CANR
WORK TITLE: THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.zeynjoukhadar.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Graduated from University of Connecticut, 2008; Brown University, Ph.D., 2014.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has also worked as a biomedical researcher; Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Program fellow; Arab American National Museum fellow; Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellow; Camargo Foundation fellow; Josef and Anni Albers Foundation fellow.
MEMBER:Radius of Arab American Writers; American Mensa.
AWARDS:Pushcart Prize nominee; Best of the Net nominee; Middle East Book Award, 2018, for youth literature, for The Map of Salt and Stars.
WRITINGS
Contributor to to Salon, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Zeyn Joukhadar is a Syrian-American writer and former biomedical researcher. He has contributed to Salon, the Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, and has served as an artist in residence with various institutes. Joukhadar talked about his shift from biomedical research to writing fiction in an interview in Hoctok. He shared: “I’ve always been a writer and had written novels and novellas for fun since childhood. After getting my Ph.D. in Medical Sciences from Brown and doing two postdoctoral fellowships, I reached a point in my career where I knew that being in academic research science for the rest of my life wasn’t going to make me happy, so I decided to give myself a year or so to focus on my writing and figure out what I wanted to do instead. It was during that year that I wrote The Map of Salt and Stars.”
The Map of Salt and Stars
Joukhadar published his debut novel, The Map of Salt and Stars, in 2018. Twelve-year-old American Nour moves with her family to Syria after her father’s death in 2011. They settle in Homs, where they have relatives who they take care of. Bombs soon begin to fall on the city as the country enters a civil war. Nour and her family flee. During this upheaval, Nour recalls a fairy tale her father told her about sixteen-year-old Rawiya, who fled her twelfth-century home in Ceuta by dressing as a boy to avoid starvation. Nour finds comfort in Rawiya’s bravery in the time of her crisis.
In an interview in Booklist Reader, Joukhadar spoke with Biz Hyzy about the Syrian refugee crisis, the setting of her debut novel. He discussed how he is able to write about a topic that is so disturbing while keeping it realistic. Joukhadar admitted that “whenever I write about things that are traumatic or very emotionally charged, I focus on the same things I focus on in every story: the individual characters, their motivations, their relationships, their emotional arcs. Every story is personal; a writer has to bring all subject matter, no matter how much gravitas it carries, into focus through the story of a unique human being and what is going on in their mind and heart.” In the same interview, Joukhadar additionally remarked: “I also personally believe that no writer can write to an emotion they haven’t felt (or at least I can’t), so that is what I focus on.”
Writing in BookPage, Omar El Akkad took note of the “heartfelt quality to the story.” El Akkad concluded that “The Map of Salt and Stars presents an Arab world in full possession of its immense historical and cultural biography, marred by its modern tragedies but not exclusively defined by them.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked that “Joukhadar plunges the Western reader full force into the refugee world with sensual imagery that is immediate, intense, and at times overwhelming.” Reviewing the novel in Bookreporter, Melanie Reynolds summarized that the author’s “lyrical debut novel introduces readers to 12-year-old Nour and the dangers and grief that Syrian refugees … face today. Nour–equipped with the courage she doesn’t yet know she has, her color sense, and her mother’s special map–searches for a safe place for her family to land, as Rawiya traces the same geographical journey 800 years before. Perhaps the salt and stars will lead both girls back home.”
In a review in Shelf Awareness, Marilyn Dahl lauded that “Joukhadar’s jeweled prose sparkles with fanciful images … and Nour’s keen perceptions add intensity to the writing.” Dahl posited that “the result is magic mixed with tragedy as Rawiya seeks fortune and adventure, and Nour seeks safety and home. They may end their quests in Ceuta, but there is still more life to map. Nour asks, are all maps stories? Huda asks, are all stories maps? Zahra asks, maps to what? Nour replies, to ourselves? The Map of Salt and Stars is, in sum, a hero’s odyssey, a spellbinding geography of family and hope.”
The Thirty Names of Night
In 2020 Joukhadar published the novel The Thirty Names of Night. An unnamed trans man narrator shares his experiences of coming to terms with his identity in contemporary New York. His struggle is made more difficult because of his thoughts of his deceased mother and a sense that he never really knew her well enough. The second half of the novel centers on Laila, an immigrant to America from French-occupied Syria in 1920. She succeeds in life, becoming a renown illustrator of birds. The unnamed narrator comes to learn that this woman was his mother and scours her diaries to find out more about her life and their connections.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews observed that Joukhadar “creates a world for his characters in which readers who are perhaps unfamiliar with the communities being represented can find their way around, but he does not feel compelled to translate and explain.” The same reviewer found the novel to be “gorgeous and alive.” A Publishers Weekly contributor claimed that this “evocative” novel “is a stirring portrait of an artist as a young man.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, May 1, 2018, Omar El Akkad, review of The Map of Salt and Stars, p. 18.
Kirkus Reviews March 15, 2018, review of The Map of Salt and Stars; March 15, 2020, review of The Thirty Names of Night.
Publishers Weekly, March 13, 2020, review of The Thirty Names of Night.
Times Union, May 11, 2018, Massarah Mikati, “Saratoga Springs Bookstore Talk with Author about Her Novel on Syria’s Civil War.”
ONLINE
Booklist Reader, https://www.booklistreader.com/ (May 3, 2018), Biz Hyzy, author interview.
Bookreporter, http://preview.bookreporter.com/ (May 11, 2018), Melanie Reynolds, review of The Map of Salt and Stars.
Brown Alumni, https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/ (September 12, 2018), Abigail Cain, “Syrian Journeys.”
Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/ (May 1, 2018), author interview.
Hoctoc, https://www.hoctok.com/ (April 15, 2020), author interview.
Shelf Awareness, https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (January 31, 2018), Marilyn Dahl, review of The Map of Salt and Stars.
UCONN, https://magazine.uconn.edu/ (September 25, 2018), Amy Sutherland, “Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar ’08 (CLAS).”
Zeyn Joukhadar website, http://www.zeynjoukhadar.com (April 15, 2020).
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020), a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and a member of American Mensa. His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, The Saturday Evening Post, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and others. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Program, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
Originally from New York City, Joukhadar earned a PhD in the Pathobiology Graduate Program at Brown University and worked as a biomedical research scientist before switching careers to pursue writing full time.
He is represented by Michelle Brower of Aevitas Creative Management. For speaking engagements, he is represented by Books In Common.
