A Map of Home

Throughout this chapter, Nidali narrates her life in the second person and present tense.

Nidali continues to spend time with Dimi and Camilla at school and eventually becomes friends with another girl, Aisha. Fakhr writes her letters, and she writes back to him until her father discovers the correspondence and forbids her from contacting Fakhr. Baba also tells her that she is not allowed to attend a rap concert with her friends.

One day, fed up, Nidali decides to run away. She steals her father’s credit card and attempts to sell her gold necklaces at a pawn shop but gives up, indignant at the low prices offered to her. She decides that she needs to become a taco vendor and tries to apply for a street license. The man asks her how old she is, then tries to proposition her. Nidali escapes to a motel, checks in under a fake name, and calls her parents. She negotiates with them, withholding her location until her father gives in to some of her demands. He allows her to resume contact with Fakhr but says that she is not allowed to date. She agrees to these terms, though she muses internally that she “will regret not having negotiated more on the dating bit” (237).

Mama confides in Nidali that she has kept all the letters sent by Fakhr since Baba forbid them from corresponding, implying that Nidali can have the letters if she wants.

Nidali shifts back to narrating in the first person and past tense.

During Nidali’s sophomore year, Mama tells Baba that she thinks Nidali is bored because she is not being challenged enough. Mama convinces the principal to advance Nidali to 11th grade.

For the next few weeks, Nidali tries to convince her father to extend her curfew. She wants to stay at the library until closing, at ten o’clock, rather than being forced to leave an hour earlier. She also wants to attend a poetry slam on Saturdays. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, Nidali writes a faux suicide note and hands it to her father. Unfazed, Baba forbids her from attending the poetry slam but approves her later library curfew.

Nidali narrates this chapter in present tense, with a mix of first person and second person point of view. The chapter is broken into small, short, numbered sections.

Nidali describes Baba’s life in America. He spends his days working, commuting to and from the office by bus. Nidali depicts his life as monotonous. Baba yearns to build his own house, but loan agents repeatedly reject his loan applications. He tries to build his credit by applying for more credit cards.

One day, Nidali’s family receives a letter in the mail telling them that they are the winners of $10,000,000. They spend all night giddily fantasizing about how they’ll spend the money. Then they read the fine print on the mailer and realize that they didn’t win anything—it was just a marketing ploy.

Mama makes money teaching piano classes. Lots of neighbors come over to visit her. She opens her own bank account and gets a credit card. She applies for a mortgage, but after the loan officer asks for her taxes, Mama realizes that she hasn’t filed any, and she spends the next 133 lessons earning enough money to pay back what she owes “so she won’t go to jail” (244).

A boy from school asks Nidali out on a date. The “date” consists of an invitation to his house. There, the boy sexually assaults Nidali, forcing himself into her mouth. Nidali bites him and runs away. The boy spreads rumors at school that Nidali is a “whore,” and her father starts calling her a “whore” as well (245).

On the way home from work, Baba sees a model of a mobile home. He becomes enamored with the idea of getting a mobile home, but Mama does not approve.

Nidali notices that Mama and Baba fight less than they used to, and the fights that they do have are not quite as violent.

Baba receives an anonymous letter saying that his daughter “sucks dicks” (248). He beats up Nidali and berates her. Nidali dares him to kill her. Baba chases her around with a knife. Nidali calls the police, and they document her injuries. She takes Baba to court but drops the charges. Nidali comments, “It’s hard to buy a house when you have a criminal record” (249).

Nidali shifts to third person perspective, referring to herself by her name and referring to Baba by his name, Waheed. She describes a seemingly normal day during which her family tries to eat out at a restaurant, but all the restaurants nearby are mysteriously closed. Her family later finds out that this day was Thanksgiving.

Mama finds out that their home is actually a mobile home. Out of anger, she recruits her piano tuner to use his truck to turn their home around, like how “Jahilia’s women turned their tents around when they wanted to divorce their husbands” (250). Baba comes home and laughs.

Mama, Nidali, and Gamal buy a Christmas tree and bring it home. When Baba comes home, he starts sneezing and orders them to throw out the tree. They refuse to comply. Baba then screams until he passes out from exhaustion. Nidali observes that he “cannot change the fact that our household is changing” (252). The next day, he gets up and goes back to work.

Nidali applies to colleges. Baba only allows her to consider local schools.

In defiance, Nidali smears a booger on one of her application forms. Baba tears it up and starts a new one. His face glows as if he is the one applying to school instead of Nidali.

