The Map of Salt and Stars
by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
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Dear Jennifer, Thanks for accepting our invite for this interview. Can you tell us something more about your book “The Map of Salt and Stars”? What do you think of the feedback it has received so far?I’ve been humbled by the response to the book, which has been overwhelmingly positive. Folks have received my characters with open arms, both within my communities and outside of them. And it’s been incredible to see my writing move people to act, to get involved in doing what they can for refugees. What do you see the role of art in breaking barriers of any kind? |
Photo credit: Neha Gautam |
I think positive change comes about when we are invested in our communities and in becoming our best selves, in seeing what is possible and believing in making the possible real.
Art can make us believe again when we’ve stopped, and it can also show us the worlds that are possible if we are willing to work for them.
What made you switch your career from biomedical research scientist to writing full time?
I’ve always been a writer and had written novels and novellas for fun since childhood. After getting my PhD in Medical Sciences from Brown and doing two postdoctoral fellowships, I reached a point in my career where I knew that being in academic research science for the rest of my life wasn’t going to make me happy, so I decided to give myself a year or so to focus on my writing and figure out what I wanted to do instead. It was during that year that I wrote The Map of Salt and Stars.
How can fundamental values of humanity be preserved and advanced by science and art?
It all depends on how they’re practiced. As with anything, science and art can be practiced with respect, humanity, and love, or they can be practiced unethically, disrespectfully, violently, or appropriatively.
I think the best scientific inquiries and art are made by centering the most marginalized, because keeping those folks in the center of any discussion creates a result that is more inclusive and respectful for everyone.
When writing, do you think about the impact it will have on the others?
Absolutely. I consider the impact of my work on others in everything I do, particularly how my words will affect those who are more marginalized than I am and how I can make my writing inclusive and non-appropriative.
Art can make us believe again when we’ve stopped, and it can also show us the worlds that are possible if we are willing to work for them.
What made you switch your career from biomedical research scientist to writing full time?
I’ve always been a writer and had written novels and novellas for fun since childhood. After getting my PhD in Medical Sciences from Brown and doing two postdoctoral fellowships, I reached a point in my career where I knew that being in academic research science for the rest of my life wasn’t going to make me happy, so I decided to give myself a year or so to focus on my writing and figure out what I wanted to do instead. It was during that year that I wrote The Map of Salt and Stars.
How can fundamental values of humanity be preserved and advanced by science and art?
It all depends on how they’re practiced. As with anything, science and art can be practiced with respect, humanity, and love, or they can be practiced unethically, disrespectfully, violently, or appropriatively.
I think the best scientific inquiries and art are made by centering the most marginalized, because keeping those folks in the center of any discussion creates a result that is more inclusive and respectful for everyone.
When writing, do you think about the impact it will have on the others?
Absolutely. I consider the impact of my work on others in everything I do, particularly how my words will affect those who are more marginalized than I am and how I can make my writing inclusive and non-appropriative.
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The Earth and the Fig
The island of Manhattan’s got holes in it, and that’s where Baba sleeps. When I said good night to him, the white bundle of him sagged so heavy, the hole they dug for him so deep. And there was a hole in me too, and that’s where my voice went. It went into the earth with Baba, deep in the white bone of the earth, and now it’s gone. My words sunk down like seeds, my vowels and the red space for stories crushed under my tongue.
I think Mama lost her words too, because instead of talking, her tears watered everything in the apartment. That winter, I found salt everywhere—under the coils of the electric burners, between my shoelaces and the envelopes of bills, on the skins of pomegranates in the gold-trimmed fruit bowl. The phone rang with calls from Syria, and Mama wrestled salt from the cord, fighting to untwist the coils.
Before Baba died, we hardly ever got calls from Syria, just emails. But Mama said in an emergency, you’ve got to hear a person’s voice.
It seemed like the only voice Mama had left spoke in Arabic. Even when the neighbor ladies brought casseroles and white car- nations, Mama swallowed her words. How come people only ever
have one language for grief?
That winter was the first time I heard Abu Sayeed’s honey-yellow voice. Huda and I sat outside the kitchen and listened sometimes, Huda’s ash-brown curls crushed against the doorjamb like spooled wool. Huda couldn’t see the color of his voice like I could, but we’d both know it was Abu Sayeed calling because Mama’s voice would click into place, like every word she’d said in English was only a shadow of itself. Huda figured it out before I did—that Abu Sayeed and Baba were two knots on the same string, a thread Mama was afraid to lose the end of.
