Borderlands and Arab American Identity in Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008)

Abstract

Arabs have always been configured racially inferior in Western popular cultural representation. This mythical, monolithic representation of Arabs and Arab Americans as Others further became entrenched after the 9/11 incident. Hence, Arab American identity has been the subject of various fictional, critical, theoretical, and literary explorations over the past few decades that seek to foreground the multiply constructed Arab American identity. Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008) is one such narrative that challenges the dominant unilateral representation of Arab American identity through the character of its protagonist Nidali Ammar who struggles to make sense of her borderland identity amidst war, migration, and cultural dislocation. While previous studies have explored the text from linguistic, cultural, historical, and narratological perspectives, this qualitative study explores the complexity of a borderland identity as represented through the protagonist. Drawing on a framework developed from Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “borderlands” and Homi K. Bhaba’s notion of the “third space,” this paper argues that Jarrar’s protagonist reflects a “borderland consciousness” that owes to her constant shifting along borders. While this constant movement is disruptive, violent, and traumatic, Jarrar’s protagonist deploys this unending journey as a liberatory mechanism to reject her reductive characterization as an Arab woman and reshapes her sense of self at the crossroads of various conflicting identities grounded in her Palestinian, Greek, Egyptian, Kuwaitian, and American roots. In doing so, the protagonist constantly straddles the third space between various cultures that helps her navigate the political, social, and cultural turmoil marking her life from the very beginning. The paper concludes that while the border experience is a constant source of anxiety, trauma, and displacement, Jarrar’s characters also embark on a rite of passage that allows them to embrace borderland with both its traumatic underpinning and its liberatory potential.