Randa Jarrar discusses her novel, A Map of Home
Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home is a novel that changes the landscape of Arab-American fiction. Nidali, the narrator and a young half-Palestinian, half-Egyptian/Greek girl, shares the story of her life from birth to college, leaving no questionable power dynamic unburned along the way.
From outsmarting overbearing and abusive men, writing cavalier letters to Saddam Hussein, encountering soldiers on the Allenby Bridge, to enduring other kids making fun of her zaatar at the cafeteria, Nidali beautifully carves a place out for herself in life and in literature.
I think it is no overstatement to say that, in terms of Arab characters in art, Nidali deserves a place as often remembered and as often invoked as Handala’s– but that I think is a judgment better left to the reader. You can buy this book on Amazon. If you’re not convinced, read the interview KABOBFest conducted with Jarrar earlier today!
Interview with Randa Jarrar, September 9, 2009
YS: I guess I should start by saying that when I was reading the book, I kept wishing you had written it 10 years ago, so I could have read it when I was growing up. I think, growing up, I would have been able to relate to Nidali in a lot of ways, and her courage, her wittiness, her spirits would have been a great empowering role model. How long have you kind of known about Nidali’s story, that you would share it eventually?
RJ: I know! I wish someone had written this book about 13 years ago. That’s actually the impetus behind the book, in many ways, and part of me wanted to dedicate it to my 18-year-old self. I finished the book almost six years ago! Then I revised it and it was set to be published four years ago. Publishing is a complicated beast.
YS: Ah, wow. Did the complications have anything to do with the content, or was it pure red tape?
RJ: I think both. Mostly red tape. But also, I think the novel in many ways read “too much like memoir.” It was being punished for the effectiveness of the 1st person voice! And I think perhaps editors wondered how they would market it. But I think Arab-American fiction is no longer facing the kind of censorship it did just a few years ago.
YS: Can you elaborate on the censorship? Why did Arab-American authors have difficulty getting fiction published?
RJ: I think it’s a mixture of ignorance, racism, not knowing how to find an audience for Arab-American stories, an absence of Arab-American writing groups like RAWI. Thirteen years ago, the only contemporary Arab-American novelist on the scene was Diana Abu-Jaber. Now, I can name her, Alicia Erian, Leila Halaby, Laila Lalami, Rabih Alameddine, Alia Yunis, Leila Abu-Saba, myself Mohja Kahf, and more I’m forgetting. Wait, it’s not that Arab-Americans weren’t writing fiction, it’s that they weren’t getting published.
After 9/11, American readers wanted to read more about Arabs and Muslims, and Arab-American writers started to have their say. It’s sad though, most readers still don’t know the difference between Arab, Muslim, and Iranian writers. I think that will change too one day.
Once editors and publishing houses saw there was a market for these books, they began publishing them. And the issue of Palestine has been less inflammatory that it was in decades past. For example, Patricia Highsmith, fantastic author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, once dedicated a novel to the Palestinian people. Her publisher deleted that. Now, there’s less of a lid on talking and writing about Palestine.
YS: A lot of the power of the book comes not only from what Nidali says, but the mere fact that she is saying it. I think that ties into your point about Arab-American writers being unable to publish. A Palestinian-American friend of mine describes it in one of her poems as “writing her body into history.” How do you think the two are linked, Nidali’s writing herself, her family, and her experience into history, and the social empowerment of Arab-American communities?
RJ: That’s a great question. The fact that Nidali has a voice should not be shocking. It’s the fact that she uses it that might be. Arab-American communities often find themselves omitted from artistic representations of themselves. It’s why, I think, my father used to go crazy wondering if Marisa Tomei was an Arabic name. He wanted to see Arabs on the screen! We want to see, hear, and read ourselves, because when we do, our very existence becomes validated, celebrated. Nidali is aware of this point. She wants to see her own story set down, and she realizes that the only person who can do that is herself. I think that this is something the larger community is experiencing. I just heard an interview with Cherien Dabis where she said she wanted to be a filmmaker precisely because she didn’t like the misrepresentation of Arab-Americans in the media. And we get to reap the benefits of her decision! Yay!
