Yasmin Zaher's Debut Novel 'The Coin'
The protagonist in Yasmin Zaher's debut novel, The Coin, is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods often cross boundaries. The book follows the protagonist's intense unravelling, and her desire to regain control of her life. Zaher joins us in studio to discuss the book, which is out today.
Alison has selected The Coin for our Summer Reading Challenge in the category "a book by a debut novelist. Clickhere to join our Summer Reading Challenge!
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[00:00:09] Alison Stewart: This is All of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In Yasmin Zaher's debut novel, The Coin, we don't know the narrator's name, but we do know that she obsesses over hygiene and cleanliness. She wears gloves when riding the subway. She hems her pants so it doesn't brush against the pavement. When she returns home, she's meticulous about scrubbing her body with soap over and over again. She wears exclusive designer clothing, using her inheritance. She does work as a teacher at an all boys middle school serving mostly underprivileged students and offers them a strange version of lessons. One day, the protagonist befriends a man that lures her into a scheme to sell luxury bags using false identities. As the story progresses, we witness her try her best to gain control over her body, her mind, her relationships, and failing beautifully. The Coin is Yasmir Zaher's debut novel. It's out today. Vulture, Marie Claire, and Time listed as one of the most anticipated books of the summer. And I included The Coin as my pick for an All of It's summer reading challenge as part of my book by a debut novelist. We have a debut novelist in the studio, Zaher. Nice to meet you so, Yasmine.
[00:01:23] Yasmin Zaher: Hi.
[00:01:23] Alison Stewart: Hi.
[00:01:23] Yasmin Zaher: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:24] Alison Stewart: Of course. You have a background in biomedical engineering. Is that right?
[00:01:28] Yasmin Zaher: Yes, I do.
[00:01:29] Alison Stewart: So what was the big turning point that made you pivot to writing?
[00:01:32] Yasmin Zaher: I think the engineering was the pivot point. Actually, I've always wanted to be a writer. As soon as I learned how to read, I also started to write. I was copying children's books into my notebooks. I think in my twenties I was a closeted fiction writer. I was a little bit too afraid to take it to the next level, but eventually, I did. This is my big day, I guess.
[00:01:58] Alison Stewart: You also worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist. What did journalism teach you about writing fiction?
[00:02:09] Yasmin Zaher: They're very, very different. Journalism, it's a different version of the truth that you tell in journalism. You tell the facts. You stay true to what is true for everyone, but in fiction, you really say your own truth. And to me, that is a much more interesting and attractive endeavor. Yes, I'm more interested in subjective truths, I suppose, than factual ones.
[00:02:40] Alison Stewart: The narrator, whose name we don't know, why did you decide to have a nameless protagonist?
[00:02:46] Yasmin Zaher: Honestly, no name sounded right to me. I tried so many names, and I couldn't find anything that sounded natural. Although, usually when I'm writing, coming up with a name is something that is very easy for me, like Trench Coat came to me immediately. There's a character called Curls, came to me immediately. Sasha, the name just rolled off my fingers, but for the narrator, I couldn't find anything that sounded right. So I decided to keep her unnamed, and I think it's okay.
[00:03:19] Alison Stewart: Yes, what were you able to do creatively by keeping her unnamed?
[00:03:25] Yasmin Zaher: I guess she stayed more undefined and more borderless and boundaryless. A name is such a defining thing. I know because Yasmin is a very strong and defining name that I love. But I think by not giving her a name, I was able to keep her more raw, in a way.
[00:03:49] Alison Stewart: Your character is obsessed with cleanliness, with hygiene. We're going to actually ask you to read a passage so people can understand what her cleanliness looks like. This is a passage from The Coin. My guest is Yasmin Zaher.