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of The Map of Salt and Stars and The Thirty Names of Night. He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and of American Mensa. Joukhadar’s writing has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature and a 2018 Goodreads Choice Award Finalist in Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. He has been an artist in residence at the Montalvo Arts Center, the Fes Medina Project, Beit al-Atlas, and the Arab National Museum.
By Biz Hyzy May 3, 20180 Comments
Read More →
Syria and Synesthesia: An Interview with Debut Author Zeyn Joukhadar
The Map of Salt and Stars, Zeyn Joukhadar’s first novel, follows the odyssey of a preteen named Nour. Caught in the crossfires of the Syrian Civil War, Nour’s family loses their home and flees across the Middle East and Northern Africa, searching for safety. To comfort herself, Nour tells her late father’s favorite story about a girl named Rawiya who disguises herself as a man to apprentice a medieval mapmaker, traversing the same route as Nour. By weaving these two stories together, Joukhadar has crafted a moving bildungsroman about hope, loss, and perseverance. Joukhadar graciously agreed to answer some of my questions about his stunning debut, which publishes May 1.
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
BIZ HYZY: The Map of Salt and Stars is pitched as, “[a] remarkable debut novel that promises to be to Syria what The Kite Runner was to Afghanistan.” How does it feel to get compared to such a widely regarded, influential novel?
ZEYN JOUKHADAR: I’m flattered and honored by the comparison, but I do think it’s important to clarify what about The Kite Runner is similar to The Map of Salt and Stars. Typically, people mention the fact that The Kite Runner exposed many American readers to a story about the people of Afghanistan for the first time, and that for a lot of American readers, The Map of Salt and Stars may be the first time they’ve read a story that features Syrian (or Syrian-American) characters. If my novel helps readers with no link to Syria come away with greater empathy for the Syrian people and for refugees, then I’m very glad. But I also want those readers to know that this book is a kind of doorway, hopefully the first of many works they’ll read to understand the situation in Syria and the Syrian people better. In other words, this book is only a starting point, and I hope it encourages readers to seek out the writing of people born and raised in Syria and of refugees in their own words.
The current Syrian refugee crisis carries such gravitas. How did you go about approaching a situation so harrowing and so real?
For me, whenever I write about things that are traumatic or very emotionally charged, I focus on the same things I focus on in every story: the individual characters, their motivations, their relationships, their emotional arcs. Every story is personal; a writer has to bring all subject matter, no matter how much gravitas it carries, into focus through the story of a unique human being and what is going on in their mind and heart. I also personally believe that no writer can write to an emotion they haven’t felt (or at least I can’t), so that is what I focus on. What kinds of trauma can I speak to? What kinds of loss have I also felt? Maybe I haven’t been in the same situation as a character has, but if I have felt a similar emotion, I can imagine how that character might feel in that moment. All writing is, at its core, about empathy. To write this book, I had to draw on my own emotional landscape to imagine, as vividly as possible, how I might feel if I were in the characters’ places, and then deepen and write to those joys and horrors without looking away from any of it.
The Map of Salt and Stars includes poetry, a contemporary plotline, and a historical-fantasy plotline. Did you enjoy writing one more than the others?
Hmm, I think that’s a bit like choosing a favorite child! In terms of which timeline was more fun to write, I guess I would have to say the historical-fantasy timeline was pretty fun. I really enjoyed the historical research for that timeline, and I was an avid fantasy reader as a kid, so having the chance to combine mythological elements with the history of the Middle East and North Africa was both enjoyable and meaningful.
Map of Salt and Stars
In that timeline, Rawiya disguises herself as a male and goes on magic-fueled adventures while apprenticing al-Idrisi, a real, twelfth-century mapmaker. Did you always know that you wanted to include Rawiya’s parallel journey?
I knew pretty early on that I wanted to include the historical timeline and what its general plot was going to be, because I originally conceived of the book as a story about the power of stories. I knew I wanted to take a historical event and loosely base a story around it that draws on and mythologizes that history, making it something the protagonist can take with them and gain strength from in difficult times. Making Rawiya’s timeline more fantastical—I call it a “historical fable”—made it something that Nour could hold onto in the midst of the trauma of displacement.
Nour is the only member of her family that struggles to speak Arabic. Why was that an important characteristic for you to include?
Growing up, my father—an American citizen and also an immigrant—was determined to have his children speak English without accents, so he discouraged my sister and me from speaking Arabic when we were growing up. He had his reasons for this. He faced discrimination, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia from the time he arrived in America to his death in the ‘90s. I picked up some Arabic from listening to my father speak it to other people, but he rarely spoke it to me directly, and so I had to (re)-learn it as an adult. A funny thing happens when you grow up around a language but rarely have the opportunity to speak it: when you finally do speak, you find that there is an ocean of unused words and sounds inside of you that wants to come pouring out. But for years I struggled with being unable to speak Arabic, and since this is an experience I’ve heard about from other Arab Americans, too, I wanted to explore the importance of language to heritage and identity in Nour’s character.
Nour is a synesthete. Does her synesthesia manifest itself the same way as yours?
For the most part, I did give Nour the same types of synesthesia that I have, as well as the same colors (unless a particular color really didn’t fit the tone I was going for in that particular scene). Like Nour, I have several types of synesthesia—I experience colors in response to a number of different sensory stimuli, including letters and numbers, sounds, smells, etc. In particular, the color of Nour’s letters match the colors I see exactly—I experience those colors so vividly that I couldn’t imagine them being any different!
I noticed that your author photo color coordinates with your book cover. Did you plan that? It seems like the synesthetic thing to do.
That would have been super clever! No, I just really like the colors blue and green. Serendipitously, though, the deep blue-indigo color on the cover does happen to be my favorite color, so I’m pretty thrilled about that.
Syrian Journeys
A debut novel inspired by present-day refugees
By Abigail Cain '15 / September/October 2018
September 12th, 2018
Portrait of Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Much has been written of the Syrian civil war and resulting refugee crisis—seven years’ worth of newspaper articles, television broadcasts, and radio dispatches so far. But Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar ’14 PhD still felt something was missing from this steady stream of news coverage.
“What bothered me was that it was so difficult to find first-hand accounts,” she explained. “Specifically, first-hand accounts where the narrative was open, rather than guided by this very popular refugee narrative of gratitude and assimilation. I wanted more open-ended stories.”
