Review: Debut novel of Palestinian writer explores exile, displacement through the female body

JEDDAH: The 2024 novel “The Coin,” is the dizzying debut of Jerusalem-born Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher, which hones in on the female body, and is written in a stream-of-consciousness narrative style.

Titled after a shekel coin the unnamed female protagonist believes she swallowed as a child, and is rusting and decomposing in her, the novel is essentially about an affluent yet displaced woman’s exploration — on her own terms —  of the pain and pleasures of life.

Zaher writes about the unraveling, or rather the becoming, of a Palestinian woman who moves to New York City with the hope of starting life afresh as a schoolteacher.

The coin is “resurrected” here, amid the dirt and poverty that plagues the American city, which the protagonist describes as: “How could the devil be the dream?” It seems to manifest as discomfort, linking the traumas of the past to her present.

The narrator befriends a homeless, yet elegant man whom she gets embroiled with in a Birkin scam. This is an exploration of the cosmopolitan city life’s obsession with consumerism and materialism, as well as the performative and elitist nature of fashion and wealth.

With a closet full of designer pieces, the woman’s refined taste in fashion is a ruse to help her navigate societal expectations against the call of her inner self. She asks herself: “I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned?”

She is from Palestine, which she describes as “neither a country, nor the third world, it was its own thing.”

Moving to the Big Apple in pursuit of home and her ideal self, this triggers obsessive cleaning rituals because the city “embraced the dirt like it was an aesthetic.”

As a woman from a country under occupation, her own body becomes the site of power struggles, a site of cleansing rather than being ethnically cleansed out.

Her protagonist says “the women in my family placed lot of importance on being clean … perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.”

The narrative is mercurial in its depiction of her cleansing rituals that are juxtaposed with glimmers of violent and disturbing psychopathic thoughts, making her not just an intriguing protagonist to read, but an elusive one.