Home Is Not a Country

Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | YA | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2, Pages 83-135

Part 2, Pages 136-190

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 2, Pages 83-135Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Old Country”

Part 2, Pages 83-102 Summary

Content Warning: This section depicts racism, Islamophobia, and hate crimes.

In “Haitham,” Nima visits her friend in the hospital. Haitham, a Muslim, was a victim of a hate crime and is kept alive by machines. Distraught, Nima flees the room. When she returns, Aisha comforts Haitham’s mom in “Hala.” Even though Hala brought him to the United States to protect him, she realizes he is not safe here. Later, in “Touched,” when the bus to the hospital lurches abruptly, a man bumps into Aisha, who recoils and growls at him. Moments later, she reveals the details of the car accident in Sudan that killed Nima’s father: Aisha and Ahmed were stopped by officers who wanted to touch her. When Nima’s father locked the doors and tried to drive away, the officers shot him. Pained, Nima jumps off the bus.

In “Running,” Nima ends up alone amid a festival. Drawn by hunger, she wanders and is swept up by a parade of dancers. In “Houses,” Nima stumbles onto a quiet street of inviting homes. Walking through an open gate in “Trespassing,” she finds a swimming pool. On impulse, she enters “The Water” and finds solace in being beneath the surface. Exhausted, she emerges in “Caught,” thinking of Haitham and a different life. When an elderly man limps to the pool, he steps on her hair, and Nima is flooded with guilt. However, the man does not see her because her body is translucent again. Nima realizes that she disappears when she wishes for another life.

Glimpsing Yasmeen, Nima follows her to “The Diner,” and even though she is penniless, she orders. Then, in two poems titled “The Stranger,” a man approaches Nima and pays for her food. Drawn to him, she accepts a ride home, but he takes her to a hotel instead.

Part 2, Pages 103-118 Summary

In “The Driveway” at the hotel, the stranger steps away to get a room, and Nima feels a hand on her arm. It is Yasmeen, and she directs Nima onto the airport shuttle. Nima slips unseen into the vehicle and safely arrives at “The Airport.” Amid the hubbub, Nima hears people speaking Arabic and approaches them. In “Broken Arabic,” Nima tells an older woman, “i want to go home i want to go home” (106). Nima realizes she has said “homeland” instead of “home.” When the older woman’s family shows disgust at Nima’s appearance, the girl follows a ghostly Yasmeen through the crowd.

Nima finds herself alone in “The Elevator.” Desperately wishing for home, the doors open, not to the airport, but to the party from her beloved photograph. Her mother and father dance, and a solid-looking Yasmeen takes her hand, leading her into the party. In “The Photograph,” in addition to her parents, Nima spots Khaltu Amal, Hala, and a man who looks like Haitham. Nima’s Arabic teacher is a drummer in the band, while her bus driver plays the keyboard and the bigala shopkeeper sings. Everyone looks joyous, and Nima wonders why they ever left.

The next two poems, both titled “Home,” detail Nima’s exhilaration to be there. Eventually, she leaves the party to see her country and walks along the river with Yasmeen. Nima asks if they are the same person. The girl states that they are a “parallel version of each other” (113). When Nima peppers the girl with questions, Yasmeen evades them with inquiries of her own. They discover that they both love music and neither has been to this time or place before.

In “Haitham,” the girls return to the party, and Nima is drawn to the man with Hala, clearly Haitham’s father. When someone calls his name, he steps away from Hala while the woman shamefully slinks away. Nima follows the man in “Ashraf.” He is married, but not to Hala, and has other children.

Part 2, Pages 119-135 Summary

In “Visitors,” when Yasmeen informs Nima that they are invisible and here to learn, Nima senses there is something else too. Eavesdropping, they learn that both Hala and Aisha are pregnant. Then, Nima remembers in “Haitham” that she and her friend have a tacit understanding not to talk about Haitham’s father, which Nima broke in their recent argument. Seeing the man now makes Nima wonder just how much Haitham knows, and she worries about him in the hospital.