[00:04:10] Yasmin Zaher: It's strange where we start stories. I might as well have started from my birth if I was going to be proper and methodical. But the dirt is not a metaphor. I really saw it in my ear canals, inside my nose, around my ankles. Do I disgust you? I don't look dirty, do I? One day, I began to notice that my body was dirtier than usual. It was a pleasant day in late September, and I went for a long walk after Franklin, wandering down some streets that were neither numbered nor lettered. I wasn't afraid of being lost. There was always a cab around the corner, and when I felt that I'd had enough, the sun was setting. I raised my hand in the air, and a taxi took me home.
I entered my apartment and decided to take a shower. I did this naturally and with no intentions. I was only doing what felt good. Before I got in the water, I remembered that I had a Turkish hammam loofah in my suitcase. I brought it out, stepped into the shower, slipped my hand inside the loofah, and began scrubbing. The bathroom was small, the bathtub short. First, my right hand scrubbed my left arm. It burned. The water was hot, my heart began to race, and it gave me the energy to continue. As I said, it was a pleasant day, and perhaps in my boredom, I had found a way to make it exciting.
I closed my eyes and rubbed as hard and as fast as I could until my muscles began to stiffen, which wasn't long. I'd be exaggerating if I said it took more than 30 seconds. As you can see, I'm a small woman. I wait for others to open doors for me. And when I opened my eyes, I saw the miniature grey snakes. They fell to my feet, three or four of them. I looked at them, and immediately I knew. I mean, I had seen them before, but not like this. A hard-faced woman had once scrubbed me in a Turkish hammam, and I saw them there, too, wiggling in the splash on marble. But the snakes of New York were scary and ghoulish, like my own voice in the mouth of a total stranger.
I took the dirt to heart. I knew that the snakes were not just a material fact, but that they were a sign of something very bad, something terrifying that was happening to my body. The loofah was a harmless-looking thing that, in reality, was wicked and rough. I continued. I scrubbed my entire body. I peeled off the dead skin. I told myself that this was a death that I could manage if only I worked hard enough, if I stayed clean and organized. But I had no stamina and when I switched left to right, I did not see any snakes. My left side is not as strong. And you will see, as I proceed, that this is a condition of asymmetry. The left is cleaner, but it is weak. The right is strong and covered in filth.
[00:06:59] Alison Stewart: My guest is Yasmin Zaher. She's reading from her debut novel, The Coin, which is out today. What does this fixation do for her, this fixation on cleanliness?
[00:07:12] Yasmin Zaher: Cleanliness, what I understood from writing this book is that cleanliness is one of those things that you could fight your whole life and you will never win. It's an endless battle because dirt is a very, very natural thing. And when I finished the book and I was in the process of editing it and I was trying to understand what I had written and what its true meaning was, I understood that she's trying to find control and cleanliness is a way to assert control on our bodies, on our homes, on our families, on the streets, on the outside world. That is a losing battle, in a way, because you cannot control the world and its events and its chaos.
[00:07:56] Alison Stewart: Another character in the book is Trench Coat. You said the name came to you quite easily. He wears an expensive trench coat, hence the name. What does the character see in Trench Coat, and what does he see in her?
[00:08:11] Yasmin Zaher: In a way, they're opposites of each other. Trench Coat, he has no home. He is poor, but he wears these expensive clothes, and he hangs around the expensive neighborhoods, believing that, in a way, class is a performance. That if you can pretend to be rich, you will eventually become rich because he thinks that that's how wealth works. The narrator is born wealthy and is spending her time with these boys who come from underprivileged backgrounds. They have just very different understandings to class and performance and what clothing can get you in the world.
[00:09:02] Alison Stewart: They come together and they get-- I'm not giving anything away- they get in this reselling of Birkin bags. She already has a Birkin.
[00:09:13] Yasmin Zaher: Right, which she inherited from her mother.
[00:09:16] Alison Stewart: Right. So what does a Birkin mean to her before she gets into the swindling?
