On Kinship and Belonging: narrating and surviving in Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night
MARTA CARIELLO
Abstract
Zeyn Joukhadar’s second novel, The Thirty Names of Night (2020) tells the story of a young transgender Syrian American man in New York City who reconnects, through an old notebook and a common love of birds, to a Syrian artist who lived and disappeared in New York decades earlier. Through this journey, in a New York City mysteriously invaded by flocks of birds, and rare birds appearing in the narrative alongside and as metaphors (also) of the ‘unseen’ young man, Nadir names himself and finds the threads of memory in stories of queer kinship and untold history. This article looks at Zeyn Joukhadar’s poetic interweaving of stories, where finding one’s place in the world means allowing oneself to see and believe the bonds and commonness of found and chosen family, and of found and chosen community – queer and Syrian American in this case – among migratory lives, just like birds. The linkages of family and memory are intertwined, in the novel, with the sense of longing and belonging inscribed in diaspora, and rootedness acquires a completely different, much lighter, air-borne quality, for those who are willing to see and recognize the stories, and their names.
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Arab American literature, queer kinships, queer temporalities, diaspora, memory
Pages
37-49