"Abu El Banat (Father of Daughters)"
This is a story about a single, blue-collar father in the
booming ’50s. It is about a dysfunctional family, cultural and religious
differences, sibling rivalry and the unconventional view of a mother working
outside the home. It is about an unhappy marriage five kids later, the grief
of separation and the things missed about being a family intact. It is about
being different, normal teenage issues, and about having odd role models. It
is about learning the lessons of sacrifice, unconditional love, the trials
and tears of childhood, about discrimination, a scary world and rebellion.
It is the story about feeling caught somewhere in the middle in a world
where everything seemed black and white. Everyone knows the story of the
single mom. But even today, one might have been hard pressed to find an
immigrant father from Yemen with a swing shift job at a steel plant raising
five children on his own. This man was my father.
