1By definition immigration involves the act of border crossing, an act which also highlights all the other borders—social, discursive and imaginary—that are part of framing a national identity. These borders work together to keep some people, in this case those belonging to the nation, in and others out. As a result, immigrants are generally aware of the existence of those (border)lines, whose physical reality (if they have one at all) has often come after their imagined existence in the minds of the people with the power to define them and their subsequent portrayal on maps of the world.

2Consequently, the diaspora literatures are highly concerned with the question of frontiers as they are the site where immigrant authors represent their understandings of the workings of borders and their effects on the formation of their identities as members of a diaspora. Literature acts as a tool for social and cultural transformation, since as Benedict Anderson suggests in his seminal Imagined Communities, it plays a substantial role in the construction of the nation and forming solidarity among its members. It does so by producing common content, reproducing vernacular language and entwining multiple plot lines, which in turn cultivate a way of imagining that supports the integration of self and nation. That is to say, a way of imagining that allows the individual to envision and integrate his or her personal story as part of the story of the nation alongside and parallel to the stories of its other members, since “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail […] the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 2006, 7). Playing with these elements could turn literature into a powerful tool in the hands of the authors of diaspora, a transformative instrument which would allow them to reveal the porosity and artificiality of the lines drawn on the maps, question their use, and reevaluate what it means to be a member of the “imagined community” of the nation.

3This paper will focus on such questioning in the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) by the Syrian American author and poet, Mohja Kahf. Kahf’s only novel to date narrates the coming-of-age of Khadra Shamy, a young Syrian American girl who, like Kahf, was brought to the United States by her parents at an early age. Through her narrative, Kahf demonstrates how crossing the physical borders of the country of origin and settling within the confines of another results in the destabilization of all types of borders, those between genders, religions, myth and reality, and geographical borders. It is this destabilization that eventually results in a questioning of the borders between self and other, and a new understanding of identity. Both thematic and structural techniques are employed in the narrative to demonstrate the eventual artificiality and malleability of borders. On the thematic level, it is the protagonist’s journey of self-discovery that serves to subvert the idea of fixed borders. and on the structural level, the narrative attempts at obscuring the borders between genres, literary, historical, religious and other. This in turn results in a play between the extra textual and the textual level of the narrative to help carry out the author’s political, social and cultural missions which consist mainly of claiming a place for Arab American women in the American society, and also of questioning the nature of the lines that separate people and put them into boxes, a topic that she has addressed in several interviews.

4The novel opens with an epigraph from The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kid: “my creative life is my deepest prayer” (Kahf 2006, 1). The epigraph to the first chapter of the novel—as each and every one of the sixty-six unnumbered chapters of the book opens with one—works on many levels to cross numerous borders and immediately sets the ground for what the novel will be doing throughout. First, it instantly creates a link between the extra textual and the textual, since the epigraph can be read on two levels: as an epigraph, relating to the contents of the chapter, and as a statement made by the author in relation to her novel. One should note that Sue Monk Kid is a Southern author from Sylvester, Georgia, and her The Dance of the Dissident Daughter is subtitled A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (1996). The book recounts the story of the author’s successful pilgrimage from her Southern Baptist roots and away from the patriarchal and fundamentalist Christian religious systems surrounding her. As such, the epigraph works to introduce almost all the areas where the novel complicates fixed borders: gender, religion, and the self.

5The epigraph also works to cross a number of frontiers. On the one hand, it traverses the frontiers between Kid’s text and Kahf’s novel as it relates Kid’s journey to that of the novel’s protagonist, who much like Kid goes through a journey of self-discovery. This is the manner in which it problematizes the frontiers between history/autobiography and fiction, linking the novel to a postmodern tradition which maintains that the goal of fiction is “to show that past itself is fiction since we can only know the past through forms of representation or of narrative […] We transform historical events into facts by interpreting the archive documents which are representations of the past, themselves victims of the subjectivity of the person that recorded them” (Chirobocea 2017, 240). Hence, the frontier between autobiography as a historical recording1 (Wallach 2006, 459) and fiction as an imaginative account of events is problematized. On the other hand, by relating the two texts, one belonging to the Christian (Kid’s), and the other to the Islamic tradition (Kahf’s), and by highlighting the unsettling similarities of the journeys undertaken by their followers, the epigraph engenders the crossing of religious boundaries, a theme that will be amply developed by the novel. Finally, by creating the above-mentioned connections between Kid’s and Kahf’s creative work, it puts Kahf, an Arab American author, on the same level as Kid, an American author, thus redefining what it means to be an American and claiming a place for Arab American women alongside American women on the literary maps of the United States, which is the author’s primary political mission.

