Introduction:
The Thirty Names of Night (2018), written by Zeyn Joukhadar, follows the story of a young Syrian trans artist struggling in the aftermath of his mother’s death as he copes with coming out to his family, the destruction of his community, and the trauma he holds close to his chest.
Half of the novel is written from the perspective of the protagonist (who largely goes unnamed as he wrestles with his identity), while the other half of the novel follows the epistolary narrative of the protagonist’s favorite artist.
Author Zeyn Joukhadar is a a non-binary trans writer, he himself is Syrian-American. His novel The Thirty Names of Night is both a Stonewall Book Award winner and a Lambda Literary Awards Finalist.
Overview:
The novel begins five years after the death of the protagonist's mother in a fire. His mother had been working on petitioning to save an old community building in Little Syria located in New York. As an ornithologist, she was interested in pursuing research on a species of rare bird, only sighted once before and never confirmed, she believed to have been nesting in and around the building. Her death was a result of arson.
This is not the only attack against Arab Americans in the book. Later on, the protagonist witnesses both a local Islamic community center and an Islamic owned shop attacked similarly in acts of xenophobia and anti-Islamic sentiment.
As the novel progresses, the protagonist connects more to his community and family (both family by birth as well as his found family) than he has since the death of his mother. During his research into the old community building, he discovers a journal belonging to an artist known as Laila Z, an Arab artist who primarily painted and cataloged birds, one who had been missing from the public eye for close to forty years. She had been his mother’s obsession for years, and she had spent the last few years of her life attempting to locate a painting of the rare bird she suspected Laila to have done.
The protagonist, having finally named himself as Nadir at the end of the novel, is able to fully live as himself to his family and community. Nadir works through the lingering grief and trauma he had been holding onto since the death of his mother, which he had been blaming himself for. The novel ends with Nadir being able to paint for himself once again, surrounded by his family and friends, no longer haunted by the death of his mother.
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