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Interview With Arab American Author Randa Jarrar
Randa Jarrar’s debut novel, A Map of Home, tells the story of a young Arab-American girl, Nidali, her hilarious journey through childhood, and the many homes she inhabits during those years.
Although A Map of Home treads familiar territory such as the hardships of the immigrant experience, Jarrar infuses Nidali with enough wit and humor to make the narrative fresh and exciting. My favorite scenes are those depicting family life; the constant bickering between her parents is at times “laugh out loud” funny. However, it is the seductive prose and the elegance with which Nidali’s sexuality unfolds that makes this novel a success and a must-read for Arabs and Americans alike.
As far as novels go, it brings to mind Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”, Bukowski’s “Ham on Rye”, David Mitchell’s ” Black Swan Green” and definitely “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by Joyce.
1-There are so many Arab symbols in your novel: the Allenby Bridge, The Kuwait Towers, the Montazah Palace in Alexandria, the small Nasr Fiat that exists in every Egyptian movie in the 80s. Were they random elements of nostalgia or intentional Arab symbols?
A little bit of both. These symbols signify a lost time for me, so they’re essentially my version of the madeleine cookie. I moved to the US from Egypt in 1991 and felt— for a while, and in the service of assimilation (I was, afterall, a teenager)— that I couldn’t look back. So when I was crafting the novel, I knew there were specific places, landmarks, and objects that I would include, like talismans, almost fetishistic in their importance to recalling a childhood set in this time period.
2—Your character’s last name is Ammar, her first name is Nidali, her brother’s name is Gamal, and her father’s is Waheed. Any relationship to Abu Ammar, aka Yasser Arafat? Nidal is a very common Palestinian name, Gamal for Gamal Abdulnasser, Waheed for the only son of 6 daughters from Jenin? I am reading way too much or is there significance? If true, does your novel have elements of Arab Nationalism?
I suppose it does. Waheed, Nidali’s father, is indeed an exiled and lonely soul. He is very much a product of Arab nationalism, so yes, he names Nidali and Gamal after people and ideals. But Ammar was just a fluke. I thought it would sound cool for Nidali Ammar to be named that- literally, my struggle which builds up to something.
It’s difficult, in many ways, to be an Arab-American author, but I think naming characters is one of them. Someone’s always going to read into the names. I don’t suppose Jonathan Franzen’s characters get the same treatment.
3-My favorite sentences in your book are ones in which you describe the Iraqi sky on your narrator’s exodus from Kuwait to Jordan:
“The Stars appeared slowly, one by one, as though a long forgotten Zoroastrian God had risen from His heavenly couch to turn some lights on, room by room, in His astral house. Through the window I saw only darkness. There were no fields, no people, and no buildings”
A Zoroastrian God in the sky of Mesopotamia. Nidali also mentions earlier seeing the hills of Iran from Kuwait on a clear day; both are Persian elements. Does that mean that your novel surpasses the borders of Arabia? How do feel about this sentence and what does it mean to you?
I would hope that all good literature surpasses borders, in general, and yes, that my novel goes past Arabia, and America, and all the constructs of culture, race, gender, etc. I love those sentences, too. I remember the day I came up with them. I was in my mid-twenties, and I was very proud of the image. In a way, I don’t think I would come up with this image now. I think the maleness of it, and yes, the borrowing from Zoroastria, were all part of my research and reading at the time of writing the book.
4- How of much of the real Randa Jarrar is in Nidali Ammar?
27%. Ha. Really, the novel is a novel. It’s fiction. Nidali is much more composed, consistenly witty, and confident than I ever was. She also has much better taste in music. I was listening to god-awful stuff when I was her age. You can ask my brother. He was the one with the cool taste- he liked grunge and good hip-hop.
5 How can Arab-American literature humanize Arabs to the American people or to the West? Are there any Arab-American writers that you admire?
I don’t think Arab-American literature should serve any purpose other than being art. Humanization is a given, not something literature has to do. If a by-product of writing honestly, openly, and well is that people who are not familiar with the culture will become more familar with it, that’s fine. But a writer should never cater anything to “the West” or “the East,” which are false constructs to begin with.
I admire quite a few Arab-American writers, Rabih Alameddine and Alicia Erian being two of them. My favorite writers are all over the map though; Angela Carter and James Joyce and Borges and Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf and JM Coetzee being some of them.
6-What novels do your students read in your Arab American Literature class at Cal State Fresno?
It’s an Arab-American women’s fiction class, so they read fiction by Laila Halaby, Diana Abu-Jaber, Alicia Erian, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Alia Yunis, Mohja Kahf, and others, as well as essays by Nadine Naber, Alia Malek, and Hayan Charara, and poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and Suheir Hammad.
My favorite thing to do on the first day of class is show them a slideshow of the kinds of covers that publishing houses give to Arab-American women’s books. The proliferation of geometric designs, veils, henna, cresecent moons, etc is ludicrous and ripe for criticism and discussion. From there, we delve into the books proper.
7- Any advice to budding Arab American writers?
Read a lot. Write with brutal honesty and as if no one will judge you- especially your family. That part is crucial. You need to want to be a good writer more than being a “good girl” or a “good boy”. Revise what you’ve written. Read your work out loud to different types of audiences. Don’t italicize Arabic words on your pages- treat them like any other words. Don’t explain or translate your culture to anyone: remember that you’re writing for your people, too. Apply to MFA programs- we are grossly underrepresented there. Apply for writers’ residencies and make the time to go to them to write. You might need to make financial sacrifices. Dream big. Get an agent. And join RAWI; you need the community and the support.
8- Now that you’ve gotten your “Portrait of the Artist” type novel out of the way, what should we expect next from Randa Jarrar?
I’m finishing a new novel and a collection of stories- not telling anything more that than. You’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully, you won’t have to wait long.
Ahmad K. Minkara