6The integral role of frontiers and their crossing as a theme in the novel is introduced through a map in the novel’s opening:

“Liar” she says to the highway sign that claims “The People of Indiana Welcome You.” The olive-skinned, dark-haired young woman drives west on the old National Road. A small zippered Quran and a camera on the hatchback’s passenger seat in easy reach, covered by an open map—States of the Heartland. Khadra Shamy spent most of her growing-up years in Indiana. She knows better than the sign. (2006, 1)

7Notably, the novel begins at the moment the protagonist crosses the frontier between Philadelphia and Indiana, her home state, after a long, seven-year absence. Two significant objects, the Quran and the camera, have been cast on the backseat of her car in this scene—objects that stand for important aspects of Khadra’s identity, as a Muslim woman and as a photographer/storyteller/cartographer—, while being covered, and thus repressed by the map of States of the Heartland. The significance of the concept of mapping and its relevance in reading the novel is established at the very beginning. The map of the States of the Heartland, the one that is sold in the shops and is considered to be the “standard” version, with fixed frontiers represented by continuous lines, functions as a repressive tool with a coercive influence on the protagonist’s identity, an idea that is further developed in the narrative. For Graham Huggan who writes about contemporary women’s writing in Canada and Australia, “[t]he prevalence of the map topos” in those writings owes to the need for the revision, reformulation, and sometimes dismantling and discarding of “spatial paradigms that have traditionally served the interests of patriarchal culture” (1994, 95). In the work of Kahf, the map is similarly associated with patriarchal authority, and nationalistic notions. It functions as a symbol of patriarchal authority, since the domains of geography and cartography are dominated by men to such an extent that according to Gillian Rose “to think geography—to think within the parameters of the discipline in order to create geographical knowledge acceptable to the discipline—is to occupy a masculine subject position” (1996, 4); and patriarchy is static and restricting. This static quality is implied by the inertia represented in the description of the three objects. It is as if, in this scene, the map, with its imposing frontiers, placed on the Quran and the camera, hinders them from any movement or activity.

8This interpretation seems particularly relevant when the camera comes back at the end of the novel, liberated from the inertia imposed by the map, in a scene where numerous photos are being taken by Khadra. The camera then, in the hands of the female protagonist, becomes an instrument for change, since as Susan Sontag argues in her On Photography, the act of photography is not just a neutral act of recording historical evidence. Photography is a tool of power (1973, 8) and photos are used to “help people take possession of space in which they are insecure” (1973, 9). Thus, at the end of the novel, the camera, an indispensable tool in cartography, allows Khadra to remap her home state Indiana, drawing new flexible frontiers, and thus redefining her identity in such a way as not to be in clash with the Other anymore, be it people of other faiths or other branches of Islam or the Americans; hence, allowing for difference to exist and for her to “just be” (Kahf 2006, 358).

9As mentioned above, the novel begins with the protagonist’s journey back to Indiana, where she has passed “most of her growing up years” (2006, 1) and continues through a series of flashbacks that take the readers back to Khadra’s childhood and recount her growing up step by step. Through the flashbacks, the narrative illustrates that the process of destabilization of borders of every kind follows from the physical act of border crossing. For instance, right after Khadra’s family moves to Indiana, they and especially Khadra’s mother are faced with a confusing situation:

The neighbors on the other side were as nice as the Lotts were mean […] Lindsey and Leslie bewildered the Shamy’s, because you couldn’t tell which of them was the woman, and which the man.

