Directions Home

Directions Home explores the trajectories and tendencies of African-Canadian literature within the Canadian canon and the socio-cultural traditions of the African Diaspora.

Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates the story of her childhood in Kuwait, her teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), and her family's last flight to Texas. Nidali mixes humor with a sharp, loving portrait of an eccentric middle-class family, and this perspective keeps her buoyant through the hardships she encounters: the humiliation of going through a checkpoint on a visit to her father's home in the West Bank; the fights with her father, who wants her to become a famous professor and stay away from boys; the end of her childhood as Iraq invades Kuwait on her thirteenth birthday; and the scare she gives her family when she runs away from home. Funny, charming, and heartbreaking, A Map of Home is the kind of book Tristram Shandy or Huck Finn would have narrated had they been born Egyptian-Palestinian and female in the 1970s.

Between 1968 and 1980, fears about family deterioration and national decline were ubiquitous in American political culture. In No Direction Home, Natasha Zaretsky shows that these perceptions of decline profoundly shaped one another. Throughout the 1970s, anxieties about the future of the nuclear family collided with anxieties about the direction of the United States in the wake of military defeat in Vietnam and in the midst of economic recession, Zaretsky explains. By exploring such themes as the controversy surrounding prisoners of war in Southeast Asia, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74, and debates about cultural narcissism, Zaretsky reveals that the 1970s marked a significant turning point in the history of American nationalism. After Vietnam, a wounded national identity--rooted in a collective sense of injury and fueled by images of family peril--exploded to the surface and helped set the stage for the Reagan Revolution. With an innovative analysis that integrates cultural, intellectual, and political history, No Direction Home explores the fears that not only shaped an earlier era but also have reverberated into our own time.

The purpose of this activity book is to introduce students to Canada and to have students develop basic map skills through the use of a map of Canada, included with this book, and the 34 student-based activities outlined.

We begin on the first day of sixth grade in the upper-class community of Roslyn. I was the biggest loser in school and struggled to stay afloat. Then one day everything changed. It was in the eighth grade when I went from being the biggest embarrassment on Long Island to the most popular kid in school. But by that time it was already too late. So began a dark trail of revenge. It was May 4th of 1999 and I was fourteen-years-old. After being shipped across many state lines, touring America's finest juvenile institutions, I find myself at the infamous and notorious Hidden Lake Academy, an academy tucked quietly in the darkness of the Appalachian Mountains of Georgia. But before being shut down in June of 2011 for 'the tragic maltreatment of troubled youth', Hidden Lake Academy was still a thriving success with seemingly no way out. But I had to escape the danger, I had to unshackle my feet, and thus my journey to freedom began... But after a major catastrophe, I end up in New England, alone, on the run, homeless, sleeping in abandoned attics filled with counterfeit money, prostitutes and danger. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep, and no money to eat. I was sixteen-years-old, it was a month before 9/11 and it was the greatest time of my life. Welcome to The Drifter Chronicles, Volume One.