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asianamlitfans2021-12-31 03:10 pm
ccape) wrote in asianamlitfans2021-12-31 03:10 pm
A Review of Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night (Simon & Schuster, 2020)
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
Feast on the exquisite prose and the haunting, epic story offered by Zeyn Joukhadar in The Thirty Names of Night (Simon & Schuster, 2020)! Let’s let the official marketing description get us situated: “Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria, but he’s been struggling ever since his mother’s ghost began visiting him each evening. One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting birds. She mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.
As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.”
This description is actually rather robust. The story’s narrative conceit involves alternating perspectives. Nadir provides one perspective, which is always told to a narratee, who we quickly discover is Nadir’s mother, who died in a tragic accident involving a fire evacuation and a collapsed fire escape. The other perspective emerges once Nadir finds Laila’s Z’s journal. The journal details her artistic development as well as her transgressive romances. Laila Z’s journal also contains a narratee, whose identity is not revealed until the final sections of the story. What I absolutely adored about this particular narrative was its full-fledged adoration of all things related to birds. This novel makes me wonder if Joukhadar had to do a bunch of research or whether Joukhadar was already a fan of all things birds and thus could embed it into this kind of work. There’s so much texture to the knowledge offered by both Laila Z and Nadir in terms of birds, their beauty, and how rare some can be. I also learned quite a bit about the rarefied art world and the struggles of an emerging, woman of color artist. As my mother passed away in 2019, I found this novel immensely affecting for the ways in which Nadir continually hails her mother after she has died, devoting so much time and energy to the ways in which Nadir’s mother remains such a vital presence. What this novel gets right is the unending nature of grief. The other element that I most appreciated was the site of possibility that this novel offers for transgender characters. Nadir’s journey is wrought with sensitivity and understanding, a sense that Nadir too seeks to find the kind of metaphorical flight that he continually observes in all of the flying animals that surround him. Dazzling and poignant!
Buy the Book Here
Edited by Corinna Cape
Feast on the exquisite prose and the haunting, epic story offered by Zeyn Joukhadar in The Thirty Names of Night (Simon & Schuster, 2020)! Let’s let the official marketing description get us situated: “Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria, but he’s been struggling ever since his mother’s ghost began visiting him each evening. One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting birds. She mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.
As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.”
This description is actually rather robust. The story’s narrative conceit involves alternating perspectives. Nadir provides one perspective, which is always told to a narratee, who we quickly discover is Nadir’s mother, who died in a tragic accident involving a fire evacuation and a collapsed fire escape. The other perspective emerges once Nadir finds Laila’s Z’s journal. The journal details her artistic development as well as her transgressive romances. Laila Z’s journal also contains a narratee, whose identity is not revealed until the final sections of the story. What I absolutely adored about this particular narrative was its full-fledged adoration of all things related to birds. This novel makes me wonder if Joukhadar had to do a bunch of research or whether Joukhadar was already a fan of all things birds and thus could embed it into this kind of work. There’s so much texture to the knowledge offered by both Laila Z and Nadir in terms of birds, their beauty, and how rare some can be. I also learned quite a bit about the rarefied art world and the struggles of an emerging, woman of color artist. As my mother passed away in 2019, I found this novel immensely affecting for the ways in which Nadir continually hails her mother after she has died, devoting so much time and energy to the ways in which Nadir’s mother remains such a vital presence. What this novel gets right is the unending nature of grief. The other element that I most appreciated was the site of possibility that this novel offers for transgender characters. Nadir’s journey is wrought with sensitivity and understanding, a sense that Nadir too seeks to find the kind of metaphorical flight that he continually observes in all of the flying animals that surround him. Dazzling and poignant!
Buy the Book Here