Sandwiches

Elhillo uses the symbol of sandwiches to bookend the novel and prove the challenges of Nima’s identity. Nima explains in the prologue how she “begged mama to stop packing” leftovers and how “the smell alone . . . filled the entire bus” (9). She used to throw away her mother’s lunches and started to make her own “dejected sandwiches” with “white bread” and “plasticky american cheese” (9). This proves Nima’s awareness of her otherness, and her attempt to be more American among her peers. At the end of the novel, after Nima has returned from the old country and under the mini-chapter title of “Home is Not a Country” her mother makes her a lunch of feta, fuul, and tomato (203). Nima’s mother says she cannot “keep imagining [line break] my daughter at school eating that plastic” (203). Nima, looking at the “neon cheese,” feels “a dread [line break...