Joukhadar’s debut novel, The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone), endeavors to tell one such story. We meet 12-year-old Nour in 2011, still reeling from her father’s recent death, as her family moves back to Syria from New York City. When a stray bomb from the escalating conflict destroys their neighborhood in Homs, the family embarks on a cross-country journey to find refuge. This contemporary narrative is intercut with episodes from the centuries-old legend of Rawiya, a 12th-century heroine apprenticed to a famous mapmaker.
Joukhadar and Nour share certain biographical details. Both are Syrian American, grew up in Manhattan, and have synesthesia—a neurological phenomenon where certain sensory inputs such as sounds, letters, or tastes can provoke the sensation of color. For our young protagonist, oil sizzles in a pan in “yellow and black bursts,” pigeons coo “soft blue and purple,” and her beloved uncle speaks in “honey yellow” tones. “I wanted to give her a little bit of brightness in a situation that at times got really ugly,” the author said.
“I wanted to give her a little bit of brightness
in a situation that at times got really ugly.”
Although Joukhadar has been crafting novels since age nine, for years that passion was secondary to a career in science. At Brown, she received her PhD in medical sciences and went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship. But in 2015, she said, “I was at a point in my career where I had to figure out what direction I wanted to go in. I felt like I owed it to myself to really dedicate myself to writing for a while and see where that went.”
Following the success of The Map of Salt and Stars, which garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, Joukhadar has already begun work on a second novel. This one focuses on the Syrian diaspora and the immigrants who settled in Midwestern communities like Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis—cities she visited during her recent book tour.
Throughout the tour, Joukhadar said, she was often asked by readers “What can I do to help?” First, she urged, use her book as a “gateway” to seek out works where Syrian authors and refugees are able to speak in their own words. Second, “engage with the political system,” she said. “Talk about things like the Muslim ban, do something about it, try to
get it repealed. Sometimes, I think that Americans forget that our voices are really powerful.”
—Abigail Cain ’15
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar ’08 (CLAS)
In 2015, after years of intense study, a bachelor’s in molecular and cell biology followed by a Ph.D. in pathobiology as well as two postdoctoral fellowships, Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar ’08 (CLAS) walked away from science to pursue her childhood dream — to be a novelist.
Photo by Hasan Dudar
The Map of Salt and Stars book cover
Joukhadar (at book events at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan (top), and at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, Minnesota) has received high praise for her debut novel from critics, who have compared it to The Kite Runner.
“I wanted to give myself a chance to write full-time for six months to a year and see where it led,” she says.
Where it led is to Joukhadar’s first novel, The Map of Salt and Stars, which was recently published by Simon & Schuster. The book’s dual narrative follows two fatherless girls as they each embark on long and dangerous journeys across the Middle East and North Africa.
As 12-year-old Nour flees the Syrian civil war with her family, she comforts herself by recounting a story her father used to tell her about Rawiya, a teenage girl who apprentices herself to a medieval mapmaker charting trade routes. Joukhadar switches back and forth between the two tales that are as similar as they are different. Rawiya’s story is a fairy tale; Nour’s is a nightmare.
Says Kirkus Review, “Joukhadar plunges the Western reader full force into the refugee world with sensual imagery that is immediate, intense, and at times overwhelming.”
When Joukhadar began work on her novel, the Syrian civil war had raged for four years. As a Syrian American (her father emigrated from Syria to Manhattan), Joukhadar could not tune out the news of the fighting and the refugees. “I was thinking of the ways my community was grieving for people that were lost, places that were lost. I wondered if could we redefine home as something other than a place, so we can’t lose it. I started to think of the power of stories, not to just heal but to be vehicles of what we can take with us.”
Though the war felt personal for her, what the author knew of it was mostly from news accounts. Joukhadar grew up in Manhattan and in Fairfield, Connecticut. Her mother is American.
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar ’08 (CLAS) at a book tour event
To tell Nour’s story Joukhadar turned to first-hand accounts of refugees, reading as many as she could. She also researched her own passions, geology and mapmaking, which she weaves into the book as symbols and plot devices. Nour, for example, carries a piece of lapis lazuli riven by bands of salt, a metaphor for the unavoidable trauma in life. Though Rawiya’s story is fantastical, complete with a kind of monstrous bird, she apprentices to al-Idrisi, a real-life Arab medieval geographer who was one of the most advanced mapmakers of his time.
Joukhadar also drew on her experience with synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes people to see shapes and colors in their mind’s eye in relationship to music, numbers, or other stimuli. In the book, Nour describes the pink of her sister’s laugh and the red of a kitchen timer’s chime. “It brings a little bit of color into her world even when she goes through difficult times.”
Though Joukhadar began writing stories in third grade, she set her sights on science in college. Her family encouraged her to have a backup plan to writing, and a career as a research scientist became that. She went to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, but was drawn to UConn’s science program and so switched in 2007. Here, she took a heavy course load and worked in Professor Michael Lynes’ immunology lab. That didn’t leave her much free time, but she kept writing, finishing short stories and a novella.
For the past year Joukhadar has called nowhere home as she went from writer’s residency to writer’s residency, including a two-month stint in Morocco, her first visit to Northern Africa and a chance to hone her Arabic. She’s been working on her second novel, which has to do with Syrian immigration to the U.S. historically. “People don’t know they have been immigrating [to the U.S.] since 1860.”
Ironically, as she has worked on that book, the Trump administration essentially banned Syrians from even visiting the U.S. While she’s been on the road to promote her debut novel, Joukhadar says people at her readings often ask her what they can do to help Syrians. If nothing else, she urges them to read what Syrians themselves have to say about the war.
She hopes her novel is “a gateway for people to seek out the voices of people raised in Syria, to hear them in their own words.”
—AMY SUTHERLAND
The Map of Salt and Stars
by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Dear Jennifer,
Thanks for accepting our invite for this interview.
Can you tell us something more about your book “The Map of Salt and Stars”? What do you think of the feedback it has received so far?I’ve been humbled by the response to the book, which has been overwhelmingly positive.
Folks have received my characters with open arms, both within my communities and outside of them. And it’s been incredible to see my writing move people to act, to get involved in doing what they can for refugees.
What do you see the role of art in breaking barriers of any kind?
Picture
Photo credit: Neha Gautam
I think positive change comes about when we are invested in our communities and in becoming our best selves, in seeing what is possible and believing in making the possible real.
Art can make us believe again when we’ve stopped, and it can also show us the worlds that are possible if we are willing to work for them.
What made you switch your career from biomedical research scientist to writing full time?
