How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Lina Summary & Analysis

In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, “there was no ice cream.” It is illegal, as the nation is “choking under sanctions” in 1996. Lina is seventeen, and has been sent back from the U.S. on a one-way ticket by her conservative parents as punishment for her truancy and American boyfriend. Most Americans see Iraq “as a blur of bad news,” essentially identical with Islamic fundamentalism and extremist groups. But it also has a history and a people. After a flight to Jordan, a long bus ride, and a lecture from her mother Maisa, who demands she say nothing political, Lina ends up at her aunt’s beautiful villa, surrounded by huge piles of garbage, evidence of the nation’s collapsing social services under the sanctions. After a summer visiting relatives, her mother and sister leave her there.

The sanctions imposed by the United States and United Nations effectively stop all food, medicine, and equipment from flowing into Iraq. Saddam imposes rations and “at least half a million” children die unnecessarily; the nation’s infrastructure collapses. The UN’s assistant secretary general even resigns in protest because he considers these sanctions equivalent to genocide. Without electricity or sugar, “ice cream became simply unsustainable.” So, for good measure, the regime outlaws it. Although Lina enjoys seeing her family and grows close to one of her cousins, she can see the suffering caused by the sanctions firsthand; and she misses her boyfriend, to whom she writes letters that she cannot send because of fear and her family. Meanwhile, the UN is busy scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.

Bayoumi meets Lina in 2006 at a Bay Ridge café, where she smokes and smiles with a rebellious energy that reflects her private conflicts with her parents (rather than any political commitments). Her story, too eccentric to generalize, is nevertheless tinged with politics, especially because of her father’s resolute opposition to Saddam.

In 1979, Lina is born in Kuwait City; four years later, the family moves to the United States so that her father can study for his PhD. Her mother Maisa works at the Iraqi embassy and brings her father to parties where “the necessary worship of Saddam” infuriates him, and his criticisms lead to Maisa’s firing in 1986. The family moves to a working-class black neighborhood in Maryland, where Maisa works at a thrift store and raises her daughters strictly. Lina’s father gets a job at the National Institute of Drug Abuse and Iraq invades Kuwait, which means the family is going to stay in the United States for good. They move to a wealthier, whiter suburb and, for the first time, Lina feels judged and ostracized because of her race.

Nevertheless, Lina manages to befriend various students from different groups by the time she gets to high school. But her fashion choices frustrate Maisa, who accuses her of “turning into a black person!” Lina starts smoking and wearing makeup—but she fails to hide either from her mother, who grows stricter and stricter. Soon, “home [feels] like prison.”

Sophomore year, Lina gets into an argument with Maisa because she wants to go to the homecoming dance; her father agrees that she can go, and her mother even helps her buy a dress, but insists that she drive Lina both ways. During the dance, however, Lina notices Maisa lingering in the corner, watching her and her friends. They watch each other quietly and later drive home in silence.

Lina starts skipping class, which is the only way to see her friends. As her grades decline, her parents decide she should go to Iraq for the summer. She is excited—she scarcely remembers the Iraqi family she talks with on the phone and finally, if ironically, gets the freedom she never had at home. When she comes back to the United States from Iraq that fall, however, she returns to her old self. She starts skipping classes with her new boyfriend, Daniel, who is half Puerto Rican and half black and neither minds that her parents are conservative nor tries to have sex with her. But when Lina’s parents catch on to her evening phone calls with Daniel, she decides to run away.

Lina stays at friends’ houses during her runaway attempts and climbs out of her locked window when she inevitably goes back home—each time, her father gives her a drug test and sends her to the gynecologist to ensure she has not lost her virginity. Once, after a two-week stint at a friend’s house, her parents find her laying on the couch with Daniel in the basement. Instead of berating her, they say they want to meet Daniel, who soon comes over for dinner. But then Lina’s parents reveal they are planning to send her to stay with family friends in Virginia for a few weeks, and then back to Iraq.

In Virginia, Lina grows close to the 22-year-old Looma, the family friends’ daughter, who even lets her drink. She still misses Daniel, however. One day, her father calls to inform her that Daniel is in prison for a carjacking and robbery. Lina goes to visit him and is devastated; Looma advises her to move on. Soon Lina goes to Iraq, on a ticket with no return date. She thinks about Daniel endlessly for a few months, but then abruptly forgets him and starts enjoying her freedom. She is still unhappy, though—her family manages to obtain ice cream to cheer her up, but she still breaks down one night, crying and feeling isolated, able to talk only to God. Like many people under the sanctions, she begins praying devoutly and even wearing “the entire regalia of a religious woman,” to her family’s surprise.

