Yasmin Zaher
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher unfolds in the first-person voice of a wealthy Palestinian woman who remains unnamed. She has inherited millions from her parents but has to rely on her brother to dole out her monthly allowance as dictated by her father’s will. She lives in New York and teaches at a middle school for underprivileged boys.
Obsessed with cleanliness, the narrator describes in minute detail her daily routine for scrubbing her body, including all its orifices. She claims her obsession with cleanliness was probably instilled by Palestinian women who scrubbed and cleaned their homes because they had very little control over other aspects of their lives. She spends a lot of time cleaning her home and even makes the students help her clean the classroom.
She has a long-term boyfriend but doesn’t live with him, valuing her independence. She befriends a man she refers to as “Trenchcoat,” who embroils her in a pyramid scheme of reselling Birkin handbags. She is generous with her students, taking them on field trips, buying them burgers, and dropping $20.00 bills in the classroom for them to find and keep. She is always stylishly dressed, making a point of naming each item of designer clothing she wears. She walks down the streets of New York, proud of her appearance. But underneath this veneer of confidence, she is untethered and spirals out of control.
The story line is non-linear and chaotic. The narrator’s leaps from one event to another lack cohesion. She is adept at lying and fabricating images of herself and her background to others with no explanation as to why she feels the need to do this. Threaded throughout her narrative are flashbacks of her Palestinian home, talks with her grandmother, her grandmother’s once beautiful garden in Palestine, and her grandfather’s broken heart at losing his home in Palestine. All of this leads us to the coin, the title of the novel.
The narrator is convinced that she swallowed a coin when she was a child. The coin never leaves her body and lodges itself in her back. No matter how hard she tries to dislodge it, no matter how hard she scrubs, she can never get rid of it. She is aware of it inside her body, claims she can feel its physical presence, refers to it as “you,” and addresses it in her monologue. The coin comes to manifest the inherited trauma of a dispossessed population. She has ingested the trauma which has become an integral and permanent part of her psyche. It never leaves her, impacting her thoughts, behavior, and self-image. As she says to the coin: “You’ll come with me everywhere I go, I said to you, we have no choice.”
In controlled prose and in series of disparate threads woven together in short vignettes, Zaher takes us inside the mind of a woman who is dispossessed, deprived of a homeland, cut off from her culture and traditions, set adrift and untethered in a foreign land, conscious of her outsider status, culturally estranged, and harboring a deep yearning to belong. The style is hypnotic; the narrative, absorbing; the conclusion, shocking. The trajectory of the narrator’s descent into erratic, disturbing behavior is moving, haunting, and cleverly executed.