Mama told Abu Sayeed what my sisters had been whispering about for weeks—the unopened electricity bills, the maps that wouldn’t sell, the last bridge Baba built before he got sick. Abu Sayeed said he knew people at the university in Homs, that he could help Mama sell her maps. He asked, what better place to raise three girls than the land that holds their grandparents?
When Mama showed us our plane tickets to Syria, the O in my name, Nour, was a thin blot of salt. My older sisters, Huda and Zahra, pestered her about the protests in Dara’a, things we had seen on the news. But Mama told them not to be silly, that Dara’a was as far south of Homs as Baltimore was from Manhattan. And Mama would know, because she makes maps for a living. Mama was sure things would calm down, that the reforms the government had promised would allow Syria to hope and shine again. And even though I didn’t want to leave, I was excited to meet Abu Sayeed, excited to see Mama smiling again.
I had only ever seen Abu Sayeed in Baba’s Polaroids from the seventies, before Baba left Syria. Abu Sayeed had a mustache and an orange shirt then, laughing with someone out of the frame, Baba always just behind him. Baba never called Abu Sayeed his brother, but I knew that’s what he was because he was everywhere: eating iftar on Ramadan evenings, playing cards with Sitto, grinning at a café table. Baba’s family had taken him in. They had made him their own.
When spring came, the horse chestnut trees bloomed white like fat grains of rock salt under our window. We left the Manhattan apartment and the tear-encrusted pomegranates. The plane’s wheels lifted like birds’ feet, and I squinted out the window at the narrow stripe of city where I’d lived for twelve whole years and at the hollow green scooped out by Central Park. I looked for Baba. But with the city so far down, I couldn’t see the holes anymore.
Mama once said the city was a map of all the people who’d lived and died in it, and Baba said every map was really a story. That’s how Baba was. People paid him to design bridges, but he told his stories for free. When Mama painted a map and a compass rose, Baba pointed out invisible sea monsters in the margins.
The winter before Baba went into the earth, he never missed a bedtime story. Some of them were short, like the one about the fig tree that grew in Baba’s backyard when he was a little boy in Syria, and some of them were epics so twisting and incredible that I had to wait night after night to hear more. Baba made my favorite one, the story of the mapmaker’s apprentice, last two whole months. Mama listened at the door, getting Baba a glass of water when he got hoarse. When he lost his voice, I told the ending. Then the story was ours.
Mama used to say stories were how Baba made sense of things. He had to untangle the world’s knots, she said. Now, thirty thousand feet above him, I am trying to untangle the knot he left in me. He said one day I’d tell our story back to him. But my words are wild country, and I don’t have a map.
I press my face to the plane window. On the island under us, Manhattan’s holes look like lace. I look for the one where Baba is sleeping and try to remember how the story starts. My words tumble through the glass, falling to the earth.
Credit: Excerpted from The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. Reprinted by permission of Touchstone, and imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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You have received very good reviews from The New York Times, Bustle, The Seattle Times and more. What has been your reaction to these reviews?
It’s satisfying and humbling to have your work positively reviewed, and it makes me very happy that my work is reaching a wide audience. It gives me hope that The Map of Salt and Stars is raising awareness about the situation of refugees and the impacts of legislation like the Muslim Ban, and it also gives me hope that my book will reach folks who will see themselves in my characters and be reminded that their voices and their stories matter, and that they, too, can be the heroes of their own stories.
Syria and NYC are both part of your identity. What are some essential characteristics from both of these worlds that are special and your own?
The most important thing to me about the places I come from are the people. That’s how I define home—not in terms of countries or cities or passports, but in people. I come from the people who love me.
You write novels & poetry. Do you know from the beginning of a project if it will be one or the other and have you ever changed the format along the way?
I think this applies more to novels vs short stories, as poetry is a much smaller canvas. With any story, I start by tinkering with it without deciding whether it will be a short story or a novel, and if it feels like it needs more space, then I give it as much space as it needs to develop fully. The biggest difference between a novel and a short story is that certain stories are just bigger than others, and need more room to be fully explored.
What makes your heart tick nowadays?
Lately, particularly as I work on my second novel, I’ve just been enjoying being in community with other queer and trans folks of color, celebrating the fact that we continue to survive in a world that would prefer that we not.
What is the wisest thing you’ve heard recently?
That being a survivor of trauma means that one survived, whether as an individual or as an oppressed community, and that it’s important that we as a society consider alternatives to predominantly pathologizing narratives around trauma and recognize the wisdom and resilience that might also be found in surviving.