The Map of Salt and Stars

“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.” 

Nour’s mother, a mapmaker, plots a de-facto map of salt from her tears over her deceased husband. While her mind cannot find the words to express her grief, her private tears trace random paths over various household objects. The abundance of salt paths, and the fact that Nour’s mother struggles to answer the phone, demonstrates how grief cuts her off from others and that she must fight against that tendency. The telephone call from Syria so early in the novel also shows the country’s prominence as a touchstone in the narrative.

“But the earth and the fig don’t know the story like I do, so I tell it again. I start the way Baba always did: ‘Everybody knows the story of Rawiya,’ I whisper. ‘They just don’t know they know it.’ And then the words come back like they had never left, like it had been me telling the story all along.”

Nour feels that repeating Rawiya’s story in the same manner as her father is essential to keeping both his memory and the story alive. By telling the story to the fig and the earth of their new house in Syria, she believes she is rooting both her father and his story in her land of origin. Despite Nour’s efforts of faithful replication, the story’s opening words suggest that everyone knows the story instinctively and that the manner of its telling is irrelevant.