A Map of Home

“I wanted to make him laugh, wanted to see his bright white teeth standing on queue in his dark face.”

This line marks the first time in the narrative that Nidali mentions her attraction toward someone. The passage reflects her relative naivety; Nidali does not yet realize what it means when she thinks to herself that she wants to make a boy laugh, creating a moment of dramatic irony. As the narrator of the story, Nidali recounts these events from an adult perspective, knowing what these urges mean for young Nidali.

“She said it the way she said things when she volunteered at the museum: And here is the Islamic arts section, and here is the science wing, and here is a weird explanation of my mother’s death.”

Nidali portrays her mother as reluctant to discuss her mother’s death, showing that Mama can only address it obliquely. The metaphor of Mama’s stories as a museum with separate wings suggests that she compartmentalizes difficult memories. At the same time, Mama makes sure to visit Yia Yia’s grave whenever she is in Egypt, showing that despite her inability to directly deal with the emotional fallout of her mother’s passing, she still feels the impact of it and wants to honor it.

“Take the waves in the water at our feet. They aren’t the same thousand waves, but they aren’t completely different. Maybe people are like those waves, made of the same ocean of souls.”

Mama uses this simile to explain reincarnation to Nidali. This concept adds a layer of depth to Nidali’s understanding of identity. While Nidali grapples throughout the novel with a fragmented sense of identity, this poetic comparison of people and waves implies that, despite external differences, all humans share fundamental commonalities.

“Mama and Baba’s stories had a very polished quality, and usually featured God being someone’s secretary. Their fights were about stories, and their fights and stories were like myths, told and retold. In this way, Mama and Baba became my Gods.”

These lines illustrate Nidali’s point of view as a young child. During the first several years of her life, Nidali views her parents—and specifically their conflicts—as the ruling forces of their household. However, this view shifts later in the novel. As she grows older, Nidali no longer views her parents as all-powerful and fearsome; by the end of the narrative, she has become emboldened and learns to defy them.

“Then I’d repeat to myself, ‘ana ana, ana ana, ana ana?—Am I am I am I am I am I am I?’”

Nidali spends time contemplating her existence. This line illustrates that identity and existence are tied up with language. In contrast to the English translation, in Arabic the words “ana ana” evoke a mirrored effect, suggesting an imperfectness when Nidali attempts to translate facets of her thoughts.

“Mama left. I was assigned the dirty pink bathroom, the watering plants that droop all over the apartment, and the manuar…”

Nidali begins a chapter with this simple sentence—“Mama left.” The use of understatement, followed by a mundane tangent, makes the story more dramatic by contrast once she reveals the details of the incident: Mama didn’t just leave; she was stranded in the desert.

“We looked like refugees, standing as though nailed to the dirty floor, stunned at her early arrival.”

This line ties the greater events of displacement and wartime conflict to the site of the home. With Mama gone, the rest of the family seems disrupted and displaced—refugees rather than inhabitants of their own home.

“Apparently satisfied, she slipped them on and, once outside, said, ‘First my land, now my Guccis!’”

This line interjects humor into an otherwise bleak situation: a strip search along the border. With this breezy line, Jarrar evokes the concepts of a homeland and displacement, implying that the speaker is Palestinian.

“I was afraid and tired, and I didn’t understand why we had just been treated so poorly for so long.”

As a child, Nidali endures immense hardship, and she doesn’t always comprehend the full extent of her experiences. She knows that her family has been treated unfairly, but she does not yet connect it to geopolitical conflict or her Palestinian heritage. This allows Jarrar to explore a wide range of Nidali’s childhood experiences since she places similarly significant weight on her schooling and crushes.

“It was on mornings like these, when I stood in the doorway of their bedroom and spied on their failed artistry, that I questioned the reasoning behind all this studying.”

Nidali points out her parents’ hypocrisy. As college graduates who failed to pursue their own dreams, Nidali does not understand why her parents—her father, especially—push her so hard to succeed academically. Throughout the text, Baba channels the bitterness of his unfilled dreams into the intense pressure he places on Nidali.

“We all sat at a giant table, and Fakhr and I didn’t ignore each other, which confused our friends.”

Fakhr and Nidali only see each other in private, sneaking around the school. When they meet up at the pizza party they decide not to ignore each other; this is the first time they have acknowledged their closeness in public. Jarrar’s use of a double negative—“didn’t ignore”—suggests that Nidali does not yet know how to pursue romance affirmatively. Later, in contrast, she is able to tell Fakhr exactly what she wants.

“We had exited the bored-population-of-invaded-country realm, a seriously wack realm that exists for wack and helpless fools who didn’t have as a priority the goal to survive whole, with spirit intact.”