I’ve always been a writer and had written novels and novellas for fun since childhood. After getting my PhD in Medical Sciences from Brown and doing two postdoctoral fellowships, I reached a point in my career where I knew that being in academic research science for the rest of my life wasn’t going to make me happy, so I decided to give myself a year or so to focus on my writing and figure out what I wanted to do instead. It was during that year that I wrote The Map of Salt and Stars.
How can fundamental values of humanity be preserved and advanced by science and art?
It all depends on how they’re practiced. As with anything, science and art can be practiced with respect, humanity, and love, or they can be practiced unethically, disrespectfully, violently, or appropriatively.
I think the best scientific inquiries and art are made by centering the most marginalized, because keeping those folks in the center of any discussion creates a result that is more inclusive and respectful for everyone.
When writing, do you think about the impact it will have on the others?
Absolutely. I consider the impact of my work on others in everything I do, particularly how my words will affect those who are more marginalized than I am and how I can make my writing inclusive and non-appropriative.
* * *
The Earth and the Fig
The island of Manhattan’s got holes in it, and that’s where Baba sleeps. When I said good night to him, the white bundle of him sagged so heavy, the hole they dug for him so deep. And there was a hole in me too, and that’s where my voice went. It went into the earth with Baba, deep in the white bone of the earth, and now it’s gone. My words sunk down like seeds, my vowels and the red space for stories crushed under my tongue.
I think Mama lost her words too, because instead of talking, her tears watered everything in the apartment. That winter, I found salt everywhere—under the coils of the electric burners, between my shoelaces and the envelopes of bills, on the skins of pomegranates in the gold-trimmed fruit bowl. The phone rang with calls from Syria, and Mama wrestled salt from the cord, fighting to untwist the coils.
Before Baba died, we hardly ever got calls from Syria, just emails. But Mama said in an emergency, you’ve got to hear a person’s voice.
It seemed like the only voice Mama had left spoke in Arabic. Even when the neighbor ladies brought casseroles and white car- nations, Mama swallowed her words. How come people only ever
have one language for grief?
That winter was the first time I heard Abu Sayeed’s honey-yellow voice. Huda and I sat outside the kitchen and listened sometimes, Huda’s ash-brown curls crushed against the doorjamb like spooled wool. Huda couldn’t see the color of his voice like I could, but we’d both know it was Abu Sayeed calling because Mama’s voice would click into place, like every word she’d said in English was only a shadow of itself. Huda figured it out before I did—that Abu Sayeed and Baba were two knots on the same string, a thread Mama was afraid to lose the end of.
Mama told Abu Sayeed what my sisters had been whispering about for weeks—the unopened electricity bills, the maps that wouldn’t sell, the last bridge Baba built before he got sick. Abu Sayeed said he knew people at the university in Homs, that he could help Mama sell her maps. He asked, what better place to raise three girls than the land that holds their grandparents?
When Mama showed us our plane tickets to Syria, the O in my name, Nour, was a thin blot of salt. My older sisters, Huda and Zahra, pestered her about the protests in Dara’a, things we had seen on the news. But Mama told them not to be silly, that Dara’a was as far south of Homs as Baltimore was from Manhattan. And Mama would know, because she makes maps for a living. Mama was sure things would calm down, that the reforms the government had promised would allow Syria to hope and shine again. And even though I didn’t want to leave, I was excited to meet Abu Sayeed, excited to see Mama smiling again.
I had only ever seen Abu Sayeed in Baba’s Polaroids from the seventies, before Baba left Syria. Abu Sayeed had a mustache and an orange shirt then, laughing with someone out of the frame, Baba always just behind him. Baba never called Abu Sayeed his brother, but I knew that’s what he was because he was everywhere: eating iftar on Ramadan evenings, playing cards with Sitto, grinning at a café table. Baba’s family had taken him in. They had made him their own.
When spring came, the horse chestnut trees bloomed white like fat grains of rock salt under our window. We left the Manhattan apartment and the tear-encrusted pomegranates. The plane’s wheels lifted like birds’ feet, and I squinted out the window at the narrow stripe of city where I’d lived for twelve whole years and at the hollow green scooped out by Central Park. I looked for Baba. But with the city so far down, I couldn’t see the holes anymore.
Mama once said the city was a map of all the people who’d lived and died in it, and Baba said every map was really a story. That’s how Baba was. People paid him to design bridges, but he told his stories for free. When Mama painted a map and a compass rose, Baba pointed out invisible sea monsters in the margins.
The winter before Baba went into the earth, he never missed a bedtime story. Some of them were short, like the one about the fig tree that grew in Baba’s backyard when he was a little boy in Syria, and some of them were epics so twisting and incredible that I had to wait night after night to hear more. Baba made my favorite one, the story of the mapmaker’s apprentice, last two whole months. Mama listened at the door, getting Baba a glass of water when he got hoarse. When he lost his voice, I told the ending. Then the story was ours.
Mama used to say stories were how Baba made sense of things. He had to untangle the world’s knots, she said. Now, thirty thousand feet above him, I am trying to untangle the knot he left in me. He said one day I’d tell our story back to him. But my words are wild country, and I don’t have a map.
I press my face to the plane window. On the island under us, Manhattan’s holes look like lace. I look for the one where Baba is sleeping and try to remember how the story starts. My words tumble through the glass, falling to the earth.
Credit: Excerpted from The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. Reprinted by permission of Touchstone, and imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
* * *
You have received very good reviews from The New York Times, Bustle, The Seattle Times and more. What has been your reaction to these reviews?
It’s satisfying and humbling to have your work positively reviewed, and it makes me very happy that my work is reaching a wide audience. It gives me hope that The Map of Salt and Stars is raising awareness about the situation of refugees and the impacts of legislation like the Muslim Ban, and it also gives me hope that my book will reach folks who will see themselves in my characters and be reminded that their voices and their stories matter, and that they, too, can be the heroes of their own stories.
Syria and NYC are both part of your identity. What are some essential characteristics from both of these worlds that are special and your own?
The most important thing to me about the places I come from are the people. That’s how I define home—not in terms of countries or cities or passports, but in people. I come from the people who love me.
You write novels & poetry. Do you know from the beginning of a project if it will be one or the other and have you ever changed the format along the way?
I think this applies more to novels vs short stories, as poetry is a much smaller canvas. With any story, I start by tinkering with it without deciding whether it will be a short story or a novel, and if it feels like it needs more space, then I give it as much space as it needs to develop fully. The biggest difference between a novel and a short story is that certain stories are just bigger than others, and need more room to be fully explored.