“Miso soup for our neighbors!” one of them said at the door […] If male, he had very clean-shaven soft skin. If female, she had big knuckles and a very flat chest. This unnerved Khadra’s mother. If she could be sure it was the woman, she’d invite her in, but if it was the man, she’d stay behind the screen door and be careful not to touch his hand when she took the bowl. (2006, 7)

10The patriarchal world Khadra lives in tries to impose its fixed borders on her, so as to shape her identity to fit its own predetermined models. She is growing up on the one hand, in a Muslim community that tries to impose strict and fixed frontiers in every domain of her life, and on the other, in a country and a state which try to fix her as the Other, the oppressed Muslim woman who cannot be a member of the national community, thereby approving, reinforcing and fixing the Muslim community’s unchanging borders as a community in the midst of Indiana with almost no relations to the world outside, placed somewhere where it does not belong. For instance, the narrator tells the readers that many of the town’s residents were not happy about “Muslims doing God’s work there” (2006, 38), and that a certain group which called themselves the “Protectors” had tried various methods to make them leave. The Protectors’ first move was to call Immigration and Naturalization authorities, who had raided the Muslim Center in vain. As their next move, they had invoked zoning ordinances. Both these acts are symbolic as they involve maps and limits and have keeping people and businesses in and out of those limits for their goal. Thus, both actions are intended to reinforce limits and borders and to keep the people who do not belong out. To put it in a nutshell, the Muslim community and the American host work reciprocally and hand in hand in order to define and fix the limits of Khadra’s identity as a Muslim woman and as the ultimate Other. However, incrementally throughout the novel, those borders prove to be porous and artificial, as the protagonist is faced with innumerous situations where fixed borders are undermined and static frontiers destabilized.

11Another example, much like the one above, proving the confusing nature of frontiers which also follows the physical act of border crossing, is given when little Khadra is offered candy corn by her teacher at school. Khadra knows that she should not eat anything that has “pig” in it. Her parents who have learned much to their surprise that “[d]anger abounded. Pork was everywhere” (2006, 12) have explained to her that there are bugs in pork and if she eats it “bugs would grow in [her] stomach and eat [her] guts out” (2006, 12). That is why they have instructed her to “always ask before you eat anything from kuffar [non-Muslim] hands” (2006, 13). So, when kind and sweet Mrs. Brown, Khadra’s teacher at school, offers her candy corn, at first, she refuses to eat it because she thinks there is pig in it, but Mrs. Brown assures her with a lovely laugh that that is not true. Khadra learns later from her brother that there is indeed pig in candy corn: “it was too late to throw up. Khadra was tainted forever. If she lived, that is. Too ashamed to tell her parents, she waited in horror for the bugs to grow in her stomach and eat her guts out” (2006, 13). In the new land, it is not even possible for Khadra to control the frontiers of her own body. The new land proves to have uncertain boundaries that are threatening to Khadra to the point of annihilation.2

12The chapter with the candy corn scene, the second of the novel, begins with a quotation from the Psalm 137: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Kahf 2006, 8). The chapter narrates the family’s beginnings in the United States, as “they were a galaxy away from home” (2006, 12). Much like the first chapter, the epigraph of the second chapter, famously recounting the exile of the Jewish people, creates a link between the latter’s experience and Khadra’s Muslim family’s experience of immigration, thus linking the two religions, and questioning the rigid frontiers that separate them. It would not be far-fetched to argue that the epigraph subtly links the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as the Psalm figures as part of the Bible.

13The choice of this epigraph is further significant as on the one hand, it is a lament on the pains of exile, and as such, it fits the actions described in the narrative as the chapter focuses on Khadra’s first experiences in and memories of America. However, ironically, where Psalm 137 emphasizes the memory of the lost land, Square One is described as the first world Khadra remembers. Thus, from the very beginning of Khadra’s story, the narrator is subtly undermining the question of roots fixed in the limits of closed frontiers, by implying that the protagonist’s roots are in Square One, in the United States as much as they are in Syria or maybe even other places, such as Mecca, and Philadelphia. It takes the protagonist the whole novel and twenty something years to realize this though. Throughout her growing up years, she goes through an identity crisis, as she struggles with the fixed boundaries imposed on her, being constantly faced with the destabilization of those fixed borders that are supposed to define her identity and demarcate her place in the world. She travels to all these geographical places in search of her roots, but every time she fails to wholly bind herself to their fixed boundaries. The view of roots propagated by the novel is reminiscent of Amin Maalouf’s preference for the term routes instead of roots3.

