Zeyn Joukhadar Books & Quotes

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“You used to sit like this and tell me stories about my great-great-grandmother, the one who killed scorpions with her bare heels and slit the throats of the goats on Eid. You and Teta Badra before you and Teta's mother before her—my great-grandmother Wafaa, daughter of the scorpion-killer—you were the bearers of bravery in our family. You were the one who fought to save the neighborhood I'm now sneaking into to paint each night. But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving.”

Women Family Strength Bravery Heritage

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“There was a confidence in everything you did that I never learned to emulate, a belief in everything you loved, as though victory was secured, as though it wasn't a fool's errand to believe in justice.”

Strength Bravery

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I've become just like the white boys at middle-school dances: the boys by the wall, earthbound boys, wing-severed boys with stiff bodies. There is nothing behind the door in my chest that should uncage the kind of feminine softness I should have, the kind you told me would settle into my chest and my hips. It never did.”

Boys Female Gender Girls Gender Roles Male Bodies

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“It's not that Teta doesn't think about money—that's a privilege our family will never know—but to discuss her anxieties with me would be 'ayb. It would be a mark of shame; she'd feel like she'd failed me. The children and grandchildren of "real Americans," the ones who made it, shouldn't need to fear poverty. But Teta has found walls in this country that she never could have imagined.”

Poverty Immigration Parents

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“She'd never forgotten war and hunger, never forgotten hoarding medicine for her own sick mother during the French bombardment of Damascus in the late spring of '45, and I've had to accept that sometimes to feel secure is its own medicine.”

Poverty Safety Trauma

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“But nobody ever says it. Does it make it easier to live with loss if you don't name it? Or is that something you do as a mercy for other people?”

Loss Grief Silence Sadness

Book:The Map of Salt and Stars

Source: The Map of Salt and Stars

“If you put on a dress once in a while, habibti, you will see the boys come running, eh?" Teta gets up from her chair and bends to tug off my hair tie. She uses her hands to let my long hair roll down over my back, then thumbs my chin to make me smile. "You are a beautiful girl. You never let us see." I catch your eye, standing close by her side. And I do smile back, that false smile that I am supposed to make because now, as then, there is no room for me on this rooftop, and neither Teta nor Reem know the difference, because I have not smiled a real smile since the day the crows came to mourn their dead, and even my family no longer remembers the smile I lost.”

Sadness Trans Smiles Transmasc

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“Facing myself in the mirror is like that. If I never cut my hair, if I don't acknowledge that I've never allowed anyone to really know me, I can pretend that a perfect road awaits me. I can pretend there's some medicine that will magically allow me to see myself. But going down that road might mean discovering that there is no magic strong enough to bring me into harmony. Breaking the illusion means acknowledging the parts of myself that will never be visible.”

Fear Shame Gender Boundaries Self Acceptance Walls Trans Bodies

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I've been afraid of the knot of shame that was tied in my belly then: the shame of earnest belief. Don't let them see the thing you love, I wanted to shout at you, but it was too late. I wanted to cover your mouth. I'd already learned from my father and my bullies that believing in something, for people like you and me, was a punishable crime.”

Fear Shame Bullying

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I catch myself remembering that he carves each moment of joy from the jaws of a world that seeks, every day, to devour him. Sometimes I remember this is true of both of us, and then to believe in anything, let alone joy, seems like a lonely tightrope walk.”

Pain Joy Hope

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“You knew my mother as a wise woman, the kind of woman who would listen to anyone with a problem, who always had coffee in the house to serve a grieving family who had lost a loved one in the night and enough flour and ghee to make a tray of bitlawah for the celebration of a birth. She was the keeper of life and death. Her face, creased by years and by the sun, was the first thing most people had ever seen—and the last. [...] For as long as I have been her daughter, my mother has been the loneliest woman I have ever known.”

Kindness Loneliness Therapist Friend

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I miss home with an angry hunger, even though home is an imaginary place now.”

Home Loss Grief

Book:The Map of Salt and Stars

Source: The Map of Salt and Stars

“This was a back that had carried the pain of others until it had become impossible for her bones to unbend themselves, like certain saplings will become permanently twisted under the force of windstorms. I thought of Hawa, whether it was this slow bending she had tried to escape with her linen wings, and whether there was any mercy in the world for those who decline to carry the burdens they are assigned to carry. My mother's back and mine were made from the same mold. Our spines were fashioned for bearing and bending and bowing and burying. Our backs had been honed over generations for the thankless labor of woman. They had never been made for wings.”

Pain Suffering Grief Family Generational Trauma

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“Growing up, those of us who had to put a hyphen before "American" got scoffed at for sending money home to cousins in the old country or supporting aging parents here on green cards. But you used to shake your head and tell me how, back home, nobody put their parents into nursing homes or let their kin go hungry. The same thing lives on among Sami's queer and trans friends of color, he tells me, crowdfunding for medical care and housing online, or in the group chats he tells me about where friends help one another escape abusive relationship or housing crises with safety planning and couches to sleep on. We take care of one another because no one else will, eh says. But every time is a gamble.”

Care Support Immigrants Healthcare

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“You turn your head and smile at me. I smile back in the tired way the living have of appeasing the dead. How are you supposed to smile at a ghost without feeling lonely?”

Death Loss Grief Loneliness Ghosts

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“Even now, I sometimes run over in my mind all the men who catcall me the moment I step out my door, the men who corner me on subway platforms, the man who reached under my dress at a parade once and slipped his finger beneath my underwear. I think of my father complaining to my mother that the dishes weren't washed, or of the time they fought over something stupid and he called her a camel to shut her up. I grew up with dozens of boys who would one day become the same kind of man. Sometimes the world is one long chain of men from whose anger there is no protection, an obstacle course I run to stay safe.”

