Map of Salt and Stars

I am posting woefully late on a Tuesday at 4 a.m, so a lot of posts have discussed the parallel/perpendicular plots, the gorgeous prose/can a novel be too pretty?, past tense 3rd vs. present tense 1st, the effect of Nour's (deep) questions, and the metaphor of Rawiya's story as Nour.

I want to discuss how a narrator can reveal plot elements while being personally oblivious to what's "really" happening (this happened also in Lucky Boy regarding Soli and Silvia. It seemed like the reader knew Silvia was taking advantage of Soli while Soli was naive to her motives).

I was interested in the way Nour reveals that Huda is severely sick with a fever through the detail of her forehead fogging up the AC window on the bus, on page 200:

Huda leans against the window and winces, shivering, before she closes her eyes. Her forehead is so hot that it fogs the air-conditioned glass.

Umm Yusuf has that look grown-ups get when they want to protect you, the look that says: Don't let her see.

 The nature of Nour's character is that she sees details around her with precision and curiosity. She's almost stunted by a deeper read of how others interpret the world, that she has not yet developed analytical skills of those details she sees. And why would she? She's still a child. She's also quite dreamy and unfettered by specific rationale for adult decision-making (side note: people like this do really well with others who have anchored personality types, those whose Jungian outer traits are organized and apt at planning. Not that I'm match-making Nour...).

Page 216:

"What's wrong?" I ask.
"It's just hot out," Mama says.
The rosy brown of Huda's lips has gone ashy, and the thin skin under her eyes has turned gray. I ask, "Are you sure?" 

Still, Nour isn't actively worried about Huda. Other plot elements unfold around this time to stave off directly addressing Huda -- Zahra and Nour make up, Nour gets closer to Yusuf.

It isn't until page 239 that Mama seeks medical attention for Huda, and she sends Nour and Zahra off on their own. Between the first hint that Huda is developing complications from her injury to something being done about it, there are at least 40 pages.

I also want to float this out there before class on Wednesday: we've discussed how child narration functions in certain texts, such as Persepolis and Monsoon Mansion. I feel as though Nour's character being through the lens of a child has many of the same attributes as these other texts... she gets to be politically neutral if she wants, she gets to narrate atrocities of war in ways that hit the reader especially hard because of her innocence, and she gets to ask a lot of questions.

My question is, in what ways does Nour being a child influence other characters' actions around her? I am thinking of all the advice the adults impart around her at every given opportunity. Is that a function of her being a child, or a function of it being a war, and adults are desperate to pass on knowledge and wisdom before it is too late?

Excess and Myth

The limitations of the plot in The Map of Salt and Stars are arranged around the viewpoint of a thirteen year old who doesn't fully understand the language around her. The reader still gets access to what is discussed, so this limitation doesn't transfer to the experience of reading it—we don't share Nour's perspective entirely. We get reminded of her narrow understanding of Arabic regularly, and she starts to pretend she can understand less than she does in order to gain more access to the adult world, where decisions of life and death are made. Nour spends the majority of the book not understanding why they must be on the move constantly, while still managing intense feelings of grief about the loss of her father. She leans on an ancient story he used to share with her, to draw connections to the land she travels and to remember him.

While reading I was sometimes struggling to get past the flourish of the storytelling. I started to feel like the beautiful language cluttered the action of the narrative. There were so many instances when the artful language felt like it was in the way, like I had to get past it or through it to get to the action. It was so overdone, that individual poetic moments had less weight amidst the clutter of it all. I also got really tired of the synesthesia, it didn't add anything to Nour's character for me. It became predictable and corny very quickly.

All that said, I was really hooked into the dual narratives, especially the way the migrations of each character linked through time. The ancient settings of the places that Nour and her family went through populated my imagination. The way Nour clung to her Baba's story made sense of the trials they went through trying to find their way to safety. The mirroring challenges and fights were illustrative, when Huda almost got raped it lined up with Rawiya's fighting Ibn Hakim and losing Bakr. There was a strong sense that even though they escaped the young men who would have taken Huda, that something deeply important was still lost. Later in the novel when Huda loses her arm, I wondered if the infection that caused the amputation was started in that tussle.

