55 pages • 1 hour read
Randa JarrarA Map of Home
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Multicultural Identity and the Meaning of Home
Content Waring: This section of the guide includes discussions of domestic abuse and racist slurs.
Nidali’s multicultural identity lies at the heart of A Map of Home. As a girl with Egyptian, Palestinian, and Greek heritage, an American passport, and a childhood spent moving between countries, Nidali’s sense of identity constantly fluctuates. Throughout the novel, Nidali grapples with questions of where she belongs and what home means to her. In particular, her father’s experiences as a Palestinian refugee heavily influence her sense of home on multiple levels: geographically, politically, and emotionally.
Nidali’s geographic sense of home is shaped by her constant movement between different countries and cultures. As her family moves from place to place, she witnesses the varied terrain of the Middle East as well as America, and she orients herself according to the changing landscape. Apart from the physical landscape, the motif of the map also illustrates Nidali’s geographic sense of home and homeland. In particular, maps are strongly tied to Baba’s sense of home, and he tries to impart this to Nidali. As Nidali grows up, Baba lectures her on the importance of her heritage, insisting that she practice Arabic and understand her Palestinian roots and forcing her to draw a map of Palestine over and over again.
As a Palestinian, Baba is used to the geographic borders of his homeland shifting according to the political situation; he tells Nidali that the borders of the Palestinian map “[depend] on the year” (193). Nidali witnesses this truth firsthand through her family’s experiences of displacement as they are uprooted from their home in Kuwait during the Gulf War. Political decisions determine the family’s fate; Kuwait bars them from returning due to their Palestinian identity and forces them to search for a new place to call home.
Although Nidali is half Palestinian and experiences some of the same prejudice and geographic displacement as her father, when it comes to her emotional connection to home, Nidali struggles more than Baba. While Baba stands solidly in his Palestinian identity and views Palestine as his homeland, Nidali grapples with the complexities of belonging to more than one place. In the epigraph of the novel, Jarrar quotes Franz Kafka, writing, “Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it” (n.p.). Nidali straddles multiple cultures and identities, and this complicates her understanding of where she truly belongs. She describes herself as “split in half” and often feels like she is lesser because of this (8); she asks her grandmother if “she thought I was half a girl since I’m only half-Palestinian” (104). Nidali feels as if she was born fragmented, and as she navigates through different continents and cultures, this fragmentation increases. By the time she moves to America, she feels that she is “starting to forget […] where home really was” (221). Her struggle to emotionally root herself in a broader sense of home is also complicated by her smaller-scale sense of home; the setting of her family’s household remains an unstable environment, ruled by her father’s violence and strict control.
A Map of Home demonstrates that the concept of home is nuanced and multifaceted. Nidali grapples with displacement, trauma, and prejudice, mirroring the experiences of many Palestinians, while also confronting the internal struggle of belonging to multiple cultures and identities.
School as Both Refuge and Battleground
In A Map of Home, school serves as both a refuge and a battleground for the protagonist, Nidali. While she uses it to escape the confines of her tumultuous home life, it also becomes a place where she faces various conflicts.
Throughout the novel, Nidali finds solace in the school environment, starting from a young age. Nidali likes going to class because “[s]chool was where my parents were not” (10). At home, her parents fight, but school provides a different environment. Nidali enjoys school because of this escape, not because her teachers treat her particularly well there; in fact, she says of them, “[t]hey weren’t supposed to love us, and they didn’t. They were English and cold and didn’t resemble us at all. I liked this, that they did not hold a mirror up to me” (10). Nidali does not seek emotional comfort from her teachers but rather finds refuge in the absence of familiarity, allowing her to flee the chaos of her home life. Moreover, since school represents an escape from her parents, it also liberates her from her father’s strict control. This enables Nidali to use school as a setting in which she can explore her own identity and assert her independence. This includes exploring her sexual attractions and indulging in small moments of rebellion and escapism, such as when she writes imaginative stories instead of completing her assigned work.
Nidali prefers school to home because she views home as a site of conflict: “I knew from the beginning that home meant fighting, arguing, and embellishing” (10). However, the pressures of school also exacerbate the conflict that Nidali experiences at home. This is particularly evident in Nidali’s relationship with her father. Baba holds Nidali to unreasonably high academic standards and conflates her schoolwork with her self-worth: “If I did all my homework perfectly I was perfect too; if my homework was done badly I was bad. In Baba’s mind, it seemed […] [w]e were one, the homework and I” (23). Baba often employs physical abuse to enforce his expectations, beating Nidali when she falls short of them. He focuses on school as a competition, both during the Koran contest and as Nidali studies for her secondary school exams; this creates a hostile and oppressive atmosphere, transforming academics into a battleground rather than a refuge.
Despite these challenges, the end of the book suggests that school ultimately serves as a refuge for Nidali. She forges an academic path that serves as a final—and effective—escape plan, allowing her to leave her violent home life behind and pursue higher education away from her father’s oppressive rule.
Relationships as War
War serves as a significant backdrop in A Map of Home. While geopolitical conflict shapes the lives of the characters in the novel, their relationships with each other are also characterized by warlike tactics and violence.
One of the most significant events in Nidali’s early childhood—the conflict between her parents that results in Baba abandoning Mama in the desert—exemplifies of relationships as war. Nidali describes the aftermath of this event in warlike terms:
Seldom in Mama-Baba history had victory been so efficient or so visibly decisive in so short a span of time. The matriarch’s insisting thrusts swept across the Baba’s desert of piano-resistance; air strikes—in the form of no dinner—hit and destroyed the opposition’s bases. The stronghold fell on the second day of fighting” (72).
The mockingly formal tone and warlike language satirizes war reporting, reinforced by the fact that Nidali later admits that she learned English by imitating radio broadcasters. Nidali finishes her narration as if describing an epic historical battle: “Mama had deployed her naval vessels […]. Baba squatted in the sand, announcing the very welcome end of the Mama-Baba sixty-hour battle […]. But the war raged on” (72). Jarrar’s use of war metaphors highlights the intensity and violence of Nidali’s parents’ relationship, though her humorous tone tempers the seriousness of the situation. Jarrar employs similarly wry metaphors when Nidali describes her role as a peacekeeper in the family: “During these Camp David-esque scenes, I play Jimmy Carter to Mama and Baba’s Begin and Sadat” (248), referring to political agreements signed by the leaders of Egypt and Israel and witnessed by the US President. At other times, she uses language that skews poetic, such as when she compares her bruises to Gamal’s, examining them like “bomb sites” on the maps of their bodies (177).
This theme arises most explicitly in the context of Nidali’s immediate family, since her home life is rife with violence. However, this can be seen in her relationships with others as well, even though these relationships are not marked by physical violence. For example, Nidali’s relationship with Fakhr begins with a hostile exchange of insults and name-calling, reminiscent of a battle or confrontation. Fakhr uses combative language, referring to Nidali with a racist slur, and the two of them later engage in verbal sparring. Nidali finds this attractive and begins dating Fakhr. When Nidali decides to contact Fakhr after experiencing a falling-out, she describes this action as calling a “truce” (198). Nidali’s relationship with Fakhr faintly echoes that of her parents’ in its conflict-driven trajectory.
In A Map of Home, Jarrar portrays relationships as wars that involve battles, violence, and ever-shifting power dynamics. The metaphors used by Nidali highlight this theme within her parents’ relationship as well as in her own relationships.