Baba hears Nidali listening to Jay-Z in her room. He says that he recognizes the music—not the Jay-Z song but the Ab-Halim song it’s sampling (Ab-Halim is a famous Egyptian singer). Nidali and Baba talk about the song, then Nidali uses humor to steer the conversation toward school. She asks Baba how he’d feel if she went far away for college, but Baba protests.

Nidali meets with her college counselor, Ms. Quiff. Even though Ms. Quiff knows that Nidali’s parents want her to go to school nearby, Nidali manages to convince Ms. Quiff to let her apply to one out-of-state school, telling the counselor, “I’d like to apply to one college that is known for its writing program, preferably on the East Coast. Just for the hell of it. Like a lotto ticket” (257). Ms. Quiff acquiesces and gives Nidali a college reference book. Nidali goes to the park and reads it like a “porno”—as if it’s a dirty magazine she must keep secret from her parents—and sets her sights on “a small college in Boston” (259).

Baba forces Nidali to write compositions every night, thinking that this writing practice will prepare her for the statement of purpose on her college applications. He makes her write “in both English and Arabic, about something purely Arab, or relating to my Arabness, or to a famous Arab” (261).

Around this same time, Baba decides to play the lotto on a regular basis. He does this by dictating numbers to Nidali and giving her $50 each time to buy the tickets.

The narrative displays several of Nidali’s writing compositions, which Nidali spells “combozishans” to imitate her father’s accent in English (261). Nidali defies Baba’s instructions by writing wild stories, using swear words, or writing about pop culture. When Baba sees these compositions, he tears them up and dictates his own thoughts to Nidali instead.

One night, Baba finds out that he won $3,000 in the lotto, but Nidali reveals that she pocketed all his lotto money instead of buying the tickets, so he didn’t actually win. She sees this as her well-deserved compensation for serving as Baba’s scribe.

Nidali reveals that she used $50—out of the $600 in lotto money she pocketed—to secretly apply to the “forbidden-fruit college in Boston” (269).

A couple weeks later, Nidali visits Omar Medina—her crush from school, whom she calls “Medina”—to study with him. Nidali knows that Medina broke up with his girlfriend after he found out she cheated on him and that he is now “on a rebound rampage” (270). Nidali asks him to rebound with her, but Medina protests, saying that Nidali is more like a cousin to him.

Nidali sits on a chair and gets stung in the rear by a wasp and starts having a reaction. Medina gives her aloe and some medicine and sits with her on the bed.

Eventually, Medina kisses Nidali, and they have sex. Nidali orgasms but Medina does not; he says he can only do so if he’s in love, and he starts to cry. Nidali leaves.

At home, she washes the blood from between her legs and sits on an ice pack to nurse her wasp sting. She “felt a sense of panic about whether I would be loved now that I was no longer a virgin, then thought of why I would ever want to marry someone who would hold that condition over me” (276).

One night, Mama wakes up Nidali in the middle of the night and asks her if she’s not a virgin; she thinks that Nidali had sex. Nidali finally admits that she did. Mama tells her that she still loves her.

Nidali receives a big envelope in the mail from the college in Boston. She shoves it into a bush, hiding it to read later. Mama opens a letter from the bank and screams in joy—they’ve been approved for a mortgage.

Nidali goes to prom. She graduates from high school. Finally, she opens the letter from Boston. She reads it and finds out that she got in. Baba tells Nidali that she is not allowed to go to school in Boston. She hatches a plan to run away. She sneaks out and stays at her friend Dimi’s house for 10 days. On the 10th day, Mama comes to Dimi’s house, searching for Nidali. Mama yells for Nidali but Nidali stays hidden.

Nidali comes home. She sees that most of her mother’s hair has turned white. Mama swears at Nidali, and Nidali apologizes. Seeing her mother’s white hair with strands of black, she thinks to herself that it looks like a piano. Mama goes to bed and sleeps for hours, not waking up even when Baba and Nidali scream at each other.

Baba tells Nidali that Mama stayed awake for all 10 nights, worried about her. Nidali tells Baba that she “want[s] to do college right, because […] it means a lot to” her (288). Baba reminisces about holding Nidali as a baby.

The night before Nidali leaves for Boston, Mama gives her a box of letters that Mama and Baba wrote to each other during their courtship. She tells Nidali to never forget her family.

The narrative ends with Nidali recounting an anecdote about her family. Mama and Baba argue over a pen that a woman on an airplane handed Baba 20 years ago. Mama believes that the pen is a spy pen. The family tries to break the pen open in various ways. When that doesn’t work, they decide to drive into the country and fling the pen out the window.