delighted, in no small part because it meant exploring the offerings of an up-and-coming graphic novel publisher that focuses on nonfiction and memoir by underrepresented voices.<\/p>\n

My attention was immediately captured by What Is Home, Mum?<\/em>, a graphic memoir by Sabba Khan, a second-generation Pakistani immigrant living in London. Brace yourselves, because this is about to get personal! What drew me to this one was my fascination with the author\u2019s background, one with some similarities to my own (and also some key differences): my father was also an immigrant to London as a young man, born in India a few years before Partition and then raised in Pakistan afterward, since the family was Muslim. He moved to London, went to university there, lived there for over 15 years before meeting my mother (an American) and coming to the U.S.<\/p>\n

Khan\u2019s family immigrated to a part of London called Plaistow. I am familiar with Plaistow because a really good friend of my dad\u2019s, whom he immigrated with\u2014my uncle Salim\u2014still lived in Plaistow until his death a number of years ago. I\u2019ve been<\/em> to Plaistow, three or four times at least. Another similarity: My dad was part of that same South Asian diaspora that can be traced back in a straight line to Partition. And my dad\u2019s family is Muslim, although they practice Islam a bit differently, and his cultural background is quite different, having been raised in huge cities like Delhi and Karachi, while Khan\u2019s family is from the Punjab & Kashmir region. (Another eerie echo: I have a cousin named Sabah, although it isn\u2019t that uncommon of a name among Muslims, as far as I know, which isn\u2019t very far, admittedly.)<\/p>\n

\"page<\/a>
Click to embiggen. (c) Street Noise Books<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What really resonated, though, were the issues of heritage, culture, and identity that pervade the book\u2014some of them questions that have arisen in my own life, although I\u2019m half white American, and my parents divorced when I was a child, making things complicated in a different way. What does it mean to be Pakistani? To be Muslim? To be straddling two cultures and questioning one\u2019s place in both? To have this familial legacy that is a burden in some ways\u2014some visible, some invisible\u2014and, in other ways, a priceless treasure? What is home, indeed?<\/p>\n

Over the years, from childhood to adulthood, the author experienced situations where she was visibly different, and made to feel Othered, as well as times where she lived in a community with a lot of other South Asians and her hijab wasn\u2019t questioned at all. She moved in and out of worlds, but still questioned her place within them, and who she might be one day. It\u2019s a common, perhaps universal, experience for children of immigrants. Who are we in our homes, with our families, within our communities? Who are we when we are just ourselves? Are we X% this and Y% that? Can it be quantified, or does it fluctuate? How much can we self-determine? At what point does self-definition\u2014self-determination\u2014become tantamount to a rejection of where we came from?<\/p>\n

The artwork\u2014there\u2019s another thing that resonates for me; few self-respecting South Asian parents want their kid to study art, but IT HAPPENS (ASK ME HOW I KNOW)\u2014is highly personal and unpretentious in style, weaving from the realistic to the more abstract\/surreal\/symbolic. The structure is loosely chronological, but jumps around a bit in time, driving home the point that our pasts are often there lurking in the background no matter where we are in life. I appreciated the nontraditional aspects of the layout, too: there were some longer passages of narration, but also some pages with an extremely sparse layout, depending on what the author was expressing. I learned a lot reading it, in an artistic sense, and as someone who intends to one day write a graphic memoir of my own.<\/p>\n

\"page<\/a>
Click to embiggen. (c) Street Noise Books<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(Here\u2019s the weirdest little coincidence about the book: my working title for the still-to-be-written graphic memoir, Neither Here nor There<\/em>, popped up as a phrase more than once in What Is Home, Mum?<\/em> Perhaps not so strange, though.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m always intrigued by books about the mixed experience: mixed race, culture, heritage. Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Danzy Senna, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Anzaldua, Marjane Satrapi. This one is a perfect addition to that shelf. Not only does it have personal resonance for me, it has a raw openness, a questioning and questing spirit, that will grab readers and not let them go. I would hand it to any young adult or adult reader with an interest in identity, culture, or personal memoir.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Gina Gagliano for the galley of this book, which you can buy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was contacted to do a backlist review in honor of Street Noise Books\u2019 5th anniversary, I was delighted, in no small part…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117,122,133,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adult-teen-crossover","category-graphically-inclined","category-memorably-memoir","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10722"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10732,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10722\/revisions\/10732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}