While the chorus of “Bella ciao” played over and over again, the movement became rhythmic. At first it just wobbled, heating, until it got much hotter than the rest of me, until finally it was blazing and spinning inside my body. And then I understood at once. It was the coin. I had no doubt about it, I just knew. I had put it there when I was little, in the car ride down south. For more than two decades the coin was gone, I didn’t know where it was. And then, for some reason in New York, it was resurrected.
Yasmin Zaher is a Jerusalem-born Palestinian journalist and The Coin is her first novel: and it absolutely knocked me off my feet. The main character — a young Palestinian woman: rich and beautiful, newly arrived in NYC to work as a private middle school English teacher (even though she hasn’t read any of the English classics), physically and existentially stateless — is not outwardly a victim of history looking for sympathy. And yet she suffers bizarre, body-based obsessions, and as her actions approach a breakdown, it’s obvious that, despite outward appearances, trauma (both personal and historical) underpin and affect her entire existence. I have never experienced anything like this novel — I don’t believe I have read a book written by a Palestinian author before — and this exposure to other lives and voices is exactly the reason why I read. This might be a bit challenging for those who like bodies to remain sanitised and out of sight, but this is a novel I would urge everyone to read; and especially at this time. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In the morning I brushed my teeth with a soft toothbrush and my favorite Cattier toothpaste. Then I washed my face with an oil-based cleanser, followed by a water-based cleanser, followed by toner. All imported from Korea, the world capital of skin like porcelain, purity, and nothingness. Two thousand more years of snail cream and you will see a woman’s brain through her face. Then, after drinking a glass of hot lemon water, a glass of lukewarm water, and a cup of coffee, I emptied my bowels. This happened easily, gloriously, requiring no effort or thought, like flipping through an abridged history of the fall of an empire. All out, insides clean.
A trust fund orphan (with her brother administering her inheritance back home), the unnamed main character has a strict cleaning and beauty regime, wears a capsule wardrobe of designer clothes (all in black), drinks Chivas, enjoys several lovers, and never goes anywhere without the vintage Birkin handbag (size 35) that she inherited from her mother. The publisher’s blurb explains that this is about her time teaching “with eccentric methods” at a school for underprivileged boys, and how she “gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags”, and while these are the plot points that keep the novel rolling along, this is so much more about what’s happening inside this young woman and what she wants to share about her thoughts and background with the reader; and that often gets political:
• To be honest with you, in New York I saw the dirtiest people I had ever seen, although I’d never been to a third world country. I came from Palestine, which was neither a country nor the third world, it was its own thing, and the women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.
• When Netanyahu and Trump were elected I thought those were good days, because the truth had come to light. But it seemed not only that the truth was ugly, but also that ugly was beautiful. The people adore the monster, the rich want to look poor.
• It was reported that fifty-five people were killed in Gaza, and I felt a pinch in my chest. But when I looked up at the trees, at the sky, I saw that nothing was changed.
From the presence of the titular coin — a shekel the main character swallowed as a child, which she never knowingly passed, and which she now suspects has lodged itself beneath the skin between her shoulder blades, which she can’t quite reach with her Turkish loofah — to a back-to-nature mania that her breakdown leads to, this is very much about this woman’s body (which is, I suppose, the singular homeland of a stateless person), and the writing about this body is discomfiting, explicitly sensual, and illuminating. The following scene — in which the woman walks naked in the woods outside NYC, while on a trip with her lover Sasha, and is frightened by a deer — seems to hold the key to the whole thing:
I come from a land that is a graveyard. For millennia, all kinds of people were born there, they died there, or were killed, and some were even resurrected or reborn. It was bloody, haunted, and doomed, but it belonged to mankind. Nature in America was uncivilized and untamed. I didn’t know how to read it. If a deer was some kind of warning sign, I wouldn’t have known. Before Sasha could see him, the deer turned around and left. I saw his fluffy white tail behind him, like the tail of a rabbit, and all my fear turned into giddiness. Sasha didn’t leave the house to look for the deer, he stayed indoors, keeping a distance from nature. He was a complex man, but you have to understand that everything outside of me only serves a function. Yes, I am a good woman, I respect people, I listen to their voices. Yours too. But this is not Bakhtin’s carnival, this is a centralized nervous system.
That last line was so intriguing to me that I had to look into “Bakhtin’s carnival” and learned (here) that this refers to the theory of Carnivalesque/Rabelasian “writing that depicts the de-stabilization or reversal of power structures…by mobilizing humour, satire, and grotesquery in all its forms, but especially if it has to do with the body and bodily functions…often read as a utopian antidote to repressive forms of power everywhere and a celebration of the possibility for affirmative change, however transitory in nature.” So while I have read and enjoyed Rabelais, and appreciate that form of satire as protest, it feels like a post-modern update for Zaher to explicitly write that this is not Baktin’s carnival, “this is a centralized nervous system”: this is real life, a real trauma-informed breakdown, and I see no reason why Zaher can’t both hearken to the carnivalesque (as a literary tradition) and repudiate it (as a personal experience). I absolutely loved everything about this novel — this is a voice, in both tone and particular POV, that I have never before encountered — and I hope The Coin is read widely upon its release. Full stars, no hesitation.
