By Pahull Bains Pahull Bains is a Contributing Editor at Vogue India.
“I sometimes questioned my decision to go to America,” says the protagonist of The Coin. But then, “I couldn’t have worn heels teaching in a school with dirt floors.”
This wry admission is one of many shared by the unnamed narrator of Yasmin Zaher’s electric and audacious debut novel that speaks to her contradicting wills and desires. Our protagonist is a stylish and wealthy woman living in New York — a familiar premise in popular culture, but quite unlike the Serenas and Carries we’ve seen before. For starters, she’s a Palestinian in exile, who leaves her home in pursuit of a different kind of life. Though orphaned at a young age, she’s a child of the urban elite and has been left a sizeable inheritance that allows her to move to New York, live a hedonistic life, and amass a wardrobe of quiet luxury staples - the likes of Brunello Cuccinelli, Chloe, Marni and Alexander McQueen.
She only lasts eight months in the city. This may be a New York novel but again, not the kind we’ve read before. Far from being charmed by the city, our protagonist takes no pains to hide her distaste of it. In fact, she never wanted to come to America in the first place, though it was her late mother’s dream for her. Reflecting on the devastation the American government has wrought abroad, in Vietnam, in Guatemala and to her own people, she wonders, “how could the devil be the dream?”
But in pursuit of a certain lifestyle and lacking the courage to go “somewhere dire,” she arrives in Brooklyn with the help of her maybe-boyfriend, a wealthy Russian real estate developer, and takes up a job teaching English at a school for underprivileged Black and brown boys. It’s during this stint in New York — a city that “embraced the dirt like it was an aesthetic” — that she starts to become obsessed with the idea of being clean. She devises new and punishing ways to scrub every inch of her body, in an effort to remove the spectre of an ancient coin she believes has long been lodged within her body.
The coin is a metaphor for long-repressed, inherited trauma—from the occupation of her family’s homeland in 1948, to the loss of her grandparents’ house, to the death of her parents—and it takes on the form of something parasitic that needs to be dislodged, expunged. We join our protagonist at the beginning of her descent into obsessive-compulsive cleaning rituals, and as she tightens command over her body, everything around her spirals out of control.
She befriends a well-dressed and mysterious stranger, gets roped into a ludicrous scheme involving buying and re-selling Birkin bags in Paris, and starts improvising in the classroom,
setting increasingly unconventional assignments for her impressionable students in a misguided attempt to teach them about the real ways of the world. An air of recklessness—bordering on psychopathy—permeates the novel, infusing it with the kind of unpredictability that elicits both a frisson of fear and a tantalizing curiosity. What will this woman on the verge of a breakdown do next?
As the writer, Zaher is in immense control of this uncontrollable character. The novel is broken into bite-sized chapters (ranging from one to five pages) that mirror the narrator’s fitful state of mind. Her thoughts feel stream-of-consciousness and they are often absurd, even problematic, but they also lead to unexpected places of wisdom and wonder. Through this character, Zaher picks apart notions of beauty, justice, prejudice and privilege with a discomfiting honesty and sardonic wit, drawing throughlines that feel refreshingly original.
Take, for example, a chapter that begins with the narrator describing her capsule wardrobe (a Simone Rocha blouse, wide-leg raw denim from Gucci, an Alexander McQueen coat) and ends with an astute observation about the rise of populist figures like Trump and Netanyahu. The connecting thread between the two is a clothing installation by disruptive Georgian fashion brand Vetements that she sees at Saks Fifth Avenue. Comparing them to Banksy for their ability to sell “sweatshop hoodies” for thousands of dollars, thus transforming streetwear into high fashion and the ordinary (or ugly) into the covetable, she observes, “It’s a reflection of the truth isn’t it, that the truth is ugly. I used to think that if people saw the real face of wickedness, not the mask, they would revolt… 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 that ugly was beautiful.”
This novel has come out at a time when Palestinians are seen either as victims or terrorists. They’re not afforded the ability to be full people, let alone a person with a Burberry trench coat and a multi-step Korean skincare routine. This book is not a tale of their suffering or victimhood. It’s not about Palestine. At least, it’s not explicitly about Palestine. But the narrator’s yearning for her homeland — not just as a tangible place but the mere idea of it — suffuses the pages. (As Palestinian writer Suad Amiry said recently on the Kalam podcast, “Every Palestinian is occupied by Palestine.”) Her unravelling in the concrete jungle that is New York is partly borne of a desire to be reconnected to nature, to the olive groves of her ancestors and the citrus trees of her grandmother’s garden. It’s connected to the odd dichotomy of being both stateless and privileged; powerless and powerful. It stems from a desperate desire for control and agency, something her people have long been denied.
In its interrogations of class, style, societal privilege and political oppression, The Coin is not just a Palestinian novel, not a New York novel, not a fashion novel, but an exhilarating and mesmerising combination of all three.
Publisher: Catapult Page count: 240
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