The Theme Of Crescent By Diana Abu-Jaber

The Theme of Crescent Crescent, a book by Diana Abu-Jaber, is about a cook at Nadia’s Café named Sirine, a middle aged woman who is Iraqi-American. Sirine lives with her uncle, a man who works at a local university and is an avid story teller. Sirine’s uncle meets a new professor, Hanif, at the university, and encourages Sirine to pursue him. Hanif, also called Han, is a brilliant man from Iraq, but he is also a man with deep secrets and scars from his past. The two begin a romantic relationship, but all too soon things within the relationship begin to crumble. There are speculations of cheating, actual cheating, and lack of trust that begin to come between Sirine and Han. Eventually Han heads back to his home in Iraq because he feels to need to see his mother, Sirine is utterly heartbroken by this. Sirine believes that he has
“Every time he does this, he tells himself, it is the last time. It is no career for a young man” (Abu-Jaber 39). Abdelrahman has a bad habit of selling himself into slavery and then to swim away from his owner. He only does it for the money; he wants more out of life than that. As the story progresses we discover that he wants to become an actor. He gets away from selling himself into slavery and travels to “Hal’Awud,” commonly known as Hollywood. Abdelrahman finally makes it to a place where he can fulfill his dreams, but it was not that simple. He continually runs into challenges and is not as big of a star as he had hoped he would be. I think this portrays the theme because he had hope for his dreams and he was patient enough to achieve it. He did not give up on his goal even when he felt like he was not making any progress. His perseverance eventually brought him to Egypt where he was reunited with his family. Abdelrahman was not the only patient character within the short story; his mother and the mermaid are also good examples of