YS: By the way I haven’t seen Amreeka yet but I read Will’s review on KABOBFest as I started reading your book, and finished the day knowing this was a good month for Arab-American art! Moving on…
I don’t think Nidali is only expressing herself as an Arab-American, on an ethnic level. I wanted to ask you if you spent a lot of time deciding how honest to be about Nidali’s sexual curiosity and involvement. I mean, Nidali herself is not particularly open about it, at least to her parents, and she refrains from certain things in public. But she doesn’t really hide any of that from the reader. I suspect that this content will be a big reason why some Arab-American kids won’t get this book for Eid/Christmas, if their parents have a choice. They might say you could have written this book and made an important point about Arabs without all the sex stuff. What do you say back to them? How important do you think honesty & openness in this regard was?
I also meant to add that I think at least part of the objection to this subject matter will be based on the fact that Nidali is a woman. Other Arab writers, especially men, I think tend to get away with it as artistic license. But for some reason women might have to pass a morality test.
RJ: I always knew she would be honest about sex. Sex has always been a point of antagonism between myself and my own parents. I always wanted control over my own body; they thought it wasn’t “my” body, it was theirs. That’s a problem I think that afflicts lots of Arab kids. I wanted Nidali to be honest about everything in this book, and to omit her sexual awakening would have been completely dishonest to the reader and to the story. The idea that I could have written about her without “the sex stuff” is truly mind-boggling, because young people think about sex so often. And I wanted to make a point of finally talking about sex OUT LOUD instead of burying it under the marital rug, so to speak. Just because good girls aren’t supposed to fuck until they’re married doesn’t mean they don’t think about fucking before they’re married, and in many cases, doesn’t mean they AREN’T fucking before they’re married.
It’s true that male writers tend to get away with this, unless, of course, they’re gay. It’s all about power. Who does the female body belong to? And if the woman believes that it belongs to the woman herself, what is she going to do with it?
YS: There’s a lot of power issues in the book, not least of which is internal to Nidali’s family. One moment in the book that surprised Nidali–and I think it surprised me a bit too–is when Gamal, her younger brother, spoke up on her behalf, for what I think was the first time. It seems like everyone had beef with Waheed’s power tripping, but there is not much they are able to do about it. Is physical force really the only thing stopping them? Why didn’t the sibling solidarity develop earlier?
RJ: I think the physical force is a big problem, though Gamal is a big dude when he stands up to Waheed, finally. I think they’re all afraid of his physical power over them. But also, he’s the breadwinner. They need him. He’s made sure of that.
There’s also a scene where Gamal and Nidali bond over their bruises. Gamal wonders if their mother will save them, and Nidali accurately predicts that she won’t.
I think I consciously didn’t build their bond, too, because it would have been hard to do that effectively and stay focused on Nidali’s pont of view.
YS: Despite that though I thought the characters were developed really phenomenally throughout the book, and I think the honesty you were talking about earlier helped a lot. The one guy who seemed… flat, despite everything, was Esam, Nidali’s cousin. It just seems like he has so litle to offer to anyone else in the book. What’s his deal? I was glad it rained on him.
RJ: I just really hate dogmatic people. And I had a cousin who really did take away all my posters and stickers when I was a kid, and I always hated him. This was my way of getting back at him. I was worried, though, that because I was bagging on a Muslim man I was a sellout. But truthfully, Muslim fundies wouldn’t think twice before they bagged on a single mom who drinks and does whatever the fuck she wants, so I let it go. He’s a stock character, for sure, but at the same time I hoped talking about how limited his background and opportunities were would explain a little why he was such a jerk.
YS: God, I remember when I was a kid I stopped listening to music for a while because someone told me it was haram. Fuck that. I share your resentment. (I probably won’t post this statement, haha [note: I published this statement, intentionally]).
RJ: Hahahahahah. I know what you mean. And yes, FUCK THAT.
