Novelist Zeyn Joukhadar ‘Chooses everything’ in the historical fiction “The Thirty Names of Night”
Late this past February a newly inaugurated President Joe Biden carried out airstrikes in eastern Syria, resulting in 22 deaths and briefly sparking international attention. The attacks mark the beginning of yet another chapter of the U.S. and other imperialist forces’ bloodied and merciless intervention in Arab countries. The trauma of atrocities like these echoes through Zeyn Joukhadar’s 2020 historical fiction novel “The Thirty Names of Night.” Caught amidst the terrors of wars both old and new and the intermittent joys of their everyday lives, the novel’s trans and queer characters find romance and fight injustice while navigating a densely mystical New York City.
As the novel begins, its unnamed narrator is haunted by the ghost of his Syrian-born ornithologist mother, who died in a mysterious fire. While wandering the streets of the gentrified lower West Manhattan, he adorns walls with paintings of birds and eventually discovers the diary of famed and elusive Laila Z, a Syrian-born artist who migrated to New York City during the 1930s and inexplicably vanished. From there, the story alternates between past and present, revealing uncanny similarities and unexpected connections between Laila and the contemporary narrator.
Cover, “The Thirty Names of Night” by Zeyn Joukhadar, Simon and Schuster, 2020 | Fair Use
Ornithology serves as one such connection for the characters: The narrator ponders the field notes and sketchbooks his late mother has left behind while Laila displays an early aptitude for studying and illustrating birds, despite the discouragement she receives based on her gender and socioeconomic status. Birds adorn most pages of “The Thirty Names of Night,” such as the owl who cries mournfully the night Laila’s father returns injured from fighting French colonial rule and the more than 500 birds protected at an underfunded avian sanctuary run by Aisha, a friend of the narrator’s deceased mother.
Whether harbingers of justice or symbols of hope, the birds represent the nature of the sublime in the ordinary. When the avian sanctuary loses its funding, impossible hordes of birds swarm modern-day New York City:
The birds fill the sky as though drawn to our sighing. They’ve been arriving every day from nowhere: orioles roosting on fire escapes, stray jays clinging to box air conditioners, dozens of ravens walking the shop awnings...They congregate like white blood cells to a wound, drawn to arson and eviction notices, to a pig’s head hurled at a masjid door, to the murder of a Black trans woman deadnamed in a police report.
The birds serve not only as symbols of the migration from Syria to America and the resilient nature of the characters but also as blatant and sinister reminders of the violence that marginalized people face. White supremacy is a tangible force in the world with deep historical roots, but Joukhadar employs magical realism to emphasize that violence against Black trans women and Muslims is not “normal,” despite their ongoing prevalence in New York.
A desire to “be seen” for who they truly are also unites characters across time. In the contemporary chapters, the narrator and his beloved friend Sami navigate the dangers of using public transportation among homophobic and transphobic strangers as well as the explicit and implicit rejection from their family members. Aside from familial strain, the narrator has a prolonged and difficult relationship with his body, characterized by dysphoria and the medical difficulties of an IUD.
Laila also seeks to understand her queer identity as she grapples with her family’s expectations. Her narrative begins with a description of her hidden, romantic feelings towards another young girl in her bilad, an Arabic word for “land” used to describe someone’s home casually. While Laila battles the increasingly restrictive set of rules and expectations that follow her first menstruation, her great passion for studying and illustrating birds takes flight, eventually becoming the foundation of her arts career. While she grapples with the expectation of marriage and domestic life, her brother Isaa harbors an interest in botany, which his parents see as unusual for a boy.
Laila isn’t the only queer character in the historical narrative. Her aunt, Khalto Tala, is revealed to be in love with a widow named Haddad. Laila witnesses the pair sharing moments of quiet intimacy, expressing the same tenderness for each other that they feel for the rooftop pigeons they care for. It’s wildly refreshing to read historical fiction that illuminates queer and trans history, mixing the difficulty of navigating a heteronormative culture with exultation and humor.
Joukhadar doesn’t miss the opportunity to incorporate the immigrant, working-class aspects of his characters’ lives in both timelines. In this true testimony to the political landscape of contemporary America (which both main characters call “Amrika,” following the pronunciation used in most Southwest Asian and North African countries), the unnamed narrator ponders and mourns the constant brutalization of Black and Brown people through policing and reflects on the systemic lack of healthcare that forces his grandmother to ration her medication.
Meanwhile, the struggle for labor rights remains central to the novel’s historical characters. Soon after a labor accident changes the health of the family, Laila and Khalto Tala embark on a journey that eventually leads them to the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, where they take part in a union workers’ uprising against the unjust conditions at a factory. In imaginative but unromantic terms, Joukhadar describes the demonstration, which quickly turns violent at the hands of the police. The fictionalized incident is modeled after real historical events from the area, such as the 1932 Ford Hunger March in which five people died and the notorious 1937 Battle of the Overpass, incidents that forever altered the history of labor rights in America.
Joukhadar isn’t afraid to confront the limitless pain in this world, but “The Thirty Names of Night” also offers moments of laughter and enchanting mystery. In modern day New York, the invading birds soon threaten to overwhelm their human counterparts, leading to joyful chaos. Multiple characters frequently quote the Sufi poet Attar throughout the book, looking to birds to remind themselves to "Choose everything." The story is a hopeful one, despite its author having the ability to record the violence of reality without turning away. Like the best historical fiction, it offers an excursion into a history that reveals as much about the present day as it does about the past.
Image credit: A bird taking flight by Kosovari (Internet Archive)