What makes your heart tick nowadays?
Lately, particularly as I work on my second novel, I’ve just been enjoying being in community with other queer and trans folks of color, celebrating the fact that we continue to survive in a world that would prefer that we not.
What is the wisest thing you’ve heard recently?
That being a survivor of trauma means that one survived, whether as an individual or as an oppressed community, and that it’s important that we as a society consider alternatives to predominantly pathologizing narratives around trauma and recognize the wisdom and resilience that might also be found in surviving.
Saratoga Springs bookstore talk with author about her novel on Syria's Civil War
Photo of Massarah Mikati
Massarah Mikati
May 10, 2018
Updated: May 11, 2018 7:42 p.m.
2
Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs will be hosting Syrian-American author Jennifer Joukhadar Friday, May 11 for a talk on her book
1
of
2Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs will be hosting Syrian-American author Jennifer Joukhadar Friday, May 11 for a talk on her book "The Map of Salt and Stars", led by Terrence Diggory of the Saratoga Immigration Coalition.
Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs will be hosting Syrian-American author Jennifer Joukhadar Friday, May 11 for a talk on her book
2
of
2Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs will be hosting Syrian-American author Jennifer Joukhadar Friday, May 11 for a talk on her book "The Map of Salt and Stars", led by Terrence Diggory of the Saratoga Immigration Coalition. (Photo credit Neha Gautam)
Most Popular
Cuomo: COVID-19 flattening, hospital needs may not be as severe
Six NBC shows ending early due to coronavirus
Coronavirus live updates: Saratoga, Rensselaer counties announce more deaths; Regents tests canceled
Colonie crash sends mother, 3 children to hospital
SARATOGA SPRINGS - When the Syrian Civil War started in 2011, Jennifer Joukhadar could not stop thinking about it. A year later, the Syrian-American woman still couldn’t stop thinking about it. In 2015, she decided to put her thoughts to paper and write a book. This month, “The Map of Salt and Stars," was published.
“I was thinking about all the loss occurring in Syria in terms of people and places and heritage, and the ways so many people I knew were grieving,” said Joukhadar, who was born and raised in Manhattan. “I was trying to think about what we have left that we can take with us.”
On Friday evening, Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs will host Joukhadar for a book talk, led by Terrence Diggory of the Saratoga Immigration Coalition.
“The Map of Salt and Stars” follows the story of 12-year-old Nour, who — like Joukhadar — was born in New York City. After losing her father to cancer in 2011, Nour’s mother moves Nour and her two older sisters back to Homs, Syria to be close to family. The war breaks out soon after their arrival to Syria, and her family is forced to flee after losing their home (and nearly losing their lives).
As refugees, Nour and her family traverse the Levant and North Africa in search of safety. Nour recounts the favorite story her father used to tell about a 12th century, teenage girl who ran away from her family and disguised herself as a boy to apprentice herself to a mapmaker. As the mapmaker sought to create the most accurate world map to date, he and the teenage girl followed the same route Nour and her family follow centuries later.
Joukhader’s narrative style is not a coincidence.
“It’s a traditional Arab storytelling technique to weave two stories together,” Joukhadar said. “That in itself is part of the heritage we can take with us.”
The content of the story also speaks to coping with grief and loss, as Nour carries her father with her by carrying the mapmaker’s story.
“Maybe we can redefine what home is,” Joukhader said. “If it can’t be a physical place anymore, you can still carry stories with you, and within stories people, places, history, feelings, mythology – all of these things.”
Through that, Joukhader said, she hopes her novel presents a feeling of hope – hope that people of the Syrian diaspora can move forward from trauma and pain while keeping their heritage alive.
While the release of her book is exciting, Joukhader feels a twinge of sadness. She had hoped, when she started the novel, that the Syrian conflict would be over by the time her book came out.
Three years later, “In a way some things are actually worse,” Joukhader said, bringing up U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban – commonly referred to as a Muslim ban – as an example. “We can do something about this if we keep talking about it and engaging. We shouldn’t let it slip away.”
Debut Author Snapshot: Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Posted by Goodreads on May 1, 2018
33 likes · 3 comments
Share
Zeyn Joukhadar
The debut novel The Map of Salt and Stars is the story of 12-year-old Nour, a Syrian American girl from New York City. When the book begins, Nour's father has just passed away from cancer, and her mother—a cartographer who makes unusual handpainted maps—decides to move Nour and her two older sisters back to the Syrian city she grew up in. When unrest and violence arrive in their quiet neighborhood and they lose their home, Nour's family makes the difficult decision to leave Syria in search of safety.
As Nour and her family travel across the Middle East and North Africa as refugees, Nour tells herself a story that her father once told her: the story of the real 12th-century Muslim mapmaker Abu Abd Allah Muhammad al-Idrisi and his fictional apprentice, Rawiya, a girl from the North African city of Ceuta, who leaves home disguised as a boy to apprentice herself to the mapmaker and support her family. As Nour and Rawiya travel identical geographical paths 800 years apart, both girls struggle with what it means to make a map of a home they've left behind. Goodreads talked to Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar about turning her anger over the Syrian refugee crisis into her first novel and how storytelling can enable empathy.
Goodreads: Congratulations on your debut novel! Introduce yourself to readers.
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar: I'm a Syrian American writer, and I was born in New York City. I'm a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and of Mensa. I've been writing for as long as I can remember, but I also hold a Ph.D. in Medical Sciences from Brown University; I worked as an academic research scientist for several years before switching careers to pursue writing full-time.
GR: What sparked the idea for The Map of Salt and Stars?
JZJ: As I watched the war in Syria unfold, I felt increasingly angry about how American racism and Islamophobia were fueling the rejection of Syrian refugees. That same bigotry would eventually lead to the Muslim Ban. I thought a lot about how, if my father had never immigrated to the States, I could have been born and grown up in Syria. I could have experienced the conflict there directly.
I am tied by blood to Syria, and the country where my father was born is suffering while the country in which I was born still views us as not fully American. Where, then, does that leave me? And for people of Syrian descent living in diaspora, particularly for the generation of children who will grow up in exile because their parents left Syria for safety reasons, what can we take with us? What do we carry with us that cannot be lost?
GR: Why did you decide to have Nour cling to her father's tale, taking readers into a parallel story set in the 12th century?