YS: Alright Randa I’m only gonna eat up your time for a little longer. There’s a part where Nidali stops narrating in the first person, switching to second person. I imagine these are particularly painful moments in her life, the sense of detachment (and maybe it’s a defensive mechanism) is so severe. Yet as detached as Nidali becomes from herself, while you’re reading it’s almost like you enter Nidali’s state of mind. You don’t really have a choice because the text is telling you what you feel and what you’re going through– you’d have to stop reading to disagree with it. I appreciate this about your writing style, so many lines are blurred in this novel, and this point where I had no choice but to empathize with Nidali was one of the most intense. Can you talk about the way this and other writing techniques you used to achieve similar effects?
RJ: Thank you! That was certainly a conscious effort on my part to make the reader see how it feels to be an immigrant. This is the part of the book when she moves to America. Her identity becomes fragmented, and so I thought the text needed to be fragmented too. I thought it would make the reader just uncomfortable enough after they’ve spent all this time in the 1st person. And I hoped it worked, and after the book came out, people mentioned that a lot! I’m so glad. Another thing I did was grow Nidali’s voice from young child to adult. I wanted her voice to literally change throughout the book. So with every chapter, as she ages a year, I tweaked the narrative voice in order to show that she was changing.
YS: I think you did that very effectively, it reminded me a lot of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in some ways.
RJ: Fantastic! I was reading that a lot while I was writing.
YS: Okay, I think this is the last question. It’s about the last scene of the novel, which I love. The family is freaking out about some pen they suspect was a spy device. They’re paranoid that someone knows everything about their lives. That’s the great irony of this moment, they’re so concerned (though it’s not clear why, most of their secrets are fairly trivial to the outside world) yet by that point we already know quite a bit about them! It’s the first time I felt that Nidali, Fairuza, and Waheed are self-conscious about their acts, at least with respect to unknown intruders on their lives. Why did you choose to end the novel with this scene?
RJ: That’s my favorite scene. I thought it did so many things well. First, it refers back to Nidali’s choice to be a writer. Second, it’s a meta moment, when we know so much about them, as you say, and we know that Nidali is the “spy.” Third, it ends the novel on them being in cahoots with each other, not scattered, but as a unit of crazy folks, loveable crazy folks, of course! And last, I love that the mother throws her the pen, as a sort of feminist exchange. In the beginning of the novel, Waheed is holding a pen, filling out Nidali’s birth certificate, so it goes full circle in that way. At first, your parents dictate your life, and at some point, it’s all on you. So it seemed to be the perfect ending. I love it.
YS: Ah, that’s beautiful– I didn’t notice the connection my first time through! This is a book that deserves to be re-read, many times.
I guess this is the last official question. The book has been translated into German & Japanese [note: actually, not Japanese, Chinese--see response]. Is an Arabic translation forthcoming? Why/why not? And do you write literature in Arabic?
RJ: It’s actually been translated into German, Italian, Chinese, and soon, Hebrew! The Arabic presses have been slow to pick up. I’m hoping one will soon, though! [As for translation...], I can’t write arabic, but I can read it, and I translate fiction into English. I wouldn’t be able to do the whole translation myself, but I would definitely do the dialogue.
YS: I wonder how you would surmount the fact that Arabic is not really… “foreign,” in Arabic.
RJ: The story would still have an outsider-ish feel and the dialogue would be perfect in Arabic!
YS: Cool, good luck with getting it out in Arabic! Have you gotten many reactions from the Arab community in the states, besides the Arab American Book Award?
RJ: Ha! Yes- lots of great emails from Arab Americans saying they love the book, they’re glad to see that voice out there, and they’re happy I’m talking about some of these taboo things…it makes me ecstatic every time I get an email like that! Yours was no exception! Thank you so much for the interview.
YS: Thanks for taking the time, I really appreciate it!
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Buy A Map of Home at Amazon. Get a copy for yourself, and for your younger siblings and cousins! They’ll appreciate it!