Jarrar uses colloquial language and humor to illustrate civilian life during an invasion. While danger is ever-present, boredom presents an equally pressing challenge. Jarrar suggests that beyond physical survival, spiritual wholeness deserves to be protected and cultivated, despite—or even because of—difficult circumstances.

“My room was the same, the bed was wooden and cold, the sheets smelled like time.”

Jarrar uses sensory language as well as a simile to illustrate that while Nidali has visited the family’s Egypt apartment before, she arrives at the apartment older and changed by her experiences. While the apartment has physically remained the same, time has clearly passed, and under the circumstances of war and wintertime, the apartment no longer feels inviting.

“‘I mean,’ she kept going, ignorant of how much talk of home pained me, ‘If I had to say goodbye to everyone, to my house, my room, the place I’d grown up, I’d be so…sad.’”

Nidali’s friend pushes Nidali to talk about her experiences even though it’s painful for her. This shows that even though Nidali manages to make friends at the new schools that she attends, she still feels a distance between herself and these new friends; they cannot truly understand what she’s been through, emphasized by the flat, monosyllabic word “sad” which does not capture the complexities of Nidali’s feelings.

“But I knew in my heart of hearts that we would never return.”

As a child, Nidali displays the weariness of the adult characters, illustrating that war has stripped her of her childhood innocence. She confronts loss and displacement, reckoning with goodbyes that turn out to be final.

“We followed the ambulance all the way downtown […] my family and I, not only following disaster, but chasing it, thankful for it, depending on it to get us where we need to get on time.”

In this figurative passage, the ambulance represents disaster, emergency, and hardship. These lines show that Nidali’s family has grown accustomed to these things, to the point that they learn to work with them, navigating through the world as best they can. The path of the ambulance echoes the family’s trajectory from country to country; they are spurred on by disaster—war serves as the catalyst for multiple international moves.

“I couldn’t tell what it was until I swam closer; it was a pen.”

Nidali imagines that she spies a pen underwater amongst hidden ruins. The motif of the pen appears throughout the novel, signifying creativity, escape, power, communication, and agency. Just as Nidali imagines swimming closer and seeing the pen come into focus, during these same pages her aspiration to become a writer also comes into focus: she finally admits to Fakhr that she wants to become an author when she grows up.

“We relished it. America actually cared that we existed, and this somehow made us feel like we were worth existing.”

Nidali compares America to a “cool kid,” saying that once it paid attention to Kuwait, Kuwait felt special for being acknowledged at all. This highlights the theme of School as Both Refuge and Battleground. Jarrar employs sarcasm in this passage, likening countries to high schoolers, comparing world-altering conflicts to the pettiness of high school.

“When I pulled the notebook away from the wall, I saw the moth’s golden guts—such beautiful guts.”

Nidali finds beauty in destruction. This echoes the passage about the ambulance, implying that even amid violence, beauty and wonder can be found.

“It wasn’t as though I was unaccustomed to starting anew but I was unsure of myself, of my appearance, of my accent, of my intelligence. I was unsure if I could really, fluidly transition again, and I was scared.”

Jarrar establishes the move to America as a more jarring transition for Nidali than the move to Egypt. Even though Nidali has faced so many challenges up to this point, the culture shock of moving to Texas intimidates Nidali. Notably, she doubts her intelligence, even though she has earned excellent grades throughout her schooling.

“That night, you hold her hand and look out of the window at the city’s lights fading away, and see for the first time how you were braver than your mother.”

This passage demonstrates the use of second person perspective; Jarrar employs shifts in perspective throughout the later chapters of the book to convey Nidali’s feeling of fragmentation. During this moment, Nidali realizes that she has surpassed her mother in bravery and defiance; she has defied Baba, and she has exercised her agency by running away. As a child, Nidali viewed her mother as larger-than-life, though she wished she would stand up to Baba. Now, Nidali has done what her mother didn’t dare to do.

“Baba screams for two hours till his throat goes hoarse and his nose gets red and he passes out from sheer exhaustion. He cannot change the fact that our household is changing.”

During most of the novel, Baba is depicted as a frightening, violent, authoritative figure, whose moods rule the household. By the end of the book, his old tactics no longer work. He becomes unconscious which reflects his diminishing power in the household.

“I ran out of the trailer, over to the yard, flung myself dramatically onto the grass, stretched my mind’s arm to the stereo in my head, and pressed PLAY.”

This passage illustrates Nidali’s use of imagination and escapism. She uses her imagination to distract herself with music after an upsetting incident with Baba. Throughout the novel, Nidali employs her creativity—often through writing—to escape the harsh reality of her life.