Short Story: A Frame For The Sky

Think of home, and then think of how that has molded who you are now. Then imagine repeatedly losing your home, each time changing you and your identity until you just barely hold onto your original identity. In the short story a Frame for the Sky, a palestinian man with no name, gets displaced from his home several times during his life and each place he gets displaced to changes his identity in different ways. The palestinian man loses his home and loses his true arab identity due to the displacements and in the end he gains an American identity just to have it be lost. At first the palestinian man resided in the West Bank during a time of conflict between Palestine and Israel. He lost his home in the West Bank and found sanctuary in a Jordanian pension. In the pension he planned his escape to Egypt where he wanted to go to college. He had a sort of rebellious attitude that was created when the war started, the injustices being done to his homeland stirred a fire inside of him. In Egypt he met with fellow young
When it came to the day that the palestinian man got to officially become an american, he could not decide if it was going to be one of his best or worst days of his life “When I took my oath, a deep sadness shook inside me: I’d promised to keep my allegiance to the American government and no other”(Jarrar 36). The palestinian man has always had an inner Arab and palestinian identity, at one point the man “suggested, during a meeting with the partners, that we build something on the west bank”(Jarrar 36). The palestinian man is a man shaped by the worst days of his life, a man removed from his original home by war. He traded his identity for one that he never really wanted and in the end he will be seen as a twisted version of his original identity. 9/11 changed the way Americans looked at Arab Americans, putting labels on them that don't apply at