Home is Not a Country

 

My Thoughts:

First, this cover is beautiful! I just like to soak it in. I have kept this in my reading queue for a while just because I want to keep absorbing the cover. I started reading this for April's poetry month and I have just been holding on to snippets of the story, pulling at pieces of the images and then putting it down so that I could make this book last for the whole month. True story.

This novel in verse is about a girl who feels invisible, who would like to be someone else, Yasmeen as Jazz or Jazzy. Not Nima, grace, who feels the irony of her name that does not fit with her "uncoordinated elbow" and "overlarge feet." Nima  niʻma mispronounced in school. An excerpt from "My Name" by Safia Elhillo:

nima        meaning grace       it would be funny/if it weren't cruel    I stumble over my own overlarge/feet    & knock over the clay incense holder   its coal/burning a perfect circle into the wooden table. . ./in exasperation my mother       calls/for the grace i don't have

 I cannot help but bring forward Esperanza from House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros who also wished to be someone else. In the vignette "My Name" by Cisneros, the character spends multiple short paragraphs saying everything about her name but what her name really is. We know that she did not want to be that woman sitting her sadness on an elbow, or carried away on a horse,  but wanted to rename herself as perhaps "Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes something like Zeze the X will do." By mirroring the title of her poem to Cisneros' vignette, perhaps Elhillo is also calling forward Esperanza in her work.

Through a little bit of magic and the ability to cross reality realms when facing trauma, Nima is able to find answers that help her find herself and recognize her value as Nima. 

These poems are rhythmic and tap out a beat with its creative use of white space and gaps. I also find the Arabic in parts as well as the sparse italicized dialogue very powerful and effective in telling this story. This definitely goes on the list for must read YA novels in verse. I am passing it on. 

From the Publsihers:

my mother meant to name me     for her favorite flower
its sweetness     garlands made     for pretty girls
i imagine her    yasmeen     bright & alive
& i ache to have been born her     instead


Nima wishes she were someone else. She doesn’t feel understood by her mother, who grew up in a different land. She doesn’t feel accepted in her suburban town; yet somehow, she isn't different enough to belong elsewhere. Her best friend, Haitham, is the only person with whom she can truly be herself. Until she can't, and suddenly her only refuge is gone.
 
As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen—the name her parents meant to give her at birth—Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might be more real than Nima knows.  And the life Nima wishes were someone else's. . . is one she will need to fight for with a fierceness she never knew she possessed.