Rebuttal to ’a Proposal I Never Thought Id Consider’

Brian Rohn

English comp. 2 Amodio

Rebuttal paper ‘A proposal I never thought I’d consider’

Sabaa Saleem is a Pakistani woman who is about to graduate college and is torn between the modern day American culture she’s grown up in and her cultural background. Sabaa moved to the U.S. after only living in Pakistan her first year of life. Ever since she came to America she has known that one day she’s going to have to live with a person for the rest of her life of her parents choosing. Sabaa has come to terms with this and thinks that although she lives in America and she can do whatever she wants after she is eighteen she feels that respecting her parents wishes is what she has to do. Most of this reasoning is because her dad has had recent health problems and her parents haven’t been as strict as many Pakistani parents can be; letting her do things such as stay out late, letting her attend college away from home, and allowing her to study journalism instead of medicine. She believes that as long as they have been there for her and done many things for her growing up as they have she feels obligated to have an arranged marriage by them.

Arranged marriage is a thing of the past. There’s no reason in this day and age for old eastern culture to interfere with every day western culture. Sabaa grew up in the united states with movies and books and magazines and no matter where you go in America you will see these things and a lot of things in the books movies and magazines have to do with freedom of love and true love. The fact that she was brought up in a lackadaisical Pakistani family where her brother refuses to have an arranged marriage and her parents have accepted that fact she should not feel obligated to have to go through with the arranged marriage just because she was born into a family that happens to be from Pakistan. Sabaa says that she has never been intimate with anyone and that every time she senses someone wants to try and ask her out she either tells them she’s not sure about her sexuality or she runs away saying she has to be somewhere. Sabaas parents goals for her in life are for her to get her degree then get married. Sabaa is now a semester away from a degree and dreading the fact that she’s going to have to meet the man she will marry in the spring of the up coming year. She has even taken a final class of little importance so that she can have another semester of college but will be forced to graduate after