A Violent Perfume: A Metatextual Review of Yasmin Zaher's The Coin
Yasmin Zaher, The Coin
Penguin Random House. $35 CAD
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The Coin arrived in my mailbox in late spring. The lilacs' sweet-rot intoxicated. The irises opened their colonial faces. Across North America, students occupied campuses in protest of the genocide in Gaza. Every day there were more deaths and injuries than could be accounted for. I tasted the words everyday: Palestine will be free. June Jordan said, and Angela Davis echoed “Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world.”
Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel follows a wealthy Palestinian woman who takes on a position as a teacher at an all-boys school in New York City. She is tastefully extravagant, chaotically in crisis, not a particularly good or moral person, and one of the most fascinating characters to emerge in contemporary fiction.
Due to its formatting, this review is best read on PDF, or on desktop.
The Coin smells dead. Like paper, not blood, though coins conjure an aromatic parallel when rubbed between sweaty fingers. This book’s perfume is violent (1). It knows how to be clean, how to fake clean, how to scrub properly, how to reach around, how to touch itself. It knows clean just as well as it knows dirty: the grit beneath the fingernail, (2) the landscaping (3) of the soul. The narrator can afford almost anything – just not to look away from filth.
As I write, another massacre is exacted. Rafah (4). Nuseirat (5). As I write, a cow in north Gaza costs more than $18k(6). $18k is a luxury. Luxury, impossible. Another Met Gala, another Superbowl, another handbag thunked on the negotiating table. What is this ugly, expensive thing? Hermès? A good ugly cowskin bag costs more than $18k (7). What is this? Dirt was my first hypothesis, that stunning first line hits harder on a reread. A sharp pang: the jewel in the tooth at the edge of a smile or the coin glinting from between vertebrae. Zaher’s prose incises.
How close commerce and health intertwine. Double ouroboros of latent white supremacist capital. The long emancipation (8), the endless fucking 19th century gestation of zionism on Palestinian land (9), zionist coins, when money was still tangible, thrown to the ground as claim (10). A woman who carries ten thousand five hundred and thirty-two dollars in her purse (11). A woman with stuck money, chronic pain, deep trauma, a resemblance without borders, a tendency for indulgence, now and again, for Chivas (12). What looks like something always looks like something else. This is the basis of writing as it is the basis of health and commerce, the snake of medicine, the snake of imperialism, don’t you see? I hadn’t clocked the difference between the rod of Asclepius and Caduceus (13), had you? No matter, if any of us had forgotten we now know: medicine is an imperial business. Alleged US special cell and Israeli army dressed up like medical aid compared to Trojan Horse (14). Empire’s revisionist history of revisionist history as headline. Me, I’m no teacher, no general (15), what power I’ve found is in stubborn refusal. I walk out into the street in my nylon Uniqlo jacket (16) without shame, an unemployed, disheveled protestor.
A trench coat (17) may have served better to keep up the illusion of wellness, last spring with all the rain, fashion, and genocide. Potential tagged in Burberry blue. Second hand dumpster dive elite of camaraderie can bring one back to life, spark a bright orange signal, ignite the live weapons of lust-crush cum partners in crime. Scam of sexuality when horny overtakes – a body is a ruin of a garden (18). What can sustain? Enclosure of nature, a secret beneath the ground, what is seen might be stolen, any history sold or eliminated. Beauty and Justice (19) were stuck behind glass until they died. Children, students of revolution, coagulate around expensive burgers, develop dapper looks for revolution. Then, they start making demands. But for the time being they were still clean (20) and I would say that they were loved, if a particular kind of preparation is love. Tender meat, unethically sourced, marked up, and sacrificed to the machine.
New York, Paris, Upstate, the West Bank, everywhere the face of Franklin looms. Bill (21) is another word for debt which is another word for property which is another word for enslavement. The structure of the institution paper thin, USD-fragile, replicated liberally, the virus that it is. What new natural order! (22) What fruit that can’t be named! (23) What lemon mouth I made at fatphobia I couldn’t square. And the CVS retreats I might have done myself a few years back when my body became hypothetical. This book has an unAmerican power. God bless this fruit that is not mine to name. Forgive me, I do not have the language for immanence. Yet, it sits on my desk, all wrapped up in a striking yellow gold sleeve with a flesh that sings toward the blue of the Cuban flag (24). I lusted after what I tasted, the musk of a good metaphor, membranous pulp, a finish that rustles the spirit. And I imagine you might like it too. That you might spend some coin to hold its gold between your palms, this bloody summer, beneath a tree, in an inevitable moment of quiet. It’s important that you understand: from the first pages, you too, are implicated.