Another time that the dual narratives lined up was when al-Idrisi and the gang are lost in the sand storm along the canyon, and Rawiya desperately tries to throw stones with her sling to knock the walls of the canyon to direct them back to safety, and Nour finds herself lost in the alleyways of Amman. Although Rawiya is responsible for finding the way, and Nour ends up cowering under a tree where Abu Sayeed finds her, the incidence of Nour running into the night/dawn seemed to be inspired by the ancient tale. These reflected narratives give the action a rhythm that is really satisfying and well-balanced, it felt like a carefully choreographed dance between the two exciting stories.

The modern story moves in and out of mythology with Nour's continued survival amid mounting dangers. The rising waters in the stowaway of the passage ship should have drowned them, yet she and Zahra both survive getting tossed on the rocks. The whole group except Abu Sayeed survive the aid boat capsizing, and she and Zahra tucked into the refrigerated truck swelled my suspension of disbelief. Yet when Nour starts to match up with the ancient story, finding the purple-green stone of the roc's eye, and "remembering" al-Idrisi's fountain home when they reach Ceuta, knowing that Uncle Ma'mun lived in the same hilltop house, that felt right to me. It was so far outside of actual possibility that it fulfilled the need I had for meaning—Nour shared that need, that there should be a reason for all this heartbreak and tumult. She wanted a connection to make sense of it all. Real life doesn't have such tidy arrangements.

The Map of Salt and Stars

While reading through this week’s novel I couldn’t help but be reminded of Laurie Frankel’s This is How it Always is in how oral stories are woven into the narrative who’s central character is a child. Both of these novels contain a sort of “bedtime” story that a father creates, expanding it to last several sessions as a point for the narrative to return to throughout. Frankel weaves Penn’s fairytale story into the dialogue, with it being verbally shared as a bedtime routine. We saw what effect the story had on the characters and how they related to it as it was being told. However, with Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar’s novel, the story of Rawiya is provided through its own narrative. Though it was Baba that first shared it with Nour as their bedtime story, it is Nour now sharing it with us, (technically she’s telling the fig in order to reach Baba). Rawiya’s story is given its own space, to be told outside of Nour’s narrative. In the first chapter, the beginning of Rawiya’s story is sandwiched in Nour’s first person narrative, separated by asterisk. From the second chapter onwards, each chapter opens with Rawiya and these two stories run side by side. 

Although Rawiya’s story is taken out, Joukhadar indicates that it’s all being told through dialogue. The beginning line is repeated, first with Nour explaining how she will “start the way Baba always did: ‘Everybody knows the story of Rawiya...They just don’t know they know it’” (page 6). At the end of that section, Nour says she will “start again,” right before Rawiya’s first chapter begins. Rather than having an obvious intent for telling this story—as opposed for Penn having a lesson or message told through his characters—the reader is left to interpret how these stories relate and allows Rawiya and her group to become their own characters. I do not recall being attached to Stephanie, I saw her as a tool for parent and child to communicate, but I did see Rawiya as another central character. Penn intended for Stephanie to be somewhat like a reflection of Poppy, this wasn’t always so with Nour. At one point, Nour insists to herself that she isn’t Rawiya, which became a huge point of intrigue for Rawiya’s character.  

Both of these novels tie childhood, parent-child bonding, with storytelling and create secondary characters within that world. These other characters then provide another window through which to see the children, and how the parent telling the story sees the child. However, I enjoyed hearing about Rawiya’s adventure as opposed to Stephanie’s, which felt summarized. Joukhadar took the time to create a world within the novel’s world. Nour holds the story dear because of its connection to her father, and I sensed that deep love in the careful retelling. 

A Map of Salt & Stars

Can a book be too pretty?

I found myself constantly asking that question as I read The Map of Salt & Stars. The language is undeniably gorgeous, fantastical even. Nour's synesthesia is brought to life vividly, to the point that it builds a rhythm between reader and narrator. When Nour talks of burnt pots and pans clanging together being a pitch black or sullen gray, I can see it. The synesthesia acts as a vehicle, a palpable way for the more loftier metaphors to connect with the reader through color, but with that being said, it got to be too much at times. The language in general did. I began to wonder if a twelve year old truly thought like that? I mean, I know Nour is supposed to be a precocious kid and her circumstances are extraordinary -- she goes from NYC in an apartment with her parents to a literal war zone -- the loft language just seems so elevate and out of touch. It reminds me of This Is How It Always Is, in a sense; Poppy often felt too old to me in that, too, because of how she spoke/carried herself.

