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.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Our Given Names”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and racist slurs, as well as allusions to suicide.
The protagonist and narrator, Nidali, describes the moments after her birth. She is born on August 2, 1977, in Boston. Nidali says that she “almost died, survived, almost died again, and now I was going to live” (3). Relieved by the news, her father, Waheed, referred to as “Baba,” races down to the nurses’ station to fill out the birth certificate.
Hopeful that his wife gave birth to a boy, he writes a boy’s name on the birth certificate—“Nidal,” meaning “strife” or “struggle” in Arabic—without confirming the sex of the baby. He turns in the certificate and goes to check on his wife, Ruz, referred to as “Mama,” and their new baby. Baba realizes that the baby is a girl and rushes downstairs. He screams for the nurse until she gives him the birth certificate back. Instead of choosing a new name, Baba simply adds an I to the end of Nidal, creating the name “Nidali.”
When Mama finds out, she becomes infuriated. She rises from the hospital bed and swears at her husband as she goes downstairs, claiming that she will fight to fix the girl’s name. The narrator trails off, leaving this anecdote open-ended and guessing at the reasons why her mother did not go through with a name change. In the end, the narrator says, the name remained; she is still named Nidali.
Nidali describes her heritage: her mother is Egyptian, her maternal grandmother (or yia yia) is Greek, and her father is Palestinian.
Shortly after Nidali’s birth, her yia yia dies of a brain tumor and her family flies to Alexandria, Egypt, to bury her. Afterward, they leave Egypt and move to Kuwait for Baba’s new job.
Nidali characterizes both her parents as artists with failed dreams: Her father is a writer-turned-architect and her mother is a pianist-turned-housewife, and both parents harbor bitterness about the artistic lives they wish they still lived. Nidali hints at her family’s dysfunction; both parents are “filled with great sadness” and “took it out on us” (10).
Nidali says that she prefers school to home. At age seven, she attends The New English School in Jabriyya, Kuwait. During class, as Nidali reads a text out loud, the national emergency system siren, an ear-splitting alarm that sounds on the first day of every month, begins blaring. The children use it as an opportunity to gossip in Arabic. After it stops, they fall silent, “as though the alarm never happened, as though there wasn’t a ten-year war being waged over our little heads” between neighboring countries Iraq and Iran (12-13).
After school, as Nidali waits for the bus, she talks with her friends. One of the girls, Linda, teases one of the boys, Tamer, and he pokes fun at Linda for being Christian. On the bus, Nidali notices an older boy whom she thinks is cute, and she daydreams about making him laugh.
At home, Mama surprises Nidali: Mama reveals that she is having a baby.
Nidali tells Baba that she wants the boy who she spied on the bus to be her boyfriend, but her father tells her that boyfriends are only meant to become fiancés, and since she is too young to marry anyone, she cannot have a boyfriend.
Mama takes Nidali to a dessert shop by the Gulf. They eat chocolate and sit by the water. They talk about Nidali’s grandmother and about reincarnation.
Mama gives birth to a baby boy, Gamal. Baba tells Nidali that Mama will no longer have time to brush Nidali’s long hair, so he takes her to a barber to cut her hair short. Nidali is horrified at the boyish-looking cut. Baba then buys her a new pair of earrings and she looks at herself in the mirror, assessing the boyish haircut paired with the feminine earrings, and decides that she can’t wait to show off her new look.
One day, Mama irons Baba’s shirts. With one shirt left—Baba’s most cherished shirt—she steps away briefly for a phone call, leaving the iron on. Nidali smells the shirt burning and rushes to lift up the iron but accidentally burns her hand. Baba arrives home, takes in the scene, and angrily kicks Mama from behind.
Later that night, Nidali asks her mother for food and water. Mama reluctantly gives her food but tells her, “Drink your spit” (28). Her mother crawls into bed with her and they fall asleep.
The next morning, Nidali realizes that she didn’t do her homework assignment: two drawings of what she did last weekend. She does her homework on the bus, drawing pictures of her hand with a burn and her mother’s backside with a shoe imprint.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Comfort”
Nidali recounts her parents’ courtship. Mama and Baba first crossed paths as teenagers on the tram tracks in Alexandria, Egypt. Over the following years, they tried to indirectly impress each other by loudly talking to their friends when they knew that the other one was within earshot, hoping that the details they divulged about themselves through these conversations would be noticed by their love interest.