(1) I wore a very nice perfume then, Lys Méditeranée by Edouard Fléchier, very strong and sexual… I thought there was no better feeling in this world than leaving work to walk along a Manhattan avenue, wearing a violent perfume with no one waiting for you at home. (Zaher 5); “Angelica, Lily, Musk A floral sea breeze. On a summer evening by the Mediterranean, gusts of ocean air find refuge in the salty spice of ginger lilies. Reinforcing these salty notes, and sweetening them with orange blossom, yields a radiant perfume for sun-flooded terraces and balmy nights.” (Frederic Malle)
(2) I clipped my nails, then used a thin wooden stick to clean underneath them, fishing miniature balls of wool from the sides. I pushed back my cuticles and clipped them. (Zaher 35)
(3) the magical landscape was no longer. (Zaher 218)
(4) One of the residents who arrived at the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah said the “tents were melting and the people’s bodies are also melting” after the attack. (May 27th, 2024, Al Jazeera)
(5) Israeli forces were “perfidiously hiding in an aid truck” (June 11th 2024, Al Jazeera)
(6) My brother in north Gaza wrote that "there are only six cows still alive. Each cost 1s around $18K." My brother said the last time he ate meat or chicken was on April 6. (Mosab Abu Toha, Instagram, June 15th, 2024)
(7) The Birkin is available in a rare heritage leather with unique character. Entirely vegetable-tanned natural cowhide has an exceptionally transparent finish that gains a patina and becomes even more beautiful over time. Smooth or grained, this leather in a natural shade emphasizes the Birkin’s clean lines and will appeal to connoisseurs.(Hermes, Birkin Bag)
(8) “A fundraising gala in February, in honor of our country. Those were her words, not mine, whatever they meant, because we didn’t have a country.” (Zaher, 100), “The contradictions of how we account for colonization and resistance to it are often blurred by having to use the master’s tools to seek a measure of legibility. In short, so many of the categories that flow from post-Columbus, European Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment and late Euro-American ideologies continue to be the terms on which we challenged their violent hegemony. We, the oppressed and subordinated, speak their language to resist them, and we fail at it in the process. How do we break out of that self-defeating embrace? (Walcott, Briarpatch)
(9) “Using a future or past dream to obliterate the realities lying between past and future.” (Saïd, 10)
(10) “Mawasi area, Khan Younis, and Rafah… used to be settlements between 1967-2005, so the israelis intentionally throw these coins [1 lira] to prove they have the right of the land… [they throw coins] under the buildings in the construction phase… so they prove the right of the land… this is bullshit, it’s not working because this is a 50-40 years old coin… before… we had coins, we had airports… rails… cinemas… resorts… villages… food… heritage.So yeah, this is the story of the coins under the buildings.” (Bisan Owda, Instagram)
(11) “At first, my wallet carried ten thousand five hundred and thirty-two dollars. And then, slowly, there was an inhalation and exhalation of the leather. A bill would be broken, I would have less but it would look like more.” (Zaher 53)
(12) I drank more Chivas (220) I went to the liquor store that was open late, bought four mini bottles of Chivas, and took small sips (51) I smelled like my perfume and I was burping Chivas (51) “the only thing I could do to soothe myself was drink Chivas.” (219)
(13) “Asclepius was frequently represented standing, dressed in a long cloak, with bare breast; his usual attribute was a staff with a serpent coiled around it. This staff is the only true symbol of medicine. A similar but unrelated emblem, the caduceus, with its winged staff and intertwined serpents, is frequently used as a medical emblem but is without medical relevance since it represents the magic wand of Hermes, or Mercury, the messenger of the gods and the patron of trade.” (Encyclopedia Brittanica, Asclepius)
(14) US-backed Trojan Horse (Tehran Times, June 9th, 2024)
(15) “ And teachers have power, don’t forget that… the first weeks went by and I realized that as long as the boys scored high enough on the standardized tests, I could do whatever I wanted with them. And that’s when I began to see myself as really big and important.
No, not as their savior, much more than that. Their general.” (Zaher 3-4)
(16) UTILITY SHORT BLOUSON (UNIQLO)
(17) “I shut myself in the tiny staff bathroom, spread my Burberry trench coat on the floor, lay down on it, and propped my feet on the sink.” (Zaher 15), and born again, “Trenchcoat occupied a different position in the city, I knew this when he suggested that we meet on a weekday. When you work, you belong to a certain class and its hours. You leave your apartment every day at the same time, get on the same train, stop at the same convenience store on the way home, always at the same time. I thought about that often, how there were millions of people in the city, like Trenchcoat, to whom I had no access, because we were living on different schedules.” (Zaher 63)
(18) “snaking through a terraced garden with citrus trees” (Zaher 45)
(19) “I was feeding Beauty and Justice while Jay was wiping the desks. I thought about asking Jay to feed the fish, but I was afraid that if they died he would feel responsible.” (Zaher 154)
(20) “..and I liked being around them.” (Zaher 4)
(21) “Franklin started out as a printer's apprentice and eventually became one of the most influential figures in American history. His journey from humble beginnings to extraordinary achievements often represents the American Dream, making him an ideal face for the $100 bill.” (Greenlight, Who Is On the $100 bill?)
(22) “The project was to create a new natural order.” (Zaher 211) within the new natural order, the violence of “a land without a people for a people without a land,” after the weekly zionist shouting outside heightens, the chants to “bring them home” lying about “making the desert bloom”
(23) “Herbs, citrus, nuts, those wonderful fruits whose names probably don’t exist in English.” (Zaher 193)
(24) “Basic blue. Now that I think of it, the Franklin blue was the blue of the Cuban flag. You’re right that the American flag also features the color blue, but one cannot get to the bottom of it with all those stripes and stars.” (Zaher 3-4)
Trynne Delaney is a writer currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). They are the author of the half-drowned (winner of the QWF First Book Prize) and A House Unsettled. In their spare time they like to garden. Trynne holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary.