The coin by Yasmin Zaher (PanMacmillan, 2024)
- Mphuthumi Ntabeni writes a regular book column for LitNet.
Title: The coin
Author: Yasmin Zaher
Publisher: Pan MacMillan (2024)
ISBN: 9781804441367
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It is a short, easy-to-read novel that ticks almost all the boxes for a commercial novel, with quality writing of literary fiction.
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It is always such a pleasure to encounter a bold, new voice in literature, especially when it is the first novel you read at the beginning of the year after what you could describe as a year of fiction slump. For some reason, in 2024, reading fiction was difficult for me; my mind refused to latch onto it, relying on poetry and nonfiction to feed my reading habit. Perhaps what cured my fiction slump with this book was its sentences with their engrossing poetic force of the ordinary.
The coin by Yasmin Zaher is about a young, Palestinian woman from a rich background who is obsessed with cleanliness and body purity: “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” (21).
She teaches at a New York City boys middle school. She loves her students but not her job. Though her students sometimes titillate her sexual urges, she never crosses the paedophile line. She is estranged to her colleagues because of her unconventional teaching methods. She is lonely and horny all the time, which makes her a willing victim to a highfalutin sort of boyfriend, Trenchcoat (he picks up a coat she has thrown out because it was dirty), who is heterophobic and averse to sleeping with her, even while he has no problem sponging on her. He turns out to be a homeless swindler who gets her mixed up in a scheme of buying and reselling Birkin bags. She is obsessed with hygiene – personal, societal and environmental. And this proves to be her unravelling.
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The most interesting part of the book for me is the complexes and contradictions of her character, which she sees, ridicules and seeks to live by, rather than change.
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The most interesting part of the book for me is the complexes and contradictions of her character, which she sees, ridicules and seeks to live by, rather than change. She is restless and resigned to who she is, rather than who she is not but should be: stateless, young and carefree in a country that is obsessed with exclusionary nationalism, patriotism, material wealth and so forth. She’s living, not rough, but below her inherited upper class in one of the most expensive cities, with a stipend that is above average but below her tastes and habits. She has a disdainful attitude towards the American life she is stuck in: “I told you already, in my family America was both the key and the curse” (57).
The book is careful not to moralise too much about the politics of Palestine and the United States, but the hypocrisies of the West are given a slight bashing now and then. I understand the motivation behind this, the denying of the trauma gaze and the use of it, as a subplot, towards the need to paint the USA with a saviour rescue syndrome, to depict the denouement of gratitude and resolution for our immigrant protagonist. The book, in general, avoids tropes of commercial fiction, even as it sometimes employs them for parody and humour. The author resists the requirement to tell her story as identity experience safari – the mawkish spectacle of her experience and the prostituting of her national trauma. Unfortunately, that comes at a greater cost of hollowing out the protagonist’s national psyche and consciousness. As in everything in life, when you gain something, you lose some. Her obsessive, narrow individualism, with its accompanying pathetic fallacies and emotional retardation, robs her of proper social realism, which is crucial for expansive character development. Non-Caucasians (the hip term is “people of colour”), because of their history and the oppressive nature of the Western hegemonic systems they live under, cannot afford to obsess only about individual needs. You need communal support, to roll with your posse, if you’re to stand at all. Otherwise, the system will crush you. Also, as humans, despite the pretensions of some Western writers, we are not only our minds; others matter, too, and not only when they come across our selfish or individual needs. We are, because others who complete our social reality also are. And we are more than mere flesh and blood, because of our connection to our genes, history and future.
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All art, including fiction, is historical. It forms a part of the time archive in which it was created, and thus first serves, or betrays, the politics and culture of its own era before transcending them.
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That said, I have no problem with creative, intuitive silences in service of artistic invention and literary imagination. It is the motive that informs those silences that interests me. When the motive is disingenuous, like in a deliberate attempt to manipulate historical interpretation, or is used as a ruse to “transcend history”, that gets my goat. All art, including fiction, is historical. It forms a part of the time archive in which it was created, and thus first serves, or betrays, the politics and culture of its own era before transcending them. And the footprint haunting the literature of people of colour is the spectre of colonisation.
