35 pages • 1 hour read
A Place for Us
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Symbols & Motifs
Hair Coverings, Cutting, and Decoration
Hair coverings and styles are a recurring point of focus. Hadia and other women at the wedding are identified as either wearing a hijab or leaving their hair uncovered, and we often receive insight on why the viewpoint character observes these differences. Hadia dyes a strand of her hair blue when she’s a teenager; this seems like an act of rebellion, as she makes sure her hijab covers this when she’s at home. Later in the novel, when she is a doctor at the hospital where Rafiq is being treated, her father admires the single strand of silver in her hair and how well it becomes her—an obvious parallel and a symbol of how their attitudes toward traditional religious presentation have changed over the years. There is a similar focus on men’s hair and beard styles in the narrative, including when Rafiq takes Amar to get his hair cut as a child and when Amar begs his father to shave off his beard in the wake of 9/11. Characters’ hairstyles consistently serve as visual cues indicating personal values and how those values change over time.
Gifts Given Between Family Members
Gift-giving is present from the start, when the novel opens at Hadia’s wedding. One of the first interactions between Hadia and Amar as adults is when Amar hands Hadia a small box, which we assume is his wedding gift to her. It’s later revealed that the box holds their grandfather’s watch, which Rafiq gave to Hadia when she departed for medical school, and which vanished at a later point because a desperate, addicted Amar stole it.
Shoes as gifts is another recurring symbol. Rafiq gives his grandson Abbas an expensive pair of tennis shoes because he remains guilty for not getting Amar the tennis shoes he wanted so badly when he was young. Food items as gifts are another persistent symbol; the siblings getting ice cream together is mirrored in a later anecdote about Rafiq taking Abbas to that same ice cream shop without his sisters. Intermingled with this scene are Rafiq’s memories of getting ice cream with his parents and of flavors that remind him of home.
Lights in the Sky
Particular emphasis falls on sunlight and starlight throughout the novel, both in the flashbacks and the present-day sections describing Hadia’s wedding and Rafiq’s illness and decline. In one of the novel’s first flashbacks, the family attends a Fourth of July fireworks display. All their eyes are trained on the sky, on both stars and fireworks alike. Just before Amar’s former friends call him a terrorist and beat him several days after 9/11, Amar internally defends his father as a peaceful man who always points out the stars to his children. At subsequent points in the narrative, sunlight-centered imagery takes over in frequency. When one character walks away from another outdoors, they’re often walking toward or into the sun. No matter the time of day, morning or afternoon or dusk, quality of light is important to characters’ memories.
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