One day, Baba yelled out to his friends the details of his poetry reading event. Mama overheard and attended. Afterward, Baba worked up the courage to speak to her. They began to see each other regularly, spending time at cafes and riding the train together, talking for hours.
Baba proposed to her by the sea and Mama accepted. They marry in October 1975.
The narrative shifts to Nidali’s childhood, at age eight. Nidali’s teacher announces that a Koran contest will be held at a neighboring boy’s school. Nidali decides that she wants to win.
When Nidali arrives home from school, her mother gifts her a pack of Wonder Woman stickers. Nidali admires them and sticks them along her bedroom walls and her headboard.
That night, Nidali wakes up, looks around the house, and realizes that her parents have stepped out and left her alone in the house with Gamal. Scared, she retreats to her bed and rocks back and forth. Her hair catches on the Wonder Woman stickers on her headboard as she rocks herself, and the sound makes her think of her father rustling the pages of his newspaper as he reads in the living room. Comforted, she continues to rock back and forth and imagine her father reading.
Nidali’s 18-year-old religious cousin, Esam, arrives from the West Bank to stay with Nidali’s family. One day, Baba turns on the television. A weather report segment comes on, and Esam exclaims that “the forecast is blasphemous” (46), since only God can predict the future.
The night before the Koran competition, Baba forces Nidali to practice reciting her verses. He beats her with a hanger every time she gets the verses wrong.
The next day, she goes to the competition and recites the verses without making a mistake. When she arrives home that day, she sees that someone ripped her Wonder Woman stickers off her walls and headboard. She confronts Esam, who says he took them down because he believes that Wonder Woman “is a shameless prostitute” (53). Nidali screams and cries and retreats to her room.
A few days later, Esam finds a job and an apartment and packs up his things. As he waits for the bus outside the apartment complex, Nidali notices the impending weather and advises him to cover himself and his boxes because it will rain. Esam claims that only God can know the weather. Nidali returns to the apartment and watches from the window as the sky opens up and begins to pour, soaking Esam and all his belongings.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “The House Will Have Music”
Mama brings home a baby grand piano. She recruits her friends to help her carry it into the house and uses Nidali’s roller skates to wheel it in. The skates buckle and break under the pressure and Nidali cries.
Soon afterward, Nidali receives a certificate in the mail declaring her one of the winners of the Koran contest. Her parents laugh at the fact that the imam modified the certificate by adding a few corrections in pen. The certificate was intended for male students, but since Nidali won, the imam was forced to add letters to the ends of various words to feminize them and make them grammatically correct.
Baba glows with happiness, admiring the certificate. Nidali notices that he feels accomplished, acting almost as if he himself had won rather than expressing his pride for her.
One day, when Nidali is 10 years old, her family drives to visit her father’s cousin in the “Palestinian ghetto” of Fahaheel (59). Nidali plays with her second cousins, dancing to WHAM! songs and making za’tar burgers. They invent a jingle for their imaginary za’tar burger restaurant and perform it for the adults. Nidali’s aunt exclaims that Nidali should be a singer, but Baba shuts her down, saying that Nidali will become a famous professor.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “A Map of Home”
Mama and Baba get into a fight. Baba screams at Mama that she neglects her responsibilities to him as a wife, playing piano all day instead of properly cooking and cleaning for the family. Baba tells the family to get into the car and drives far into the desert. He orders Mama to exit the car. Mama jumps out and walks into the desert. Baba drives Nidali and Gamal home.
Baba criticizes Nidali’s schooling, claiming that the English school she attends does not teach her the right history lessons. He spends the night lecturing her about Palestine. He forces her to stay up all night tracing a map of Palestine over and over again. Nidali gets dressed and goes to school the next morning without sleeping.
After school, Nidali watches a program on television with her father and notices that some moments are edited out. Baba explains censorship to her and tells her that the kisses are edited out of television shows.
That night, Nidali does ablutions and prays for her mother. She accidentally lets out a fart and considers redoing her prayers but instead goes to sleep.