To the initiated, The coin is also an artistic, non-glaring depiction of personal traumatic experience. The protagonist carries almost all the big symptoms of inherent or generational trauma: insomnia, depression, sexual overactivity, nightmares, anxiety, flashbacks, guilt, meaningless consumption, distrust of genuine love, memory lapses, dysfunctional family life, etc. As is, the story relies on the psychological narrative tension of the individual person struggling to make it in a foreign land. She is not even sure she wants to be there, and, in her characteristic irreverent and radical honesty, she feels that she could have gone somewhere where there’s a real need, like Iraq, Yemen or Africa, or remained in Palestine if she had been a good missionary type: “I didn’t have the courage to go somewhere dire. I wanted a certain life for myself. I wanted to give and to be good, but I also had a certain idea of myself, what my life should look like. Wearing heels was important to me.”
When she was about six, on a family holiday trip our protagonist swallowed a coin that disappeared within her body. Her obsession with its whereabouts manifests itself as a need for cleanliness. She feels that it settled in an area of her back where her hands can’t reach. She tries to scrub it off in several ways that lead to maddening effects. The second part of the book exposes her mania in a surreal manner. What soothes her is the music coming from her clarinet-practising neighbour. “I imagined the player was a man, because I’m always ready to fuck” (22). She would lie on the floor in the warm sunshine, letting the music massage the coin irritant in her back:
The clarinet moved something inside of me. It was nothing scary, just a gentle vibration with certain notes. It was in the centre of my back, on my spine, in the place I could not get to, not with the Cattier Method nor with the Turkish hammam loofah. 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. (33)
I didn’t find the fashionista talk about designer labels too engrossing. The part about the Birkin (apparently a very expensive bag you have to earn by proving you deserve it, even when you have money for it) felt too contrived to me. I didn’t really care much about it. The Birkin scam felt more like a tool for a change of location from New York to Paris, another fashion capital of the West, where I understand our author actually resides. Beyond that, I didn’t really see the use of it, and Trenchcoat just sort of disappears into thin air after he has served that plot purpose.
There is also another boyfriend, Sasha, a dick partner who lives near her place on a clock tower building that looks like a dick. He loves her in an authentic sense. This makes her uncomfortable and awkward. She does not know how to react to his demonstration of love, except to reward him with sex in the manner of throwing a dog a bone after good behaviour. He is too patient with her and overly good, which is his undoing. In the end, she is left with only the coin (voice) and the cheques from her brother, who manages their family estate. When she unravels, she locks herself in her apartment, and recreates with dirt and plants the map of Palestine (a case is probably being made here by the author that the neglect of history unravels us, and we come undone when we try to lose the narrative thread that connects us to our past). When parody is her aim, as I have indicated, the author exploits well the tropes of a commercial novel. The clarinet-practising neighbour no longer brings a soothing effect to calm the razing-to-brittleness effect of the coin in her back. She sits there managing intrusive noises, exacting knock interrogations from outside her apartment and threading echoes from the street. This part of the book reminded me of My year of rest and relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
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These young, contemporary writers remind us of the ultimate value of literature as a platform for interacting with the ineffable, especially when we are hurting from invisible wounds.
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Overall, The coin is a book on the psychological stream of consciousness of how to survive in a city that permanently treats you as a foreigner while dealing with its socioeconomic micro-aggressions. It is a short, easy-to-read novel that ticks almost all the boxes for a commercial novel, with quality writing of literary fiction. Moshfegh fans and those of Sally Rooney would most probably enjoy the book. These young, contemporary writers remind us of the ultimate value of literature as a platform for interacting with the ineffable, especially when we are hurting from invisible wounds.
Also read:
PenAfrican: The equality of shadows by Charl-Pierre Naudé – a book review