After over a year, Maisa finally comes to bring Lina home from Iraq. She is shocked by her daughter’s new religious clothing, though Lina soon stops wearing it. Lina is sad to disappoint her mother once again, and agrees to an engagement with her older cousin in Iraq.

When she returns to the United States with Maisa, Lina’s family is living in Colorado, where her father works for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. She bonds with her mother over wedding dress shopping but cannot stand her new town, which is “claustrophobic and small-minded,” uniformly white and adamantly Christian. But her parents are getting along better, and finally “they [feel] like a family.” And then, suddenly, Maisa dies from an infection while Lina’s father is away. The family is devastated; Lina calls off her engagement. She graduates high school and spends the following summer “drinking hard and smoking a lot of weed” as her father falls into depression and fights endlessly with her.

One day, Lina goes to Denver and never comes back. She stays with the only person she knows, works at a restaurant, and meets a group of Arabs at the University of Denver. She enrolls in community college, gets a diversity grant to pay for her tuition, and finally contacts her father, who is actually very impressed and satisfied with her decisions—he even helps her pay for school and rent. Lina starts dating a Palestinian man named Zaki, who brings her gifts from Lebanon.

Lina increasingly feels an itch to return to the East Coast, preferably to Maryland. When her father gets a job in Brooklyn, they move “into a drab concrete building in Bay Ridge.” She takes a cross-country bus to break up with Zaki, who is cheating on her anyway, and enrolls in Kingsborough Community College. She connects with a group of Iraqis on the internet and falls for one of them, Wisam, although they remain only close friends and never date.

In mid-2001, Lina’s father hastily marries a woman from a family of dissidents-turned-refugees torn apart by Saddam’s regime. Lina is confused and sad, but eventually grows close to her new family in Brooklyn and even agrees with their suggestion she marry one of her new stepmother’s older brothers, Laith. But he is dating an American woman, and in her confusion and frustration, Lina joins the army to be an operating-room specialist, seeking a sense of purpose and clarity of mind. Her father is incensed, but his neighbors and coworkers in the prison system change his mind. Wisam’s sister Rana, the daughter of an Iraqi diplomat, is clearly disappointed. Lina goes to Virginia for training and quickly starts feeling better, gaining a sense of discipline and focusing her goals. Having achieved what she sought from the military, she decides to quit. Back home, she briefly rekindles her friendship with Rana.

One Friday in 2003, the FBI comes to Lina’s house and politely interrogates her about Rana, Wisam, and their other brother Ra’ed, who is apparently a spy—one of his friends is planning to kill a member of Lina’s stepmother’s family. This means that Wisam, too, is secretly working for Saddam, and Lina is devastated to learn that “her closest friend and so much more” has been using her.

Rana and the family’s other brother are deported, but “Wisam and Ra’ed were not so lucky.” Lina remembers having been stopped for more than 20 minutes by the police when she was with Ra’ed a few days before; now, it all makes sense. She even remembers Ra’ed bringing the assassin, nicknamed “the scorpion,” over to her house. This man, supposedly visiting to ask Lina’s father about a rash, was “rough and imposing.” Wisam and Ra’ed are arrested in March 2003, right after the beginning of the Iraq War, and charged with acting as Iraqi intelligence agents, although some evidence suggests they were FBI informants, but the judge “determine[s] that the brothers posed no threat to national security.”

Lina moves to Virginia, where she continues working at a restaurant and going to community college. Her relationship with Laith eventually “turn[s] into real love,” but, by the end of 2004, things are rocky again and Lina returns to Brooklyn to work at a short-lived Arab American newspaper. In January 2005, Ra’ed and Wisam are convicted and sentenced to six months’ incarceration for working as foreign spies, but have already spent two years in prison and are deported to Jordan, the only country that agrees to take them. Lina visits Wisam about a dozen times, but his sense of disconnection leads her to believe he is guilty and was probably acting as a double agent, working for both the FBI and Saddam.

In July of 2006, Lina and Laith finally marry, and she moves to be with him in Virginia. Their marriage gives Lina both “something to hold on to” emotionally and a source of cultural pride. As of 2007, she is pregnant, and during Bayoumi’s visit, they celebrate at an Arabic restaurant and club in the area, then go to Laith’s brother’s Denny’s restaurant, which is full of a broad mosaic of Americans.

While the desire to return home is often seen as central to the experience of exile, this is not so for Lina, who “simply no longer recognizes the [Iraqi] nation she sees on television,” with its internal divisions and economic hardships. She especially laments the sanctions. The vast majority of her family has left Iraq and is now living in Syria and Jordan. Like so many immigrant Americans, Lina is trying to “build [her] own destiny from [her] American home while keeping one eye open to that which has been lost,” living in a geographical in-between space of sorts, starting a family but lamenting alongside her husband Laith that “there is no Iraq anymore.”