But I think it works here because of the subject matter: The Syrian Civil War. I thought it was an interesting choice by Joukhadar to ground the novel first in the U.S. Why not put his protagonist in Syria from the start? And then the exchange with Itto regarding Nour's heritage.

"New York?" Itto looks down at me. "You may be American, but you are still Syrian." 

I rub  the camel's coarse hair with my palms. "How?" 

"A person can be two things at the same time," Itto says. "The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood." 

This is where the parallel stories truly hit home for me. It's where Rawiya's story and the map making and how the narrative is told truly comes to fruition.  When I first started reading, it took me a while to realise the story was being told in parallel(ish) (or maybe perpendicular?) narratives. I kept having to stop and pull back to check where I was or who I was with. I attribute it mostly to the use of the 'I' narrator. I hate the 'I' but I digress. Its Rawiya's map making and Nour's constant reiteration of the story that embodies the above exchange. 

The Map of Salt and Stars

    The language and syntax of this book pulled me in immediately. Starting even just on the poem that opens section one, I was drawn to the intricate way beauty and pain seemed to be weaved together. And this continues throughout the book. I’m not entirely sure where to start analyzing the language, but I can can attempt to put my thoughts out into the world in some way.

    When we first hear of Rawiya’s story it is through Nour repeating the story just as she heard her father tell it countless times, “Everybody knows the story of Rawiya. They just don’t know that they know it.” (6,7). And this line is repeated verbatim on the following page. It is such a striking way to tell a story because, and I’ll speak for myself here, I try not to repeat things too often or too closely together. So why did this line work so well in this story? And why did the repetition of this line work just as well even though we had just seen it? I don’t really know. Perhaps because we know that Nour has such an attachment to this story, we know it has to be told a certain way. Perhaps because we hear Nour’s voice tell us a story that is separate (although not entirely) from her own. Or perhaps the narrator of this story to us is Nour’s Baba, possibly through Nour. I tended to think of it as the voice of Nour’s Baba, especially after Nour admitted to Abu Sayeed that she could no longer remember the sound of her father’s voice. I like the idea that his voice and Nour’s get to create this story together.

    Another thing I found myself extremely interested in was all the questions that Nour asks the reader. There are countless rhetorical questions we see while reading, and they aren’t meant for us to answer necessarily, but I do think that they are meant to make us feel something.

“How many polaroids are there of places that no longer exist?” (67)

“Is somebody sleeping in my burnt out bed? Are people coming to take our charred blankets and clean everything out and build a new house where ours used to be?” (83)

“Can the name of a street on a piece of paper prove that our family was there?” (102)

“Why didn’t I realize that you can’t just superglue a dining table back together, a house? How long will it be until we get back the things we lost?” (121)

    These questions are not for us to answer, and maybe they don’t really have answers. But each one burrowed into my heart and made me take a pause in the story. For me, they seemed to point outside of the book, to the world that I’m living in, not Nour’s world. It questions my perspective as a reader, my knowledge, what I can and can’t control both inside and outside of this story. It made me think that I needed to answer these questions for myself. Which does feel like a very selfish way to read this story, but I liked that it made me question my positionality.

The Map of Salt and Stars

            The Map of Salt and Stars impressed me with its poetic language and deeply magical metaphors and images.  Early on, lines like, “My words sunk down like seeds, my vowels and the red space for stories crushed under my tongue.” (Joukhadar 3) and, “I imagine the vibrations of my voice traveling thousands of miles, cracking through the planet’s crust… where the world is all colors at once, where nobody dies.” (Joukhadar 6-7), caught my attention and kept me listening very closely to what the narrator was saying, since it was so interesting and beautiful.  The color-sound pairing gave the book another layer of descriptive detail that I haven’t seen in another novel, even Nabokov only mentions his abilities, he doesn’t try to translate them for the reader in Speak, Memory.

