Lina Character Analysis

The woman at the center of Bayoumi’s fifth chapter, an Iraqi American who grows up in Maryland, Brooklyn, and Colorado but, by the time of the book’s publication, lives with her husband in Virginia. She grows up in a largely African-American neighborhood where she feels understood and accepted by her peers. When her father gets a prestigious job, however, Lina’s family moves to a wealthier white neighborhood, where she feels ostracized at school and starts rebelling against her parents: she smokes, wears makeup, skips school, runs away from home, and has a secret boyfriend. Her family sends her to Iraq—twice—to try to reform her. Both times, she returns more connected to her heritage but no less rebellious, and after her mother Maisa suddenly dies, she leaves home for good. She ends up back in Brooklyn and meets an Iraqi named Wisam online, whom she later learns was a spy working for both Saddam Hussein and the FBI. She joins and quits the military, then gradually grows to love Laith, her fiancé and her stepmother’s brother, whom she moves to join in Virginia. Lina’s story is the classic tale of an immigrant struggling to reconcile two cultures—that of the homeland she scarcely remembers halfway across the world and that of her new home country, the United States, which is also busy destroying her old country.