[00:09:19] Yasmin Zaher: She says that before she had come to New York-- because the character has just moved to New York from Palestine- and she says that the Birkin had never meant a thing to her. It was just the bag that her mother carried. Suddenly, she comes to New York and she understands that a bag can have power. A bag can open doors for you. A bag can make women turn their head and look at you in a way that she had never experienced before.
[00:09:50] Alison Stewart: They begin this swindling operation with Hermes in Paris. What motivates her to start swindling? She could have said no.
[00:10:01] Yasmin Zaher: I think she's unsure of her life, of where she's going with it, of what she believes. She's willing to suspend her own ideology for a while and try to go the Trench Coat way. The Trench Coat way is to basically fake it till you make it. So I think she's interested in going into the Hermes stores, pretending to be this very old-money, classy woman from the old world, and testing her status in these stores.
[00:10:42] Alison Stewart: Have you ever been in an Hermes store?
[00:10:43] Yasmin Zaher: I did. I did the research, of course.
[00:10:46] Alison Stewart: It's amazing. It's amazing the way they will treat you depending on how they view you.
[00:10:50] Yasmin Zaher: Exactly and that is the absurdity of it. I think that is also the critique that is in the book. There's a critique of fashion and of the elites and of classism. I went to these Hermes stores. I joined these schemes in a way.
[00:11:07] Alison Stewart: Oh, did you?
[00:11:07] Yasmin Zaher: I did, and I had tried many, many times, and I never succeeded.
[00:11:13] Alison Stewart: My guest is Yasmine Zaher. The name of the book is The Coin, it's her debut novel. It is out today. She does teach.
[00:11:21] Yasmin Zaher: Is teach question mark?
[00:11:24] Alison Stewart: Her lessons are unorthodox. We use that. Does she care about her job? Is she motivated about the job, of being a teacher?
[00:11:36] Yasmin Zaher: Ye, she cares a lot about her students. So much so that instead of following the syllabus, she makes up her own unorthodox syllabus where she teaches them some more revolutionary material. She teaches them how to dress well as young men because that is one way to counter racism. She cares a lot about them, but she cares, in a way, so much, and she's so unhinged that she does end up hurting them at the end.
[00:12:10] Alison Stewart: It becomes clear she's having some sort of mental crisis. How did you want us to take on feeling about her? How would you want us to feel about her as she slowly, slowly descends towards the end?
[00:12:29] Yasmin Zaher: I think she's not a very likeable character. That's what I get from a lot of people.
[00:12:36] Alison Stewart: I don't know if I'd say likable, but she's complex.
[00:12:39] Yasmin Zaher: Yes, I think she has redeeming parts. I think when we see her love for her students, her very obnoxious elitism, and sometimes also racism, becomes more palatable. But, yes, she's a complex character and I think that's part of what I intended to do, is to paint someone who's very in the gray zone, who is not exactly black and white. To me, it was interesting to challenge myself on some of the moral boundaries of the character.
[00:13:14] Alison Stewart: Your book is my choice for my read a book by a debut novelist for our summer reading challenge.
[00:13:19] Yasmin Zaher:Thank you.
[00:13:20] Alison Stewart:We asked you to share some of your reading challenges, and the one you picked for a classic you've been meaning to read is The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Why did you choose that?
[00:13:32] Yasmin Zaher: Well, it's a feminist classic, really. I had started reading it when I was a teenager and I never finished it. It's been many years, but I think I stopped somewhere where she describes the life of a woman and she's in her teenage phase. I would like to continue and read her analysis for what it's like to be a woman in your 30s and your 40s and then later in life. Yes, I live in Paris now, so I feel like it's also a necessary reading.
[00:14:04] Alison Stewart: Oh, my gosh. Yes, I think they purge your passport unless you have read it or not.
[00:14:09] Yasmin Zaher: Exactly.
[00:14:10] Alison Stewart: Well, now you have two choices to add to your reading list. You can read The Coin. It's a debut novel by Yasmin Zaher. It is her debut. It's out today. Thank you very much for joining us.
[00:14:21] Yasmin Zaher: Thank you.
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