JZJ: I wanted to explore the stories we tell ourselves when we are in pain. Particularly for those of us who have experienced severe trauma, can our stories help us heal? Can knowing who we are, our rich history as Arabs and particularly as Muslims, our storytelling traditions, our scientific achievements, our faith, our heritage—can holding onto these things remind us that there is a life beyond that trauma and remind us that we are not broken?
I wanted to tell a story about the power of stories, so I gave Nour a gift that she could take with her even to the darkest of places. Just as there are ways of defining home so that it can't be lost, if we carry stories in our hearts, it is harder to lose them. I wanted to show the reader the power of that gift, and I wanted to give a similar gift to readers of Syrian and/or Arab descent, as well as Muslim readers, because we so rarely see ourselves represented on the page as multidimensional people.
GR: Tell us about your writing process for The Map of Salt and Stars.
Want to Read
Rate this book
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
JZJ: I wrote the first draft quickly, in about two weeks. I usually write first drafts fast to get the basic structure down, the basic character arcs, the plot, and then revise over a period of months—but beyond that, this story was boiling in me. I knew right away that I wanted each section to begin with a shape poem. I spent about six months revising the book before I signed with my agent, and then we revised further together before Touchstone acquired the novel.
The more I revised and the deeper I went into the story, the more difficult the book became to work on emotionally. Every day, real human beings are going through the suffering and violence described in the novel, particularly women and children. Of all my responsibilities as a writer and as a human being, I felt most deeply my responsibility not to look away from that suffering. But I also felt it was important to include the small joys and creative acts that function as resistance to suffering, because to overlook those things would have been an act of violence and dehumanization.
GR: What writers are you influenced by, and how do those influences show themselves in The Map of Salt and Stars?
JZJ: I have been influenced by the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Federico García Lorca, and most of my works—particularly my short stories—have magical realism woven into them. In The Map of Salt and Stars, the magical realism is subtler in the contemporary timeline and more visible in the historically based timeline, which I molded into a fable.
I have also been influenced by the many Arab American writers who have come before me, including Randa Jarrar, Laila Lalami, Diana Abu-Jaber, Rabih Alameddine (particularly The Hakawati), Naomi Shihab Nye, and many others. I devoured their work because it was the first time I'd seen myself represented on the page.
Want to Read
Rate this book
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
Want to Read
Rate this book
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
Want to Read
Rate this book
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
Want to Read
Rate this book
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
GR: What do you hope readers take away from reading your debut?
JZJ: For readers who don't know a lot about the war in Syria and the refugee crisis, I hope they come away from the book with increased empathy for the Syrian people and for refugees in general. I hope that the novel serves, in some small way, to combat racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia wherever it's read. I hope that it encourages people to seek out the work of Syrians and refugees describing their own experiences in their own words. I hope that it challenges readers to stand up to racist and Islamophobic policies like the Muslim Ban—not because these communities need saviors but because, in the spirit of the quote by Lilla Watson and the Queensland Aboriginal activists group, our liberation is bound up together.
For other readers of Syrian descent, and other Syrian Americans in particular, I hope that the novel serves as a reminder that although many of us in the Syrian diaspora are undergoing trauma and loss right now, there is life after this. We have so much that we cannot lose if we remember where we come from and that we still have each other. Our loved ones and our heritage and our history are never lost. When we come together in community and tell our stories, we are never alone.
GR: What are you currently reading, and what books are you recommending to your friends?
JZJ: I recently finished Danez Smith's Don't Call Us Dead and Roxane Gay's Hunger, both of which I am recommending to everyone I know.
GR: What's next for you? Any preview you can give readers?
JZJ: I'm still revising my next novel project, but I can say that it also has a pair of voices from different eras, that it features a Muslim American protagonist, and that it explores the history of the Syrian American community over the last century against the backdrop of a Midwestern road trip taken by a group of Muslim friends.
THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS
By Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Touchstone $27, 368 pages ISBN 9781501169038 Audio, eBook available
Among the many things the violence of war obliterates, perhaps the most malicious is history. Now in its seventh year, the civil war that has turned Syria into the site of one of the world's worst humanitarian crises has also corseted one of the oldest societies on earth into a kind of perpetual infancy. Syria, it sometimes seems, only began to exist seven years ago, as a place defined only by its current calamity.
In many ways, The Map of Salt and Stars is at once a testament to the brutality of the current Syrian conflict and a reverent ode to ancient Arabian history. Syrian-American writer Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar has crafted an audacious debut, ambitious and sprawling in both time and space.
The book follows the story of Nour, a Syrian-American girl living in New York. In 2011, after Nour loses her father to cancer, her mother decides to move the family back to Homs to be close to their extended family. But Nour's arrival coincides with Syria's slide into civil war. Amid grotesque violence, Nour is made a refugee, a traveler through Syria's neighboring lands.
Almost a thousand years earlier, another girl's story unfolds. Rawiya, seeking a better life for her mother, disguises herself as a boy and joins a legendary cartographer on a quest to map the known world.
The two stories unfold side by side, split by time but joined by a common geography. Because the modern part of Joukhadar's narrative carries the urgency of the present tense, but the ancient half reads like an old Arabian fairy tale, the dual story structure is at first jarring. But soon the book finds its pace, and the intertwining tales complement each other in ways a single narrative could not. A swooping bird of prey that threatens to devour the ancient story's traveling companions finds its modern-day analogy in the form of Syrian fighter planes dropping bombs on besieged cities.
There is a heartfelt quality to the story, evident in the meticulous historical research that must have gone into the creation of the ancient part of the book. The Map of Salt and Stars presents an Arab world in full possession of its immense historical and cultural biography, marred by its modern tragedies but not exclusively defined by them.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Akkad, Omar El. "THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS." BookPage, May 2018, p. 18+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A537055046/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=93c32b2c. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.
Joukhadar, Jennifer Zeynab THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $27.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6903-8
The story of a contemporary girl's flight into exile from the Syrian civil war is deepened by the parallel tale of a 12th-century girl whose journey of discovery covers the same geography in Syrian-American writer Joukhadar's ambitious debut.
