Uncovering Silent Secrets: The Untold Conversations in “What My Father and I Don’t Talk About”
Susan Muaddi Darraj’s “Baba Peels Apples for Me” is a profoundly moving essay that plots the evolution of a father-daughter relationship within the immigrant, specifically the Palestinian-American immigrant experience, that also beautifully illustrates the universality of love and conflict among parents and their children. The author’s use of the second person makes that universality particularly vivid, although I was also delighted to learn the Arabic equivalent of the evasive no (that in my mother’s mouth was pronounced maybe) is “inshallah,” “if God wills it so.” The essay concludes, painfully and urgently, with a portrait of how father and daughter react to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
