Queerness, Art & Ornithology | The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

Title: The Thirty Names of Night
Author: Zeyn Joukhadar
Published: November 24, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 304
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.

One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.

As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.

The Thirty Names of Night is a story about family, about identity, about finding one’s place in a world bent on annihilation. It’s a ghost story; and it’s a love story. It’s a story about birds and about art. It’s about honoring the past but breaking free from the belief that history must define us.  In this novel, Zeyn Joukhadar writes about many things that may seem unconnected, but time shows that each aspect of this book is a thread that the author slowly weaves together to form a cohesive whole. The Thirty Names of Night is a book about people—specifically, it’s about one person: a grieving Syrian-American taking steps to acknowledge that he is, indeed, a man.

I have repeatedly gone on record to say that I dislike split timeline narratives. This is largely because one of the two plotlines is usually much, much stronger than the other, while the second plotline serves as a flimsy framing device that doesn’t stand up on its own merit. The Thirty Names of Night is the exception that proves the rule—this is a split narrative novel where both the “present” and the “past” carry equal weight, and where the inevitable merging of the two is intensely cathartic. If I could trust all authors to write with the same grace and precision as Joukhadar, I would be willing to read a lot more of the books that I summarily discount as soon as I see the dual timeline concept.

The framing device here is a familiar one, but it’s executed to perfection. While visiting a soon to be demolished tenement in former Little Syria, the present-day narrator discovers a diary belonging to Laila Z., his mother’s favorite artist. At first, the only thing that connects the two narratives is the narrator’s dead mother, an ornithologist who believed that Laila created an aquatint of an undiscovered species of bird and who dedicated her time to preventing the condemnation of the tenement in which Laila used to live. But slowly, slowly, Joukhadar reveals the criss-crossing connections between the diary and the present day, until the two timelines become one.

There are several things I love about this book. I love the prose; I love the way that even though bird motifs are present on every single page, they never feel heavy-handed; I love the way the author does not “explain” a nonwhite culture and instead assumes that unfamiliar words and phrases can be Googled.

Particularly, though, I love this book’s depiction of transness. Among all the other things happening in the story, this is still very much a traditional coming out tale, and the depiction of the narrator’s thought processes, dysphoria, and eventual claiming of his identity is so tender and beautiful. At all times, the narrator is supported by a newly-found queer family, and also by his not-so-traditional Syrian grandmother (who has a surprise of her own). I loved the way the text shows the many faces of bigotry, but in a way that wasn’t catastrophic or suffocating. I loved even the seemingly inconsequential fact that Joukhadar never deadnames his protagonist, even though for roughly two-thirds of the text, the narrator presents as female and is very much “in the closet.” The Thirty Names of Night is the well-considered, hopeful book on transness that sometimes seems so impossible to find.

With beautiful prose, penetrating characterization, and a thoroughly satisfying story, The Thirty Names of Night is excellent. This is one of those books where you can feel the time and attention spent on polishing the text into its final form, where you know that the author has given the very best of his talents and has been rewarded for his efforts. This book is so, so beautiful, and so alive.