(Review) The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Ultimately, The Convert was unsatisfying to me because it seemed like the big reveal was "Maryam/Margaret/Peggy is crazy*." Maryam Jameelah (born Margaret Marcus, Peggy to her family) is an American Jewish woman raised on Long Island who converted to Islam and moved to Pakistan in the early 1960s, when she was in her late 20s. The book is structured around Maryam's conversion, her struggles with fitting in (or not) in both Long Island and Pakistan and the possibility of her mental illness. Told through reconstructions/edits of Maryam's letters (edited by the author) and the author's investigative journalism, the book reveals after we read through a bunch of very articulate letters from Maryam that Maryam has spent time in a mental institution, in both New York and Pakistan. Surprise! People with mental illnesses can be good writers with logical trains of thought!
In both of the cultural contexts Maryam lived in, she was an outcast - in the U.S. she was seen as freakishly modest and sexually frigid (a la her Freudian psychoanalysts), in Pakistan she was too bold and outspoken. In both places, her quite-to-anger temper was a defining feature of her interactions with other people. I would have liked to read more about sexism in both of these contexts and how the mental institution solution was not necessarily about Maryam herself.
Throughout the book, the author alternates between using the names Maryam, Margaret, and Peggy, as if to underscore her crazy. I mean, really, what kind of woman uses three names? Only a crazy one!
There are lots of interesting things about this book, but I think the author could've gone deeper in interrogating the ways in which mental illness has been used against Maryam throughout her life.
*I use the word "crazy" throughout this review to capture the dismissive way in which mental illness is treated in our culture. It's not a word I condone the use of, because it frequently is used to delegitimize a person's experiences and ideas about the world.
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