14Khadra’s only memories of Syria, while vague, are corporeal. When she asks her brother where Syria is, the narrator tells the reader:

Khadra couldn’t remember Syria, although she thought of it whenever she rubbed a little boomerang-shaped scar on her right knee that had been made on a broken tile in Syria. Red blood running down a white stone step. Walay himmek. Ey na’am. Sometimes she had a vague memory of having been on a mountain. Dry sunny days that had a certain smell that made her think of Syria, and when she bit into a tart plum or a dark cherry, her mouth felt like Syria. (2006, 15)

15In this passage, four types of imagery, kinesthetic, visual, olfactory and gustatory, are employed to describe the protagonist’s memories of her home country, emphasizing their corporeal quality. It could be argued that Syria is thus linked to Jacques Lacan’s Imaginary order (Lacan 1998, 73–88).4 Such a reading is encouraged by the way the narrator continues to contrast Eyad’s memories to Khadra’s: “Eyad […] remembered Syria in complete sentences, not flashes of words and tastes” (2006, 15). This relates Eyad’s experience of Syria to language, to the Symbolic order. In Lacan’s Imaginary order, the subject does not distinguish between the self and the other; in other words, borders and frontiers are not clearly defined.

16On a narrative level, the use of the Arabic language in this passage which recounts the protagonist’s memories of the homeland, becomes relevant to the above discussion. This technique, that is recourse to the mother tongue in the middle of a work of fiction written in English, is not used just by Kahf or Arab American writers and could be observed among the writers of various diasporas. Some authors use literal translations of idioms and expressions from the original language refusing any syntactic compromise. Others, as in the example of the above passage, use words that are transliterated into the host language, in this case English, in the middle of passages or midsentence. Some authors provide the translation of the phrases and others leave them without any translation. In the case of this passage, and the rest of the Arabic phrases used in the novel, they are left without any translation. Such a use of language in the narrative is in line with the novel’s project of remapping and could be read as a commentary on the question of territoriality. Bill Ashcroft’s Postcolonial Transformation claims that the gap between place and language is responsible for such a use of language. He goes on to explain that this gap “between the experienced place and the language available to describe it, lies at the heart of the experience of […] displacement” (2001, 153). However, such an explanation implies a rather accidental or unconscious quality in the use of language, since it is the difference in experience that obliges the speaker to seek recourse to another language, one that will allow him/her to represent what he/she is faced with. Although the gap between language and place could be a way of explaining this phenomenon, it is more pertinent to argue for the intentionality of this usage as a way to create a new language which could correspond to the new geographies being defined by the novel. In these examples, both languages are treated equally, as one, though the shift to Arabic is still signaled to the readers by a change in font as the phrases in Arabic are printed in italics. The creation of a new register, one that would perfectly mix both languages, and undermine the borders that separate the two, would have required no signalization at all. Nonetheless, this continuation in writing with a signalization in the font still attests to the hybridity and fragmentation of diasporic subjectivity.5

17This play with language is an attempt to fashion a new and innovative use which bears witness to the hybridity of the speaker/author, and comes close to Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments in their work on minor literatures. Deleuze and Guattari argue that a minor literature is constructed by a minority with a major language (1986, 16). In the example provided by Deleuze and Guattari, that is the writings of Franz Kafka, Kafka’s use of Prague German is considered to be revolutionary in its intentional intensity as opposed to the symbolic use that other writers of the same epoch make of it: a use of language that pushes it to extreme deterritorialization as opposed to the forced symbolic reterritorialization by the authors who artificially enrich Prague German with symbolism, oneirism, esoteric sense and hidden signifiers (1986, 19). For Deleuze and Guattari, minor literatures have three major characteristics: they deterritorialize language, are necessarily political, and have a collective value (1986, 16–7). Deleuze and Guattari assert that it is precisely the marginal status of the author that allows him/her to “express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (1986, 17).

18The language of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf seems to have gathered these characteristics. Composed by a “marginal” author, one that belongs to a minority in the country where she resides, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf deterritorializes language using a minimum of two different strategies. First, there is the use of Arabic, signaled by the change in font, which in turn signalizes, and is the result of a hybrid and fragmented subjectivity. Then, there is the use of intertexts, which are used as epigraphs to each of the sixty-six chapters of the novel. The intertexts are drawn from extremely diverse sources, written originally in diverse languages, from religious sources such as the Quran, the Bible or the Prophet’s sayings, to scientific ones such as Sue Hubbell’s Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs, to books on history and philosophy such as James H. Madison’s The Indiana Way and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, to mythological books like Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Kramer’s Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth to English and American, Russian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Persian, etc. literature, poetry and prose, to song lyrics, to books on Sufism or by famous figures of Sufism such as Rumi or Attar to travel guides and dictionaries such as Thomas Huhti’s The Great Indiana Touring Book and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. These intertexts put together a great variety of language registers and styles which stand as proof to the deterritorializing quality of the language of the novel. The language of the novel does not root the reader in the geographies of Indiana, neither those of America, and it similarly does not entrench him/her in the language register of a prose novel, but constantly uproots him/her at least once with the beginning of every chapter, which is every few pages as the novel is made up of rather short chapters—the shortest chapter of the novel being the twelfth chapter, made up of two and a half pages, and the longest being the thirty-fifth one consisting of thirteen pages.

