Ten Things I Hate About Me

Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Ten Things I Hate About Me (2006), a novel for young adults, concerns a sixteen-year-old Lebanese-Muslim girl Jamilah Towfeek who, residing in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia, deals with the everyday tribulations of both overt and systemic racism in her community while coping with the profound social and physical changes of puberty. For years, Towfeek successfully hides her identity from her peers by naming herself Jamie, wearing blue contacts, and dying her hair blonde. When Towfeek transitions to high school at Guildford, known for its de facto racial segregation, she anticipates the struggle of “passing” as white, referred to colloquially as “Anglo.” The novel was widely acclaimed for illuminating the difficulties of identity erasure in adolescence and how it uniquely informs one’s psychological development.

The novel begins by characterizing Towfeek’s double life. When at home or with her family, she is a highly loyal daughter and poses as her Lebanese family’s golden child. Her elder sister is devoted to Islam, opting to wear a hijab in public despite the obvious scrutiny and discrimination it is met within Australia. Her father, a widow, is upset that her sister has opted out of college to lead a life of political activism. Her older brother is the black sheep, exploiting his status as a male to drink and sleep around despite their father’s protests. Jamilah, who gives off no overt signals of rebellion, feels confined by her father, who only lets her socialize when it takes place at an Arabic school, or madrasa. There, she is a talented drummer for an Arabic band, but she longs to attend high school parties and dances. She hides her father’s strictness at school, feeling that her friends would never understand due to her second identity as Towfeek. If they knew she was Muslim, she believes they would be too ignorant to see her as anything other than a terrorist.

In high school, Towfeek develops a crush on Peter, a bully who openly exerts his whiteness and other factors of privilege on his peers. He constantly issues racist taunts, while she attaches unhealthily to him for his popularity. She resolves to find a way to go to the formal dance with him while hiding her Muslim identity. Meanwhile, she sustains an online relationship with a person who goes by “John,” to whom she divulges everything about her family and social life as a form of coping with an intolerant social environment in which she finds no sufficient representation. These details include the fact that her mother died of a heart attack when she was nine, her hopes for the future, her frustrations with school, and her father’s helicopter parenting. She also sends him a list of ten self-deprecating things she “hates” about herself, a motif from which the book gets its title. Despite her forwardness online, she struggles to translate a candid digital persona into a real one.



As Towfeek manages these multiple identities, she becomes entangled in the stress of keeping up appearances and starts crumbling. She manages to find some solace in a new friendship with Timothy, a boy who is constantly antagonized by Peter but who seems unaffected by him. Timothy’s tolerance and dismissal of Peter leads Towfeek to associate him with John from the Internet. After being paired for a school assignment, Towfeek and Timothy grow closer, until a critical point when her whole school learns that she is of Muslim heritage. Though her social status falls in some ways, she realizes that she is strong and resilient and that all heritages have, and deserve, an inherent dignity. Finally, disengaging from the popularity contest that is so entwined in problems of whiteness and general hostility, Towfeek comes to appreciate her identity and come to terms with her father.

At the novel’s end, she has transformed from juggling multiple identities that barely pass, to having one integrated identity that recognizes and rejects problematic notions, choosing dignity over the unwinnable contest of popularity. Ten Things I Hate About Me is a bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, that is built for the globalizing world but examines its unprecedented challenges.