50 pages • 1 hour read
Road to Chlifa
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Section One: CatalysisChapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary: Pages 10-22
The narration of Section One begins with an anonymous narrator speaking on behalf of all her classmates in their Montreal school in 1990. As students arrive, one—Nancy Chartrand—notices the presence of a new boy, Karim. She tries to engage him in conversation, asks if he’s Arab, and observes that he’s “not much of a talker,” although he is cute. Our narrator confirms Nancy’s opinion, writing that Karim is “the desert prince type” (12).
She tells us that the school has many immigrant students; one Canadian student, Sandrine, has a “Consciousness-Raising Committee on the Situation of Immigrants” to which she tries to recruit new students. Karim isn’t impressed by her overtures, nor is he fazed by nasty comments by a male student, Dave, who questions his sexuality in addition to making frequent comments about his race. The narratorsays that, while no one could “get a rise of out Karim,” no one “left him in peace,” either (17).
Karim’s diary presents his perspective. While his brothers, who arrived in Montreal earlier than Karim, said that they were “invisible” in their new schools, Karim feels like “some animal being inspected by potential buyers” (14). He is put off by the Western capitalism, vanity, and promiscuity he observes in Canadian culture, and by Canada’s cold winters.
Karim has a story to tell—he’d like to tell it to his friend,Béchir, but he feels he can’t respond to Béchir’sletter until he tackles the request that he comes up with a list of twenty-one things he likes about life in Montreal. Meanwhile, his list of indignities keeps growing. In class, My-Lan gives a presentation on a song that contains the lyrics “in the boughs of the juniper tree,” and then the anonymous narrator gives one on a song about heartache, containing the lyrics “I carry you inside like a wounded bird” (21). Upset by these songs, Karim leaves the classroom.
Summary: Pages 23-36
The anonymous narrator reveals that her classmates believe Karim has a baby—a girl saw him in the park, and Karim didn’t explain his relationship to the child he was with. His classmates’ speculations are tinged with racist beliefs about Muslim countries: one postulates, “Karim had been married at fifteen to a twelve-year-old who died in childbirth” (23). She also reveals that no one understood his “episode” in French class, although it did reveal to the narrator a crack in Karim’s façade, and his “despair” (24).
She calls Karim a “catalyst,” creating the explosion that occurs on the class ski trip. At the prompting of the French teacher,Robert, the class discusses the immigrant experience, as well as racism in Canadian society. A classmate, Sandrine, suggests that in the future, “we’ll all look alike, pale Brown, and we’ll all speak…Esperanto” (28). A classmate, Pascale, objects, telling the class that immigrants are not a single block; they have diverse experiences, backgrounds, and beliefs, and immigrants don’t want their respective cultures homogenized into Canadian culture.
While the narrator learns much from Pascale’s perspective, it seems to stoke Dave and his friends’ intolerance. She awakens to sounds in the boys’ bathroom, where Karim is found in a pool of blood, along with My-Lan, who is trembling in a corner. The narrator and her classmates discover that Dave and his friends have groped My-Lan, although they claim that they “wouldn’a raped her” (33). When Karim came to her rescue and began punching Dave, Dave’s friends assisted Dave by handing him a knife.
Karim’s diaries tell us his perspective: he wakes up in the hospital surprised and almost disappointed that he is alive. He notes the irony of having survived years of war, only to experience real violence in Canada. My-Lan visits him, and he finds he cannot explain to her that he likes her. He writes, “She thinks I did it for her, but it wasn’t for her that I stepped in. It was for M…No, not even. For me” (36).
Section One Analysis
The contrast between the anonymous narrator’s perspective and Karim’s diary entries introduces a dichotomy between external appearances and internal realities. Karim’s silence is read by his classmates as noble; our narrator says he has the appearance of “the fearless hero beyond reproach” (12), someone you’d want with you in a crisis. However, Karim’s silence is not born of a heroic stoicism; as is revealed by his running out of the classroom. Rather, it is a result of his pain and disconnection with the world he finds himself in. Female classmates think they are drawing him out by flirting, without realizing that their overtures seem disrespectful to him based on his own beliefs, and because of his wish for privacy while he confronts his pain.
Furthermore, it’s clear that the narrator’s positive estimation of Karim as a “desert prince” is just as shaped by racialized preconceptions as is Dave’s more overt prejudice against him. His classmates view him as someone “exotic” because of his skin color and heritage, although they know nothing about Lebanon (including that it is not a desert nation).
The feigned tolerance of Canadian society is further revealed in the class discussion of the immigrant experience. When Robert asks new Canadians to give their perspective, Sandrine responds by talking about how sheltered My-Lan is and how shocked she must be. Although Sandrine fancies herself a social activist and friend to immigrants, she does not realize that she is in effect silencing the members of her club by speaking first, as well as revealing personal details without their consent. In fact, Sandrine’s speech seems to directly inspire Dave and other boys to “teach” My-Lan something.
Karim fascinates his classmates, but not because they want to know his story. Rather, they seem to want to recruit him to their causes, or, alternately,exoticize and seduce him rather than acknowledge him as an individual with a story. This exacerbates his feeling that he has no one he can tell his story to, with his friend,Béchir still in Lebanon. At this point in the novel, Karim’s diary thus serves as a record of his discontent, rather than a place where he can unburden himself of the trauma he has so clearly suffered via the death ofMaha.It’s this trauma that brings him to despair at the mention of a juniper tree, and rage at the sight of My-Lan being groped.
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