Have you ever missed someone so much, their absence becomes a kind of presence?
I felt this way about my family last month. It was my first time celebrating Christmas alone. I ended up photographing every dish I cooked and telling my mom about every festivity I enjoyed. I had to; it felt like no tradition was complete until communicated to family.
This separation colored the entire holiday season. The feeling of absence was a visitor itself, quietly but persistently reminding me it was here.
Some absences come to us so forcefully, they demand their own names: darkness, hunger, cold. Grief.
Grief announces its presence in Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night from the novel’s first sentence:
Tonight, five years to the day since I lost you, forty-eight white-throated sparrows fall from the sky.
The “you” in that sentence is the narrator’s mother, an ornithologist-turned-activist who died in a fire while trapped in the historic building she tried to save. Much of the novel is addressed to her. Despite being five years gone, she’s as strong of a presence in the narrator’s life as ever. “You are all I think about some days,” he writes, “and yet I can’t bear to remember the way things used to be.”
In the present, the narrator undergoes a process of internal discovery. The novel depicts his experiences of body dysmorphia, his efforts to discover what a true expression of his identity looks like, and his challenge of sharing that identity with the family, friends, and community members who’ve known him as female. “It is one thing to have a body;” he tells us, “it is another thing to struggle under the menacing weight of its meaning.” He possesses no name in the novel until he chooses one for himself: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning “rare.”
As this process unfolds, he continues seeking his mother. He conjures her through words addressed to her and invocations of their common referents: birds whose names he learned from her, places in New York they visited together, memories they share. Most of all, he seeks her through efforts to find a missing — possibly nonexistent — illustration of a rare bird painted by the Syrian-American artist Laila Z. These addresses construct a realm private to Nadir and his mother; it gives him a lens to bring color and warmth to his thoughts of the world and himself.
A similar dynamic is at play in the novel’s other half: Nadir’s chapters alternate with ones set in the 1930s and 40s, which follow the immigration and coming of age of a Syrian girl named Laila — the same painter Nadir’s mother revered. Her chapters are entries in her diary. She addresses them to a beloved whose identity gradually grows clearer over the course of the novel, and this address, too, is steeped in affection, and achingly intimate:
You’re the only one I can imagine reading my secret thoughts over my shoulder. No matter that it’s too late now to tell you all this; never mind the thousand of miles of ocean between us. Here, in this notebook, I can call you back into my mind and write the words I’d never dare to say.
The novel grows from these two interweaving voices speaking to people they’ve lost, people far away from them, people they want back.
There are other, larger topics and themes that govern the story: transphobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism. But what struck me — what I most wanted to write about — was this instinct both narrators follow to address their narratives to individuals they cherish. To choose their own witnesses for their lives, and to carefully and articulately explain their experiences to loved ones they long for.
In the process, they create their own worlds: poetic worlds constructed out of affection and shared histories.
The novel echoes the Song of Songs in this way, combining longing with poetic imagination to paint the emotional landscapes these characters inhabit.
I wondered while reading The Thirty Names of Night whether I’d be able to fully enter that landscape when I’ve never known grief. I’ve missed people, certainly, especially while living abroad. But I’ve been lucky enough so far to be spared the kind of loss Nadir processes in the novel.
While I have no experience with grief, I do recognize this desire to bring a distant loved one into your present surroundings. Last April, when it became clear my family wouldn’t be able to visit me in Japan like we’d planned, I spent an afternoon going on a miles-long walk around my small town. I took a combination of familiar and unfamiliar roads, and I looked at the landscape — at the flooded rice paddies reflecting the heavens above — and tried to imagine that beauty through my family’s eyes. I’d already been living in rural Japan for nine months; much of the novelty had expired for me. But I imagined that if my family was here to witness this springtime landscape with me, there would be a sense of awe among us — and even that imagining was enough to awaken some of that awe in me, and to stir a ripple of warmth and affection both for the ones I love, and for this landscape fostering me safely till I can see them again.
Thank you for reading and spending this time with me. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend, telling me your thoughts in a comment, or subscribing to Reading Cycle.
This entry covered my second category: Diversity. You’ll hear from me again in two weeks, when I’ll be writing about Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert as the choice for my third category: What I feel I “should” read.
Take care.