The F Word By Firoozeh Dumas Summary

In “The F Word,” Firoozeh Dumas argues that being an immigrant in America is hard, especially when it comes to names. In her essay, Dumas gives people a sense of what it is like being an immigrant in the U.S. and have a foreign name; the struggle of wanting people to accept them turns immigrants to change the biggest part of their identity, their names. Right from the beginning, Dumas states that people in America need to open their linguistic horizons and give learning new sounds and names a chance. The people who do not attempt to learn these names are limiting themselves to the simplistic names that have become the norm in American society. By not conforming to American name standards, immigrants are written off as people who are not worth getting to know or even hire. Some immigrants feel that changing their names will help them assimilate to their new surroundings because people will be more accepting. After struggling with her name and the negative attitudes it provokes, Dumas decides to look into adding an Anglican name to her own, in …show more content…
She has made friends at school who remember her name and even invite her to their houses, ever since she has added the Anglican name to her own; an adverse effect of this decision is that people think she is American, so they tell her how they really feel about her and other Middle Easterners. This feeling of being fake to the people she is friends with causes her to go back to going by her first name once she goes off to college. After going by Firoozeh all throughout college, the author struggles to get a job after graduation, even though she was academically successful. Dumas senses that her issue in getting interviews is not due to her academic major, but in actuality it is her name, so she starts putting Julie on her applications and other documents and immediately starts getting