My Struggle In Randa Jarrar's A Map Of Home

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War is simply horrible, we should avoid it all costs but then there are dictators like Saddam Hussein. “A Map of Home” is a fictional novel written by the talented author Randa Jarrar. The story is inspired by her own life, but reportedly not based on it. The protagonist is a girl named “Nidali” which literally means “My struggle” in Arabic. Throughout the book, the girl named struggle goes through struggles. The war made her lose her home, and she had to migrate from country to country. Leaving home itself is hard enough, but doing it with a father like she had, didn’t make it any easier. She moved from Kuwait to Alexandria, and then to Texas. Her father acted like he believed in modern traditions and equality, but any stranger would’ve realized …show more content…

She didn’t want to attend a school because she would have to travel a distance to go to school, she could just study at home and she felt like she wouldn’t fit in, but it wasn’t a surprise when her father said “You’re going to school and that’s final, no discussion.” (Jarrar, pg. 165) So, just like everything else was decided by her father, this was too. One day, her Grandfather Geddo fell ill which Nidali saw as an opportunity to get some time away from her Baba. While she stayed with Geddo, she went out when she collided with the last person she was expecting to see. It was Fakhr-el-Din. It was fate. They started dating secretly in alleyways, abandoned cabins and at midnight on the beaches. These rendezvous made her feel in control of her life, and a way to not follow her Baba’s rules. It was the small things that she did, which helped her break …show more content…

There, the only way she could rebel would be by dating, smoking and not studying. She enjoyed studying, so she did not choose to flunk her classes, but did the other two. When you live in such a strict environment, a rendezvous with a boy is enough to keep you happy, excited, enough for you to sustain the beatings of your parents and it is a common way every Muslim/Arab child rebels. For Texas, I could've chosen her running away as the defining part, but I didn’t feel like it would've given her father a lot of thinking to do. Being charged and taken to court by your own daughter because she wants you in jail, because she hates you, because you didn’t realize what you were doing was wrong. It must hurt, more than the part where she ran away because he wasn’t letting her go to Boston. From smaller rebellious acts to larger one, Nidali finally managed to make her father understand that he doesn’t control her, he doesn’t need to constantly protect her, he doesn’t need to make every decision for and that his little girl has grown

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