The next day, Mama comes home, surprising Baba. Nidali believes that her mother has “won” the fight. Baba declares that Mama’s piano playing is un-Islamic. Mama retaliates by telling Baba that his next whiskey shipment is delayed (drinking alcohol is forbidden in Islam) and she declares that the piano is staying.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
This section introduces Nidali’s complex heritage as well as the theme of Multicultural Identity and the Meaning of Home. Nidali is born in America to an Egyptian mother and Palestinian father. Shortly after her birth, her family moves across the world, to Kuwait. Nidali, Mama, and Baba all have different nationalities as well as different experiences of language and culture. While all three consider Kuwait to be their home, all of them are separated from their original homeland. This separation is most pronounced for Baba, a Palestinian refugee who possesses a more mobile and inner sense of homeland. He tells Nidali, “You can go wherever you want, but you’ll always have it in your heart” (9). Nidali says that hearing this “forced her to have compassion for Baba” (9). She is touched by this concept and feels sympathy for Baba’s loss. However, while Baba’s view of his homeland, Palestine, is initially depicted as poetic, Jarrar ties it to a traumatic event: After Baba abandons Mama in the desert, he forces Nidali to stay up all night drawing a map of Palestine—the titular “map of home” (68). The motif of the map carries many meanings throughout the narrative, representing displacement, belonging, and knowledge. The fact that the map is first introduced within such an intense scene associates it with pain and intergenerational trauma. For Nidali, home is a site of violence and patriarchal oppression—a place where she and her mother are not safe. At any moment, the patriarch of the family, Baba, can decide that Mama—charged with upholding the duties of the home—does not deserve to be sheltered in said home; he has the power to expel her and leave her wandering in the desert, echoing the kind of displacement that the family experiences on a geopolitical scale throughout the novel.
These chapters also introduce the motif of the pen. The pen represents self-expression, voice, agency, creativity, and imagination in the novel. Initially, the pen is presented as a tool wielded by men—a tool that bestows patriarchal power and personhood. Nidali’s father is the first character in the narrative to brandish a pen: He uses it to name his child Nidal, mistakenly assuming that his wife will give birth to a boy, and then later feminizes the name by simply adding a letter to the end of it. Similarly, when Nidali wins the Koran contest, the imam is forced to add feminizing letters to the ends of nouns and pronouns in order to address the winning certificate to Nidali. Both events make clear that the men in these spaces only consider girls as an afterthought—exceptions to the rule, deviations—whereas they center boys as the primary subjects deserving of consideration and personhood. Further, they accommodate girls only half-heartedly and still treat them as an extension of their male counterparts. Baba—“who is not usually known for laziness” (5)—merely adds a letter to the end of a boy’s name instead of choosing an entirely new name, just as the imam simply adds handwritten letters to the end of the typed certificate, rather than producing a new certificate.
The gendered power dynamics of these opening chapters are juxtaposed with the knowledge that Nidali herself is penning this story. The novel, while fictional, adopts a memoir-like style. Nidali narrates the events from an adult point of view, using an introspective tone that moves between blunt honesty and wistful nostalgia. She jumps from one formative childhood moment to another, covering a large expanse of time, stretching from her birth to the end of high school. Even as she describes the difficult conditions of her upbringing, it is clear that she has—in adulthood—gained her own agency and with it, the ability to pen her own story.
The first chapter introduces the theme of School as Both Refuge and Battleground. Nidali favorably contrasts school with her home life; she says that “school was my true escape” (10), associating it with the concept of refuge. At the same time, the narrative also immediately associates school hours with war. The novel’s first description of Nidali’s school includes an extended passage in which she describes the citywide alarm system—an unavoidable, ear-piercing reminder of wartime conflict in the region, which occurs every month during school. Moreover, school serves as the impetus for competition, and therefore battle, and even violence—Nidali signs up for the Koran competition, which leads to violence at home (Baba uses abusive tactics to force her to study).
This section also portrays one of the core struggles of the book: the relationship between Nidali’s parents, which gives rise to the theme of Relationships as War. Nidali describes her parents’ initial courtship as well as their current marriage. Both phases of their relationship are characterized by the use of extended, strategic tactics in order to achieve some sort of goal. Moreover, their marriage is marked by frequent violence and conflict, culminating in Baba stranding Mama in the desert. Jarrar uses the motif of nature and weather to reflect the characters’ turbulent emotional states, including during this incident. Nidali dwells on the image of the desert as harsh and inhospitable which echoes Baba’s treatment of Mama. Additionally, weather features prominently in a scene with Esam, as rain pours down on his belongings, contradicting his claims about religion.