            I really enjoyed Rawiya’s parallel journey.  Side by side, it’s easy to see what creates a narrative with complex characters, (Nour and her story), and what create a fairytale, (Rawiya’s story.)  The author chooses to tell Rawiya’s in past tense, and in the third person, which helps the reader put some distance between themselves and Rawiya, whereas with Nour we are inside her head and in the present tense, heightening the emotions we feel from her.  I wouldn’t have noticed it if the stories weren’t side by side, but it’s clear how different the amount of details are in each girl’s life, as well as the kinds of memories and relationships they have with the other characters.  With Rawiya, I get some lines about what her body is feeling, and the kinds of things she’s worried about, but it is kept to a minimum.  With Nour, I feel every swell of emotion, every doubt, and I feel like I’m seeing the world through her unique lens.  Rawiya has memories of her home and family, but these are brief, and she only lapses into them momentarily.  With Nour, we dive headlong into the pain of losing her father, the coyote she saw in central park, and the dead falcon she found on her building’s roof.  There isn’t much that is spared from her experience, and her sections go into memory often, sometimes once every page or two, to help round out this real human being.  Nour’s relationship with those around her are also more complex, sometimes she is angry with her mother, her relationship with Zahra is very strained, and she changes her opinion on people over the course of the book, like Yusuf.  Rawiya’s relationships are fairly simple.  She loves Khaldun, who loves her back, Al-Idrisi is angry with her for not being upfront about her gender, but gets over it after a minute or two, and her mother and brother love her when she returns home and not much has changed.  They each have the same kinds of elements and technique running through them, but it’s easy to see how much deeper Nour’s story goes when alternated with Rawiya’s. 

            Something that fascinated me the most about this book were Nour’s memories.  We go into Nour’s earlier memories very often, I was surprised by how much at first.  I expected to hear more about her father, he’s so important to her, but I was surprised with the variety and frequency of other memories.  The author slips into them with no hesitation, with no prompting, and lets Nour’s mind wander to memories that are brought up by what she’s experiencing in the moment.  When she’s helping her family search the ruins of their house in Syria, she remembers when she lost her doll as a child.  When they’re walking around their neighborhood, trying to see if Abu Sayeed’s house is in any better shape than their own, Nour remembers a coyote she saw in central park.  The memories build, and very soon we have a clear and deep connection with Nour that goes beyond the time we spend with her in the book.

-Iris

Metaphor in A Map of Salt and Stars

One of the things that struck me about The Map of Salt and Stars was how metaphor-heavy the text was. In some ways that made the prose feel almost like poetry, in fact (this may have been a reason I loved it so much, honestly). The use of metaphor allows the reader to feel more fully and accurately the hurt and longing Nour and Rawiya feel on their journeys away from home.

Though we primarily follow Nour's story and she is the narrator, she isn't the only one to speak in metaphor. Al-Idrisi, in his ordinary speech, uses beautiful metaphors: "I loved it in spite of the terrible weight of its hope" (loc 1525), he says, speaking of his earliest adventures. Nour is young, but her metaphors are mature; they come naturally to her from her father's stories of Rawiya. She has inherited them: "What did Baba used to call me? I try and remember his voice: Ya baba, my sapling. My daughter is as strong as a new palm" (loc 2494). Nour discovers the poetry she has inherited from her mother when she chips away the paint on the map she was given. Here is another metaphor: "The words were on our backs, . . . It's a map of us" (4272).

One could argue that the story and character of Rawiya work a double and metaphor for the journey and character of Nour. Though Rawiya's return home is more literal--she came from Ceuta and she returns to Ceuta--Nour, in a more complex way, returns home. Home is not Manhattan. Home is not Homs. Home is a place of both becoming and memory--and for the time being, at least, that is Ceuta. Nour is with her remaining family. She is with her own and mother's memories of her father. She is in a place of love, and wherever she goes next that love will be with her.

In no way would I say that the metaphors of this book take the reader to a land of make believe. Neither would I argue that the story of Rawiya is an escape. No, I would say the opposite. The metaphors here serve to make the story more physical, more visceral and complete. Through metaphor even the emotional pain is presented to us physically. Nour carries the deaths of her father and Abu Sayeed in her pocket, a heavy rock. These deaths are physical. Her sorrow is physical. She carries it throughout her journey. She carries her family's history, a map on her back. That history is literal before it becomes symbolic. She carries it on her back throughout her journey, an object that she protects, that she keeps dry in the sea, that she is careful to keep from greedy hands.