The unnamed narrator of The Coin, Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, is afflicted by filth. Filth is an environmental hazard of city life, evident in the “dead rats, diapers, toothpicks, and drug baggies” strewn on the sidewalk. In the spectacle of filth, what most unnerves her is poverty, as poverty begets filth, and filth besmirches character. Cleanliness, then, becomes a moral imperative for the narrator—the daughter of wealthy Palestinian parents—who protects her purity through obsessive rituals like exfoliating her entire body with a Turkish loofah (which she dubs “the CVS Retreat”) and covering her back with Cattier toothpaste. “You will see that I’m a moral woman,” she says, “that all I want is to be clean.” Her affliction reaches an unbearable apex in New York, where she recently immigrated from Jerusalem. There, she feels her body “beginning to rot.” This disorientation is a symptom of a family curse, which is traced back to a small silver shekel that she swallowed as a child. She is convinced the coin is embedded in her back, in a spot that’s impossible to clean. The shekel, an unsubtle metaphor for intergenerational wealth and trauma, belies her Janus-faced fate in the US: “America was both the key and the curse,” she says. And again, later: “In my family, the curse was also the key.” But the narrator, unlike most body-horror victims, is not besieged by an existential fear of her accursed flesh. She is, on the contrary, calm and methodical about her ritual. Eventually, she even tries to “create a new natural order” in her apartment, hoarding dirt and plants to simulate a wilderness that she can control.
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