I was sucked in immediately. Chapter 1, page 1:
“Because I love colors.”
That was my answer to my furious father when he saw me with a painted face in a clown suit.
He expected to find me studying law in a prominent London school.
“No Dad, I hated law school. I enrolled in the college of clowns. I’m swimming in an ocean of colors. You can see I have a red nose, two silver eyebrows, and some pink teardrops. In law school I could only see boring lifeless gray or dark brown colors everywhere.“
My father looked at me disgustedly and roared angrily like an old lion.
“Damn you! Damn your painted face!”
He was on fire. I was cool.
Then straight to the morning of 9/11:
Only Abdullah was still sitting with Khadija next to him, stern, tedious and gloomy. His mouth was shut and his upper lip was covering his missing teeth.
“Is Khadija O.K.?”
I never presumed to ask Khadija herself. I must ask the husband.
“Oh, nothing.”
He replied and turned to look at his wife.
“Do you have a question for me Abdullah?”
He kept looking at me with his blazing eyes.
Khadija rose and got ready to leave. Abdullah’s face was disfigured with rage and anger. He drew himself up and began following Khadija.
“JEWS DID IT… BASTARDS… DIRTY JEWS! ”
He did not look back. I wish he could see my face before walking out; my face like a frozen piece of ice trying to hold back the tears. His ignorance made me cry, my very old habit.
…and straight back to 1974 in the second chapter. The book ends on the afternoon of 9/11. But it is not about 9/11.
The chapter construction reveals both the author’s theatre training as well as his maturity as a writer.
Camel Jockey Go Home belongs in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction genre. The author discovers that an unusually large group of rich Iranian kids, not much younger than himself, have been sent to Salt Lake to attend the public high schools. This leads to his being hired as their teacher just as the Iranian Revolution begins heating up, followed by the Hostage Crises a year later. As if the sole, captive member of the audience for a 10-year long Vaudeville act, the author watches from his classroom in Utah as his fellow countrymen come and go; first, as free people, then as pawns in the Iran-Iraq war and finally, as escaped prisoners seeking political asylum along with their torturers.
Throughout the same period, the author as teacher is virtually the first point of contact for the unending waves of incoming refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Russia, Sudan and Somalia, all the while using humor to the petty and sometimes cruel irony in the collision between cultures that infuse his daily existence.
Do you remember Dr. Smiley, the late South High school principal? In three years he never, once stepped into my classroom. I could have been running a Madrassa for the Taliban.
Jahanbin does not indulge in his own victim-hood as a light brown man with an accent. Instead, the author delights in the special assignments given him to pursue his American benefactor’s own inter school district political agenda.
Despite being personally persecuted in more ways than any fiction could concoct, the author shrugs off his own persecution in a way that reveals an utterly foreign perspective of justice that for me personally, enriched my appreciation of what it means to be an American.
This is the book every American high schooler should read for its accessibility and its examination of xenophobia through the author’s and his characters’ own xenophobia.
The author’s culture and maturity as a writer and produces with Camel Jockey Go Home, an exotic but also distinctly American memoir as exciting and devourable, as it is daring.
Are you absolutely sure you want to delete this article? This process cannot be undone and is permanent.
Yes, Delete This Article
Are you absolutely sure you want to remove this article? This process cannot be undone and is permanent.
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I was sucked in immediately. Chapter 1, page 1:
“Because I love colors.”
That was my answer to my furious father when he saw me with a painted face in a clown suit.
He expected to find me studying law in a prominent London school.
“No Dad, I hated law school. I enrolled in the college of clowns. I’m swimming in an ocean of colors. You can see I have a red nose, two silver eyebrows, and some pink teardrops. In law school I could only see boring lifeless gray or dark brown colors everywhere.“
My father looked at me disgustedly and roared angrily like an old lion.
“Damn you! Damn your painted face!”
He was on fire. I was cool.
Then straight to the morning of 9/11:
Only Abdullah was still sitting with Khadija next to him, stern, tedious and gloomy. His mouth was shut and his upper lip was covering his missing teeth.
“Is Khadija O.K.?”
I never presumed to ask Khadija herself. I must ask the husband.
“Oh, nothing.”
He replied and turned to look at his wife.
“Do you have a question for me Abdullah?”
He kept looking at me with his blazing eyes.
Khadija rose and got ready to leave. Abdullah’s face was disfigured with rage and anger. He drew himself up and began following Khadija.
“JEWS DID IT… BASTARDS… DIRTY JEWS! ”
He did not look back. I wish he could see my face before walking out; my face like a frozen piece of ice trying to hold back the tears. His ignorance made me cry, my very old habit.
…and straight back to 1974 in the second chapter. The book ends on the afternoon of 9/11. But it is not about 9/11.
The chapter construction reveals both the author’s theatre training as well as his maturity as a writer.
Camel Jockey Go Home belongs in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction genre. The author discovers that an unusually large group of rich Iranian kids, not much younger than himself, have been sent to Salt Lake to attend the public high schools. This leads to his being hired as their teacher just as the Iranian Revolution begins heating up, followed by the Hostage Crises a year later. As if the sole, captive member of the audience for a 10-year long Vaudeville act, the author watches from his classroom in Utah as his fellow countrymen come and go; first, as free people, then as pawns in the Iran-Iraq war and finally, as escaped prisoners seeking political asylum along with their torturers.
Throughout the same period, the author as teacher is virtually the first point of contact for the unending waves of incoming refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Russia, Sudan and Somalia, all the while using humor to the petty and sometimes cruel irony in the collision between cultures that infuse his daily existence.
Do you remember Dr. Smiley, the late South High school principal? In three years he never, once stepped into my classroom. I could have been running a Madrassa for the Taliban.
Jahanbin does not indulge in his own victim-hood as a light brown man with an accent. Instead, the author delights in the special assignments given him to pursue his American benefactor’s own inter school district political agenda.
Despite being personally persecuted in more ways than any fiction could concoct, the author shrugs off his own persecution in a way that reveals an utterly foreign perspective of justice that for me personally, enriched my appreciation of what it means to be an American.
This is the book every American high schooler should read for its accessibility and its examination of xenophobia through the author’s and his characters’ own xenophobia.
The author’s culture and maturity as a writer and produces with Camel Jockey Go Home, an exotic but also distinctly American memoir as exciting and devourable, as it is daring.
Are you absolutely sure you want to delete this article? This process cannot be undone and is permanent.
Yes, Delete This Article
Are you absolutely sure you want to remove this article? This process cannot be undone and is permanent.
Yes, Remove This Article
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