In “The Lesson,” after helping Khaltu Amal refine her dancing, Aisha is told she should have been named Nima for her grace; she laughs, declaring the name for her daughter. When Nima’s parents go home in “The Lovers,” she and Yasmeen follow. The girls ask questions of each other, but Nima realizes that Yasmeen has shared nothing. The next “Morning,” Nima relishes the golden light and her own face reflected in her grandmother’s countenance. Then, in “The Photographs,” Nima wanders the house, gazing at family pictures and feeling a sense of belonging. Yasmeen, also enraptured, reveals that she always wanted Nima’s name. For the first time, Nima sees herself in a new light.

Hearing music in “Room,” Yasmeen and Nima creep to their parent’s bedroom and listen. When the phone rings, they discover that Hala and Ashraf are in custody for adultery because they were caught together the previous night. In the first of two “Hala” poems, they arrive at Mama Fatheya’s house to endure the woman’s rant about Hala’s disgrace and how Mama Fatheya bribed the police. Hala’s beautiful hair has been shaved off, and her face is bruised. In the second poem, they witness Nima’s mother rock the weeping Hala in her arms.

Part 2, Pages 83-135 Analysis

For Nima, water represents clarity and calmness, which is evident when she swims in the pool. After stumbling out of the street fair, she finds a backyard pool and lowers herself in, “searching for something like / the echoing peace of the bathtub at home” (94). The peace she refers to is the break from her constant self-doubt and fear that she is not good enough. Both the bathwater and the pool offer her solace from those emotions and a break from the noise in her head. Nima notes this herself when she narrates, “i have to come up again for air the world so loud / & violent in its color after the dark silence of the water” (94). The contrast between the noisy, bright, harsh world and the dark quiet of the water indicates that the pool calms Nima and offers a break from the chaos of emotions her life creates. The darkness evokes ideas of sleep, a time when a person is more relaxed, which is what Nima seeks.

The motif of photographs also factors prominently in this section. At her parents’ home in Sudan in “The Photographs,” Nima experiences a reprieve from The Struggle to Belong Within the Diaspora. Nima wanders through the house, looking at family pictures: “all of them my people all of them unknown / i peer into each face & feel for the first time / that i belong to other people my face just a collage / of all their faces” (128). Even though these people are unknown to her, Nima feels a connection because they look like her. However, her sense of belonging is more than mere appearance because even in America, there are people who look like her, her “so-called people” (23), yet she feels distanced from them because they have been so Americanized. In her parents’ home, it is both her visual similarity but also the shared history that causes Nima to feel acceptance for the first time. She is a collage not just of their faces, but of their stories that all contribute to her existence.

This same moment also contributes to the theme of Home as a Feeling Not a Place, although Nima does not understand this yet. She associates this feeling of belonging with Sudan, but it is the faces of family members that evoke comfort and belonging. Nima’s confusion about what constitutes the concept of home is underscored when she is at the airport and repeats in “Broken Arabic” that she would like to go home, only to realize that she had “mixed up the words & the word / for home [she’d] been using this whole time was homeland” (106). Although a symptom of her rudimentary language skills, Nima still unintentionally swaps a place (homeland) for a feeling (home), subtly suggesting that she does not yet understand what home truly is.

Elhillo’s use of magical realism contributes to yet another theme: Imagination as a Coping Mechanism. Often, the line between magic and reality is blurred. For example, when Nima swims at the pool, the owner does not see her at all. Also, magic and reality intertwine when she is abducted by the stranger but saved by the jinn of Yasmeen. The value of the magic in these moments is not to defy reality but to demonstrate how Nima’s imagination saves her from dangerous situations. Imagination also allows her to feel the joy and belonging that has been missing in her life. When she steps off the elevator and into her parents’ past, she sees so many people from her life in America, and “they all look / so happy so young & full of what is possible / how could they ever have left why couldn’t i / have been born into this version of us” (110-11). The party is exactly as she has imagined. In addition to her parents, she sees Khaltu Hala, her Arabic teacher, and others so vibrant and full of life. The love and belonging she witnesses at this party is exactly what she has always desired. Without the magical elements, Nima would have nothing to hold on to and help her manage her loneliness at home and her fears for Haitham’s life. Through her imagined projection of a space of perfect safety and belonging, Nima finds refuge from the alienation, loneliness, and violence of reality.