19As mentioned above, this uprooting takes place within the novel’s chapters sometimes with the use of Arabic words or phrases, but also, at other times with the use of various language registers and a great variety of allusions to or the direct insertion of texts from diverse sources. The Arabic words and phrases that are incorporated into the text of the novel in English transliteration are written in both Quranic and modern Arabic, the latter using namely the Syrian dialect. Thus, Quranic verse, prayer and Hadith figure here and there in the narrative. An example could be found in the second chapter, where Khadra remembers her life in Square One, in a scene with a nostalgic tone. In this scene, Khadra’s learning of the lines of a very well-known Quranic verse, Fatiha, which is spoken in the Muslim daily prayers, Salah, is paralleled with her learning to swing: “‘Bismillah arrahmani ‘rahim!’ Khadra sang as her father pushed her up […] ‘Alhamdu lilahi rabil alamin,’ Eyad yelled on the next swing […] ‘Arrahmani ‘rahim!’ […] Suddenly Khadra could do it. ‘I can swing! By myself, I can swing!” […] ‘See me, Mama, see me Baba!’ And they saw” (2006, 9). This passage is significant in that it not only shows an example of the use of Quranic Arabic in the narrative, but it also illustrates how the narrative imitates the writing style of the religious text all the while using a childish language in a Joycean manner in order to designate character. The text of the novel contains pieces of advertisements, highway signs, prayers, job ads, flyers, poetry or popular songs, news or extracts from religious books in English, Arabic, and French. The intertexts fulfill other functions as well, such as undermining the frontiers that separate literary genres as discussed with an example above. Including such a variety of genres within the text of the novel and giving them the exact same treatment presents their separation as arbitrary. The narrative further incorporates words taken from the Syrian dialect, namely small words such as interjections as with “ey na’am”, “walay himmek” which is also transliterated as “walay hemmek”, and words of endearment such as “te’ebrani”. At times though, both Classical Arabic and Syrian extracts are directly translated into English and it is only the English translation that is given to the readers. For instance, when Téta, the protagonist’s father’s aunt, starts singing a Syrian folk song, the song is given to the readers in English while they know that Téta does not speak and in this case especially sing the Syrian song in English: “‘Girl of my homeland, where are you going, so tender and true” (2006, 216).

20In addition to questioning geographical, gender, and religious boundaries, and in its attempt to question the frontiers of a static national identity, the narrative undermines the well-established frontiers of myth and history, and brings into question history’s claim to truth. Once again, the epigraphs play an important role in carrying out the task. Chapter twenty-one’s epigraph reads as follows: “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes […] invincible in battle and wise in peace […] dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors […]” (2006, 118).6 This epigraph, taken from an essay on race and religion by the black American novelist and social critic James Baldwin, prepares the reader for an encounter with the alternative point of view on the Iranian hostage crisis that the chapter is going to put forward, where the Iranians are the heroes. It does so by claiming that history is a matter of belief in a certain view on matters and that race is a determining factor in the process. In other words, it plays upon the opposition between history and myth in which myth and history are “considered antithetical modes of explanation” (Heehs 1994, 1), where myth is considered to be false and history to be true. What is thought of as a true historical account then is denounced and the fundamentality of the questions of positionality and identity in the construction of any historical account is highlighted. “The discourse of history as well as of myth is simultaneously a discourse of identity; it consists of attributing a meaningful past to a structured present” (Friedman 1992, 194). Subsequently, the whole of American mainstream history as written by white Americans is brought under question, and its truth value undermined as an attempt by people from a certain social/racial position to structure a specific present by constructing and promoting a past which legitimizes that present. In doing so, that is in discarding the entire history of (white) America, Baldwin’s statement creates a demand for alternative versions of that history to be written, and this is precisely what the twenty-first chapter of the novel does. It responds to this demand and proposes a version of an important episode in American history that goes against the existing and accepted version; however, it is not an “American Negro” version that is put forward, but an Arab and Muslim American one. Thus, Arab and Muslim Americans are brought to the fore and given voice by the narrative. This serves to prove that “[h]istory […] is very much a mythical construction, in the sense that it is a representation of the past linked to the establishment of an identity in the present” (Friedman 1992, 195). In order for Arab American women of the present to be able to redefine themselves, they necessarily need to rewrite, not only the present, but more urgently, the past. The passage thus underlines the reciprocal relationship between the past and the present and confirms the intrinsic presence of one in the other, undermining the borders that separate them. This is all the more evident as Baldwin’s statement comments on the past, one might say the beginnings of American history, since he refers to the “ancestors” of white Americans, while the narrative focuses on actions that are taking place in the narrative’s present in the 1970s; a present that is itself a historical past compared to the time of the novel’s release, and thus readership. Undermining the credibility of the American past in turn undermines the credibility of present and future accounts of mainstream history (such as the events and the aftermath of 9/11) and thus opens a space for the articulation of alternative accounts.