The poem in the shape of Syria that opens this novel--"O / beloved, you are / dying of a broken heart"--sets the tone of deep-rooted melancholy for the story that follows. Twelve-year-old Nour was born and raised in Manhattan by immigrant parents, her mother a cartographer and her father a bridge designer. Shortly after her father's death from cancer in 2011, her mother moves Nour and her two older sisters, Huda and Zahra, to Homs, Syria, where they have relatives to help out. But soon bombs are dropping in Homs. As the family takes flight, Nour comforts herself with a fairy tale-like story her father used to tell, and Joukhadar weaves it into the narrative. "Everybody knows the story of Rawiya," she writes. "They just don't know they know it." The heroine, 16-year-old Rawiya, left her home in Ceuta--a Spanish city in North Africa where Nour's parents once lived--to avoid starvation. Disguised as a boy, she apprenticed herself to al-Idrisi--an actual 12th-century mapmaker--as he traveled around charting trade routes. The route of Rawiya's story corresponds with Nour's as she finds and loses refuge in Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria. Passing as a boy for safety's sake, as Rawiya did, Nour endures cold, hunger, and red tape. Though she lives at the epicenter of world crises, what affects her day to day are more personal crises experienced in bus terminals, small groceries, and dusty streets. More dramatically, her sister Huda is injured by a bomb and sexually attacked by a gang of boys; a family friend drowns when a ferry to Egypt catches fire. While Rawiya had a romantic adventure, Nour experiences the terrors of being a refugee. Yet both are fatherless girls growing into young womanhood, and they share a similar search for the meaning of home, both physical and spiritual.
Joukhadar plunges the Western reader full force into the refugee world with sensual imagery that is immediate, intense, and at times overwhelming.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Joukhadar, Jennifer Zeynab: THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A530650897/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0d1f5c98. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.
Joukhadar, Zeyn THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT Atria (Fiction None) $27.00 5, 19 ISBN: 978-1-9821-2149-5
A fable of being and belonging from the author of The Map of Salt and Stars (2018).
This is the story of two artists who are connected by secret histories. This is also the story of a trans man struggling to come out to the people closest to him and a woman who found new love even though her way of desiring seemed impossible in the time and place in which she was born. This is a story about immigrants. This is a ghost story, and the specters that haunt its pages are literal and figurative. And this is a story about birds. What binds all these disparate strands together are Joukhadar’s deep sympathy for his characters and his powerfully poetic voice. One-half of the novel is set in contemporary New York. The narrator is unnamed because the name he was given at birth no longer fits him. As he tries to express his true gender, he addresses his dead mother as if her absence makes his transition impossible. “There is so much of you—and, therefore, of myself—that I will never know,” he writes. Laila Z’s tale begins in 1920, in French-occupied Syria. After her family immigrates to America, she becomes an acclaimed illustrator of birds. The unnamed narrator knows her work because she was his ornithologist mother’s favorite artist, and, when he stumbles upon Laila’s diary, he finds the key to unlocking himself. Joukhadar is writing for a general American audience about people who are often categorized as “other.” Both narrators are Syrian American, as are most of the significant characters. Many of these characters are also queer. The author creates a world for his characters in which readers who are perhaps unfamiliar with the communities being represented can find their way around, but he does not feel compelled to translate and explain. And Joukhadar’s prose style—folkloric, lyrical, and emotionally intense—creates its own atmosphere.
Gorgeous and alive.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Joukhadar, Zeyn: THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2020. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A617193073/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=60c01576. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.
The Map of Salt and Stars
by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Buy this book at IndieBound
Buy this book at Amazon
Buy this book at Barnes and Noble
Nour is a child of two cultures. For 12 years she has lived in Manhattan, enjoying Central Park with her father, speaking English and having only a passing acquaintance with Arabic, the language of her family’s native land. Her experiences with Syria are from a distance: letters from her grandmother, emails from relatives, her mother’s tasty cooking, photographs of her father with her uncle, Abu Sayeed --- and, of course, her mother’s maps.
Nour’s mother is a mapmaker. She paints beautiful representations of countries and cities, anchored with compass roses and fantastical creatures in the margins. Sometimes she uses oil paints and other times acrylics (which dry much faster) to tell the stories of nations. But it’s Nour’s father, Baba --- the designer of bridges, the real storyteller of the family --- who tells her the stories of Syria. Every night, Baba tells Nour a story, whether it’s about the fig tree in the backyard of his childhood home in Syria, or about Rawiya, the girl who disguised herself as a boy so she could learn mapmaking from the master, al-Idrisi, hundreds of years ago. That story took them a couple of months to get through --- night after night filled with spoken adventure, courage, monsters and kings, and Rawiya, the girl who became both a scholar and a warrior.
"Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar’s lyrical debut novel introduces readers to 12-year-old Nour and the dangers and grief that Syrian refugees (especially the females) face today."
Nour also has a special gift. She has synesthesia, which causes her to see colors when she hears a sound (oil sizzling in a pan is bumblebee-black-and-yellow, her sister Huda’s laugh is purple and pink, the sound of the breeze is white) or sees a letter of the alphabet. But Nour also experiences loss. Her beloved Baba developed cancer and lost his voice; he then lost his life. Her mother’s salty tears covered everything in their apartment. And now Nour, her mother and her two sisters are headed to Homs, Syria, where Abu Sayeed believes there are people who would buy Mama’s painted maps.
Huda and Nour’s middle sister, Zahra, are concerned that the protests in Syria might turn dangerous. Mama thinks that the danger is so far away from Homs that they’ll all be fine, that they’ll find a new place of life and peace for their family. But that hope comes to a terrible standstill the night they have Abu Sayeed over for dinner. The thundering echoes Nour has heard for several days resound in her ears again, when she is leaning down telling the courtyard’s fig tree Baba’s story of Rawiya. As they prepare to eat Mama’s celebration dinner, a bomb explodes in their neighborhood, and the ceiling crashes down around the family.
Rawiya left her widowed mother, dressed as a boy, and apprenticed herself to a man who was traveling around all the countries of the Mediterranean for the Norman-Sicilian King Roger, recording and creating a geography of the world. She traveled from the tip of Africa that faces Spain across the sea to Sicily and to Greece. She traversed the Syrian province, Jerusalem and Libya, Egypt, and across northern Africa. And although Nour doesn’t know it, her family is preparing to trace the footsteps of Rawiya as they flee the bombings of Syria and become refugees seeking another country of their own, a place that will become their home. But before them are dangers they cannot imagine --- not the dangers of the sea and sand monsters, or rogue warriors, that Rawiya must fight, but the monsters of predators, thirst, barbed wire and bullets. And perhaps even separation and death.
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar’s lyrical debut novel introduces readers to 12-year-old Nour and the dangers and grief that Syrian refugees (especially the females) face today. Nour --- equipped with the courage she doesn’t yet know she has, her color sense, and her mother’s special map --- searches for a safe place for her family to land, as Rawiya traces the same geographical journey 800 years before. Perhaps the salt and stars will lead both girls back home.
