Wednesday, June 30, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Home is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo

 





Home is Not a Country is a YA book by poet Safia Elhillo.  I use the word "book" there instead of novel, because the book is arguably hard to classify: it's a ~210 page story (in hardcover) told entirely in 1-4 page poems, from beginning to end.  Which again is not to say that this a collection of independent poetry, but instead a complete story told in verse from beginning to end. And that's tricky for me to evaluate as honestly, I'm not really the most appreciative reader of poetry, with me usually getting annoyed at parts of book in verse, but I'd heard enough hype that I wanted to give this a try.  

And I'm glad I did, because Home is Not a Country makes the poetry work really well.  Oddly - and again this could just be my own personal inability to really get written poetry - none of the individual poems, with their line stops and varying lengths, really individually worked for me that much....but when combined together, this method of storytelling works tremendously well.  As does the story, featuring a girl from an unidentified Middle Eastern/North-African country around 9/11 feeling uncomfortable in America and always wondering if she someone else - someone like the girl whose name her mom almost gave her.  It's a really strong YA story about wishing for what one doesn't have instead do appreciating what little one does, even if what one does have comes with a lot of pain and difficulty fitting in in a country that isn't particularly welcoming to outsiders.  

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
Nima doesn't understand why her life is what it is.  Or why she is who she is.  Her mother came to America with her as a baby, leaving a country where, from all the pictures Nima has been able to find, she was happy and loved - especially before her father died.  Now her mother is constantly sad instead.  

At school, Nima is shy, alone, and seemingly mocked by everyone for her strange other-ness...especially Nima's love of things old fashioned and from the country her mother left.  Her only friend is a fellow immigrant and family friend Haitham, who she hangs out with after both public school and Arabic classes, even if he's a year behind in school and has his own friends inside school.  And as a girl from an Arab country, 9/11 only makes things worse in terms of the bullying and treatment during school.  

So Nima dreams of another girl, a girl with the name her father wanted to give her at birth: Yasmeen.  Nima dreams that Yasmeen is everything she is not - happy, outgoing, with friends in a land where she can be herself with joy.  But as things seem to fall apart in her own life, Nima starts to see Yasmeen for real as her own body begins to fade, forcing Nima to make a choice: is her own life worth fighting for?  
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Home is Not a Country is, as I said above the jump, a story told entirely in small poems, ranging from a few lines to at most 4 sparsely spaced out pages.  Each poem is told from the perspective of Nima, as she feels herself around in her life in at first near-misery and desperately struggles for some happiness in it all.  The poems aren't in rhyme, and use various line breaks and stops to emphasize various words, to different degrees of effect - and honestly didn't really work that well for me in that regard most of the time.  Yet as a whole, the poems combine to portray Nima's reality, and her feelings, tremendously, giving power in a seemingly stronger and more unique way than a typical prose first person perspective.  

For Nima is a truly strong lead character who it's easy to empathize with - the girl from a different country she only knows through pictures, which she has idealized notions of from those pictures...idealized largely because in this country she can't seem to fit in.  Her mother is constantly sad and doesn't really provide support and Nima's otherness prevents her from fitting in at school, where her shy and introverted natures wouldn't help otherwise....leaving her with basically no friends other than her family friend Haitham, who's the only one who can secretly appreciate where she's coming from.  And of course the bullying Nima suffers as a result of being a girl from an Arab country (never identified but the author is from Sudan, which probably fits the best of any possibilities), especially after what's suggested is 9/11, only makes it worse. 

So of course Nima dreams of being another girl entirely, with the name that her parents almost chose for her before her father died - and of course she imagines that girl being happier and everything she's not.  Especially when things turn from seemingly bad to worse with the few bright spots in her life, making her run from it all in tears.  And it's there the book turns to magical realism and fantasy elements, as Nima finds herself really seeing a spirit of a girl that has to be Yasmeen, and the life she might have had...and the past she only knew in photos.   

It's a plot I won't spoil too much - again this book is only a little over 200 pages and each page is hardly full length in terms of its content (due to the poetry), but it works really well in showing Nima, and the reader, how one's own life might be far better than one imagines, and that the others in their lives might have their own problems one can't quite comprehend.  Through the course of the plot Nima realizes that she never really considered some of those she cared about's own situations, and how she has a few things that are worth treasuring, and are worth fighting for.  Life may not be easy and it definitely might be unfair, but there are moments of love if you look for them, if you try to understand them, if you don't miss them by spending your whole time wondering "what if."  

And so this book works really well, even as the non-magical problems of Nima kind of get thrown under the rug near the end (she's basically teleported out of a situation into safety in the end, for example).  It's a strong YA novel with a strong message based upon a character from a background that will both be familiar and unfamiliar to many readers, in a form that is very different from the classic prose most will read.  Recommended.  

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