21The narrative structure of the novel further reinforces this questioning of temporal borders as the whole narrative is constructed around flashbacks, which are not signaled to the readers with any specific markers. The narrative continues with only minor spacing between paragraphs, such as the one employed when the narrator starts speaking about a different topic. Moreover, the novel ends where it had begun, with Khadra in Indiana, taking pictures of her Muslim community’s life; pictures that are going to be published in a Philadelphia-based magazine entitled Alternative Americas. The name given to the magazine is an allusion to Sebastião Salgado’s book of photography entitled Autres Amériques (1986), whose name (the photograph’s) is mentioned seemingly casually at some point in the novel. The allusion hints at the significance of the visual field in the novel, which fits well with its cartographic project of map breaking. In his book, Salgado focuses on countryside and indigenous life in countries of the American continent other than the United States, namely South American countries such as Mexico and Brazil. Autres Amériques received the Prix du Premier Livre Photo and the photographer was hailed for his commitment to the cause of oppressed people. Thus, Salgado’s Autres Amériques which in itself is an attempt to modify the previous maps of America and put the oppressed and the minorities back on the map by making them the subject of photography, is linked to Khadra’s photography project to include Muslim America in a new process of remapping; one that proves that maps are not definitive or accurate and that the frontiers they draw are not only never precise, but are constantly subject to modification.

22At each stage in the novel, the protagonist’s view about frontiers is symbolized by the color of her scarf and the way she wears it. The black or white scarf that is tightly worn throughout her growing up years, is totally given up for a short period during her final trip in the novel, which is a trip to Syria, until she understands “[h]ow veiling and unveiling are part of the same process, the same cycle, how both are necessary; how both light and dark are connected moments in the development of the soul in its darkroom” (2006, 309). By the end of the novel, she is wearing the tangerine scarf of the title, loosely this time “so it moved and slipped about her face and touched her cheek, like the hand of a lover” (2006, 313), the color and the moving edges of the scarf symbolically representing the move away from extremes and the malleability of frontiers.

23By the end of the novel, the physical crossing of the borders of other countries and states in search of her roots leads the protagonist to the remapping of the borders of the “imagined community” of the nation, and to the realization, that despite her inability to neatly fit in the boundaries of the nation, she is one of its members, since in reality those boundaries are not fixed where official maps have drawn them: “She looks around at the white people, too—the Americans—no wait, she's American now—the other Americans. […] Midwesterners—Hoosiers-set in their ways, hardworking, steady, valuing God and family. Suspicious of change. In a funny way, Khadra realizes suddenly, as she surveys the crowd: they're us, and we're them. Hah! My folks are the perfect Hoosiers!” (2006, 438).

24As such, with its numerous border-crossings, both on the level of content and structure, the narrative problematizes the view of borders as fixed and ossified and instead promotes an understanding of borders that conceives of them as artificial, porous and infinitely malleable. Such a view of borders is then extended and proven to influence the construction and perception of identity and consequently affects the question of belonging. Identity is no longer viewed as an essential and unalterable entity, but as one that is being constantly and inevitably reworked and refashioned. Finally, by advocating such a view on borders and identities, the narrative claims a place for Arab American women in the American society, questioning the inflexible character of the borders of the nation and re-evaluating what it means to be a member of its imagined community.