Reviewed by Melanie Reynolds on May 11, 2018
Buy this book at IndieBound Buy this book at Amazon Buy this book at Barnes and Noble
The Map of Salt and Stars
by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Publication Date: March 12, 2019
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Atria Books
ISBN-10: 150116905X
ISBN-13: 9781501169052
The Map of Salt and Stars
by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
In 2011, in Manhattan, Nour's father dies, filling the 12-year-old Syrian American girl with grief and upending her world. In the mid-12th century, in Ceuta, on the North African coast, 16-year-old Rawiya leaves home with her beloved horse, Bauza, to see the world. In The Map of Salt and Stars, Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar has woven these two lives together in remarkable journeys touched by fable and fraught with danger.
Nour's father, Baba, was an architect and a storyteller--that's how he untangled "the world's knots." Nour loved his stories, particularly the one about a mapmaker's apprentice; when his voice would tire, she'd finish for him. But after his burial, her voice "went into the earth with Baba, deep in the white bone of the earth." Her mother lost her words, too--"instead of talking, her tears watered everything in the apartment. That winter I found salt everywhere...." When spring came, those salt tears led her mapmaker mother, with Nour and her older sisters, Huda and Zahra, back to Syria, where everyone except Nour was born. Nour laments, "Now, thirty thousand feet above him, I am trying to untangle the knot he left in me.... But my words are wild country, and I don't have a map."
Three months later, living in Homs, Nour is at a disadvantage because she speaks little Arabic. She also has synesthesia, which literally colors her world, but also sets her apart. She often goes out to the fig tree in their garden to tell her favorite story to the fig's roots, imagining the vibrations of her voice traveling to Baba as she recounts the tale of Rawiya and al-Idrisi--"The one Baba told me every night. The one where they mapped the world." There has been unrest in the city; one night at dinner with Abu Sayeed, Baba's adopted brother, helicopter blades "pop black and purple" over their heads. A shrieking sound follows and the ceiling collapses. Dazed and bloody, they all make their way outside to rubble and chaos.
Rawiya's story begins with her desire to leave her village, to seek her fortune and save her family from poverty. One morning, by the fig tree next to the house, she saddles Bauza, takes the sling her father had made for her, and tells her mother she is going to the Fes market. Ten days later, disguised as a boy named Rami, she arrives in Fes, where she is dazzled by the rose- and saffron-colored houses, green minarets and the bite of pomegranates, the "sugar-song of dates." She is seeking the legendary mapmaker, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad al-Idrisi, with plans to apprentice herself to him. Unrecognized by her, he approaches "Rami" and agrees to tell her where to find him if she can answer three riddles. She does, he reveals himself, and takes her to Sicily to the palace of King Roger II of Palermo, his patron. There the duo, along with a new apprentice, Bakr, are charged with creating a map of the entire world. The expedition sets off for Asia Minor, and from the Anatolian coast, they enter the Levant and the Syrian province of the Seljuq Empire. Here, the tale of Rawiya and al-Idrisi begins to alternate with Nour's life as they begin parallel journeys that will eventually take them to Ceuta.
Nour's family leaves Homs after the shelling. Their papers and belongings fit into one burlap bag; Huda is badly injured. They drive to Jordan with Abu Sayeed, but find no succor, only a brief rest. They leave for Egypt, then Libya. They endure a sinking ferry and separation; for Nour and Zahra, a terrifying trip across Libya hidden in a refrigerated truck. The trek is not safe for Rawiya and al-Idrisi, either. Rawiya saves the caravan from a great white roc--the legendary bird of prey--with her prowess with the sling; later, they battle enormous snakes with mirrored scales. Human obstacles appear, like the Almohad fighters looking to capture a certain mapmaker.
Nour is "a small blue stone asleep in the earth, waiting for God to polish the salt from my skin." Although she cries, "I'm not Rawiya. This isn't an adventure. A yellow wail bubbles out of me," she is brave when needed, resilient, resourceful. Other elements besides courage link the two girls: fig trees, perils, refugees, constellations, even a mythical stone--beet purple in shadow, emerald in sunlight. Signs are dropped like markers: Nour thinks of her father in a hole, Rawiya says death leaves holes.
Each part of The Map of Salt and Stars begins with a haunting poem in the shape of a country the girls cross: Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and the town of Ceuta. In her debut novel, Joukhadar's jeweled prose sparkles with fanciful images--hills jostle the travelers over their crests, stacks of textiles wave their hems, bullet casings are iron confetti--and Nour's keen perceptions add intensity to the writing: "The walls breathe sumac and sigh out the tang of olives... the brick-red ping of a kitchen timer, the green bite of baking yeast." The result is magic mixed with tragedy as Rawiya seeks fortune and adventure, and Nour seeks safety and home. They may end their quests in Ceuta, but there is still more life to map. Nour asks, are all maps stories? Huda asks, are all stories maps? Zahra asks, maps to what? Nour replies, to ourselves? The Map of Salt and Stars is, in sum, a hero's odyssey, a spellbinding geography of family and hope. --Marilyn Dahl
The Thirty Names of Night
Zeyn Joukhadar. Atria, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-982121-49-5
Joukhadar’s evocative follow-up to The Map of Salt and Stars explores a 20-something Syrian-American trans man’s journey of self-discovery. The unnamed protagonist—he later goes by the name he gives himself, Nadir—is an aspiring artist in Brooklyn who likes to go out dancing with friends and enjoys listening to his friend Sami play the oud. Nadir lives with his grandmother, Teta, and is haunted by the death of his mother years ago in a fire. After Nadir finds a diary belonging to a Syrian artist named Laila, in an old tenement inhabited by Syrian-Americans, he becomes obsessed with finding the print of a rare bird by Laila. As the story unfolds, Nadir’s narration and direct addresses to his mother (“your presence is still here, everywhere, your hand on everything”) expands to include Laila’s voice (“The day I began to bleed was the day I met the woman who built the flying machine”) as Nadir blossoms into his trans identity. Scenes with Sami, with whom Nadir falls in love, are particularly affecting. Quietly lyrical and richly imaginative, Joukhadar’s tale shows how Laila and Nadir live and love and work past the shame in their lives through their art. This is a stirring portrait of an artist as a young man. (Nov.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on : 03/13/2020
Release date: 05/01/2020
Genre: Fiction
Downloadable Audio - 978-1-79711-182-7
Compact Disc - 978-1-79711-184-1