6/1/2023 0 Comments A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar![]() I’ve written short nonfiction pieces but I prefer to read fiction. My move to Texas was a choice I made, not my parents, so I thought for my character, it would be interesting to infuse her narrative with that agency. I moved to a really stuffy part of New York and Connecticut. People who read the book assume that because my character moved to Texas after the first Gulf War, I did too, but that’s not the way it went. My life and my character’s life are similar, but also, in other ways, they really differ. I moved to Texas by myself in 2000, well, not by myself but with my child, who was two at the time. We traveled a lot to the West Bank and Egypt when I was growing up, and then moved to the U.S. I grew up in Kuwait and my mother was Egyptian and Greek, and my father was Palestinian. ![]() I also wrote a lot, and made these cute little documents, little poetry books and passports. Under occupation it says ‘author.’ I always wanted to be a writer. ![]() It’s an American passport, but my nationality is Palestinian. I have this really old fake passport I made when I was 10, and it shows all my different identity crises at the time. How did you come to write this novel, and when did you know you wanted to be a writer?Ī. Jarrar chatted with Zócalo about her inspiration, how closely her character’s story hews to her own, and the work of Arab American writers. Randa Jarrar’s first novel, A Map of Home, tells the story of a girl coming of age in the Middle East and in middle America - Texas, to be precise. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |