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291 pages, Hardcover
First published November 24, 2020
“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”---------------------------------------
…My mother turned her face to me over her shoulder. “What came,” she said, “was night, and all its names.”
…not all migrations end with a return home. Every memory begins to cut if you hold onto it too tight.Reading Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night is like walking through an incredibly rich and diverse aviary. Our attention is drawn to each flying thing as it comes into our visual range. No sooner do we coo at the beauty of the last than another feathered image hops into view. As in an actual aviary, there is an entrance and an exit. The flocks, and individuals, provide a landscape as we pass through dips and rises in the path, arriving at recognitions as we reach the end. There is a lot going on here.
If Simorgh unveils its face to you, you will findThe central, peripheral, overhead, and underfoot imagery in this novel is BIRDS. This includes tales from ancient classics, like the one above. Joukhadar infuses nearly every page with birds, real, magically real, drawn, painted, folded, and sometimes by allusion. Flocks appear, to enhance events. Goldfinches swarm during a building demolition. Forty-eight sparrows fall from the sky on the fifth anniversary of the narrator’s mother’s death.
that all the birds, be they thirty or forty or more,
are but the shadows cast by that unveiling.
What shadow is ever separated from its maker?
Do you see?
The shadow and its maker are one and the same,
so get over surfaces and delve into mysteries. - from that poem
The first funeral I attended was held under a black froth of wings. The deceased was a crow that had been gashed in the belly by a red-tailed hawk…That was the day my body started conspiring against me. I’d gotten my period.B makes Laila a gift, a piece of a dead kite they had tried to save, fallen feathers stitched back to make a magnificent silver-white wing. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Our narrator’s mother had been an ornithologist. A close friend of his mother operates a bird-rescue aviary in Queens. An evening at a club entails people dancing, using very bird-like movements. Birds are both expressions of freedom and reflections of a divine presence. They are manifestations of underlying forces and sources of purest love and beauty. They are a means by which people connect with other people.
I am tied by blood to Syria, and the country where my father was born is suffering while the country in which I was born still views us as not fully American. Where, then, does that leave me? And for people of Syrian descent living in diaspora, particularly for the generation of children who will grow up in exile because their parents left Syria for safety reasons, what can we take with us? What do we carry with us that cannot be lost? - from the Goodreads interview
We parted. I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“Tell me something beautiful,” you said.
I opened my mouth and out came the only thing that I had ever known to be as beautiful as it was true, that I had once met a woman who knew how to fly.
You clasped my chilled hand in yours and lowered your gaze to our fingers. I hoped I’d said the right thing. My mother always used to say that people in mourning prefer not to talk about the earth.
“What a wonderful thing,” you said, “for just one instant, to be so close to God.”