Explanation:
Character Analysis: <em>Hamadi</em>
In this story, both me main character´s father and her friend Hamadi come for a region turn by conflict. Hamadi is from Lebanon, a country devastated by a 16-year civil war. Susan´s father is Palestinian. In 1947, the United Nations proposed a plan to partition what was then Palestine to create Israel, a homeland for the Jewish people. More than 50 years later, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is still unresolved and often marked by violence. These situations have created millions of refugees-people who have fled their native land in search of shelter and protection.
The story is about a girl named Susan, whom family is Arab because of her father and American because of her mother. Hamadi is a friend of her father. “Susan didn´t really feel interested in Saleh Hamadi until she was a freshman in high school carrying a thousand questions around. Why this way? Why not another way? Who said so and why can´t I say something else?” Susan liked Hamadi because he was her surrogate grandmother, whom she missed and couldn´t see because she lived at an old village at north of Jerusalem.
The story carries about how Hamadi helped Susan by giving her advises. She tells about how she admires him and how he has so archaic, in the way he express himself and the way he dressed. One day, near Christmas they went caroling with their English class group and Susan decided on inviting Hamadi, her father and her mother. Her friend Tracy liked a boy named Eddie, but he liked someone else. On the caroling Tracy began to cry because Eddie was with someone else.
Hamadi told her something Susan will never forget, “whenever she was sad herself, even after collage, a creaky anthem sneaking back into her ear” :” We go on. On and on. We don´t stop where it hurts. We turn a corner. It is the reason why we are living. To turn a corner. Come, let´s move.”
Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but she lived in East Jerusalem for her freshman year, then a part Jordan because her family was Arab-American. When she lived there she learned their traditions and culture. She said that “This is one of the best things about growing up in a mixed family or community”. I think that Nye develops the character of Susan by putting her own experience and knowledge of her own life in both United States and the Mid-East. Her family, because of their nationality, may have help Nye at the moment of picking Susan’s.
