Home Is Not a Country

Nima’s journey to her parents’ past reflects her new knowledge of the cliché “home is where the heart is.” She discovers that home is a feeling of comfort, love, and belonging, not necessarily a geographical location.

Nima’s obsession with photographs and stories of Sudan fuels her initial belief that home is a place she needs to get to, a place she misses even though she has never been. At the airport when she is seeking help in “Broken Arabic” she repeats “i want to go home” but then realizes that “the word / for home i’d been using this whole time    was homeland” (106). Although Nima may not recognize it yet, her linguistic mistake reflects the error of her thinking, too. She views her parents’ country as her home without yet understanding that home is not a place, but a feeling. Moments later, when she steps out of the elevator and into the scene of the photograph, Nima is smitten with the world around her, describing the grass and trees in her “lost country just outside” in a poem titled “Home” (112). This initial view of Sudan demonstrates that Nima still believes that home is a place.

Once Nima spends more time there, however, the Sudan she envisioned as perfect gradually shows its flaws. It is here she realizes that her father deserted them, and here that the police do not always protect their people. When Nima finally returns through the portal, she recognizes that home is the people who provide her with comfort and belonging, specifically her mother. In the portal, she sees new photographs and notices that “in every photo we are together / not a single one    where either one of us is alone” (195). Nima finally sees the connection with her mother, the love that is documented in their togetherness. After she makes this discovery, she comes feet first out of the portal and into her bathtub, reminiscent of a birth. Nima’s thinking is reborn when she understands that home is not a place, but a source of love, comfort, and belonging. Her understanding of this concept is solidified in “Home,” in which she embraces her mother and tells the woman she is all Nima needs. In her journey to what she thought was her home—Sudan—Nima learns an additional lesson that home is anywhere she feels loved and safe.

Adolescence is typically a time when young people develop a sense of identity, and Nima is no exception. In addition to the struggles related to being an immigrant in the United States, she is also influenced by the Islamophobia she endures firsthand, highlighting the theme of The Impact of Racism on Identity Development.

Already a quiet person, Nima withdraws even more into herself when personally faced with prejudice and hate, to the point where she views her physical body differently. On Halloween, after joking to Haitham about the originality of a classmate’s ghost costume, the classmate turns on her, saying he is “dressed as your terrorist mom [...] [and] your terrorist dad” (49), while another boy wraps a sweater around his head as an Islamophobic “costume,” and classmates laugh along. The nonchalance with which the boys sling these slurs highlights how ingrained the prejudice is towards Muslims in American society. This, coupled with the fact that her father is dead, pains Nima. As a result, she looks at herself, thinking, “I [...] watch my feet flicker in & out of their outline / my body humming with shame   I am a ghost / from no movie anyone would care enough to make” (49). The fact that Nima’s body blurs and becomes translucent makes literal her feeling that she is less than others, neither solid nor completely human. Her classmates’ racism has made her feel ashamed of her body and afraid of the hatred it seems to invite, so she imagines it disappearing, erased by their bigotry. This moment of racism adds to her already diminished self-perception.

In addition to her physical appearance, Nima also questions herself because of incidents of hate, ultimately impacting her identity development. When she and her mother discuss the time they were rejected from the ticket counter at the airport because the employees would not allow “mohammed so-and-so near the plane” (20), her mother emphasizes that the men were wrong to stereotype them as dangerous and deny them access to a flight they had already paid for. After listening to her mother assert pride in her culture and refuse to be ashamed, Nima thinks, “what i didn’t ask / is what made her so sure” (50). Since the end of this question is ambiguous, it is not clear if Nima is unsure about the mistreatment or if she should be ashamed. This uncertainty hammers home just how much the men’s words and actions impact Nima’s self-perception. She internalizes the idea that something is wrong with her and that maybe she should be ashamed of who she is as a Muslim in the United States. By the end of the novel, however, after imaginatively traveling to Sudan, Nima learns to accept her body, ethnicity, and culture, and to proudly embody them in defiance of the bigotry of others.