Men Violence Abuse Violence Against Women Toxic Masculinity Male Violence

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“We face each other, two candles flickering. Sami's sweat smells of chamomile and musk. When we dance, I am a bird shaking loose the night from its wings. I kiss him, my hand behind his jaw, his hands in my hair. He gasps into my mouth and goes soft as water, our bodies molten glass that I am shaping with my kiss, and I wonder if it's true that there is nothing on this earth that is not born of the sweet ache of flame.”

Love Kissing Ache

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I smile back in the tired way the living have of appeasing the dead. How are you supposed to smile at a ghost without feeling lonely?”

Death Lonely Mourning

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“Before you died, I learned about death from Jiddo, whom I was never close with but whose death taught me that someday even our family will be gone. After that I held each of your hugs just a second longer, even when I would have rather been doing something else, because someday you'll be gone and I would wish I could go back to those moments. But now you are gone, and your absence hurts too much for me to think about those hugs, those games, those afternoons watering your plants. It's been five years, and time hasn't healed any wounds. You are all I think about some days, and yet I can't bear to remember the way things used to be.”

Death Loss Grief Family

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I bow my head under her hands. "I couldn't do it anymore, Teat." "My storm of storms." She tips the top of my head toward her and kisses it. "You never had to try.”

Love Acceptance

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“No boy has ever moved me the way you did that afternoon on the corniche. This is not how I am supposed to feel. The lack of you hurts. You are the knife with which I cut myself.”

Love Loss Grief Longing Yearning

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“It seemed like the only voice Mama had left spoke in Arabic. Even when the neighbor ladies brought casseroles and white carnations, Mama swallowed her words. How come people only ever have one language for grief?”

Grief

Book:The Map of Salt and Stars

Source: The Map of Salt and Stars

“I wonder if almost can cost you as much as did, if the real wound is the moment you understand you can do nothing.”

Loss Grief

Book:The Map of Salt and Stars

Source: The Map of Salt and Stars

“This is what you have faith in?" Ilyas turned to me in the dark. "I have faith in things that are beautiful and good," he said, "and don't tell other people what they need to do to be loved.”

Beautiful Faith Beauty Good

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“We stretch our bodies without letting go of each other's hands; we exorcise our grief. We twine and bend while the owls look on. I am reflected in Sami's eyes. I am not a girl in that moment, or a boy, but a person-shaped beam of light, and we see each other as we are, as energy that has willed itself into these bodies because the desire to dance is the first kind of longing.”

Longing Gender Trans Bodies

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“Maybe she was right to burn my things, little wing. I love you once, and I love you still, but not all migrations end with a return home. Even memory begins to cut if you hold on to it too tight. I don't know anymore if I believe in angels and signs. Perhaps we are the miraculous creatures my mother was looking for.”

Grief Letting Go Memory Miracles

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I feel the same thing I felt in the club in Bushwick: that sense not of shedding my body, as I almost did on the basketball court, but of growing into it the way a vine unfurls itself to inhabit a broken fence. I rub the soft, body places on the back of my skull. The remnants of moonflower leaves are laced into the black rings of hair on the floor. I have been the ghost of myself, but this has never been about waiting to be raptured out of my own body. If I am a fox-hearted boy, then so be it. Call me king of the foxes, king of untamable, unreadable things.”

Pride Gender Self Acceptance Trans Transmasc Gender Euphoria

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“One at a time, each of the crow left the circle and hopped into the surrounding thicket, emerging with a small twig or a piece of dried grass. One by one, they placed their offering on top of the body, hiding the twisted wings and the open beak that lay glinting like an obsidian shard in the low sun. More and more crows began to arrive, each bringing, something to lay on the corpse, until the clearing was a sea of glossy backs. You'd told me once that crows mourn their dead. You'd never told me how. Each bird laid their gift atop the dead crow and flew off. I did not yet know that, sometimes, it is impossible to mourn in the presence of others. When all the crows had left their offerings, the crowd dissolved into the twilight.”

Mourning Birds Crows Rituals

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“For every poet knows that the sea herself has never loved, beloved, and she is thick with our tears. Only the desert knows what love is. Only the desert opens herself when the rains come, breathing in our pain, breathing out acacia and tamarisk and flowers. Only the wadi knows what it is to hold its breath. Only the wadi knows what it is to cry for joy, saying, yes, there was death here and will be death again one day, and between the two are laughter and the rhythmic breathing in of generations.”

Love Life Death Generations Sea Laughter Desert

Book:The Map of Salt and Stars

Source: The Map of Salt and Stars

“In one corner of the room are an array of small prints of the birds with gold foil laid painstakingly into individual feathers. This is not a room; it is a menagerie, and standing in the midst of it, I am one of its birds. Beside me at the door, Qamar is weeping, and I am trembling like a person in snow. One day, someone will try to explain us as they once tried to explain this, and they will not have the words.”

Identity Difference Inexplicable

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“He is testing his body in the wind, feeling the weight and breadth of it. My heart is a new bird throwing itself against the space he is taking up. There are no long-legged white girls around us, no pale, over-cologned boys snicker-flirting with the bartender. Instead, all around us, there are brown and Black bodies marked with glow paint and tattoos. There are micro-minis and leather short-shorts and calf-length dresses in pleated faux silk atop unshaven legs. There are bodies with breasts, with thights, with scars, with canes; wearing high heels, wearing high tops; large bodies, small bodies, bodies that twirl and shake and fill the room. This is not dancing, but a becoming of winged creatures.”

Black Transformation Dancing Brown Bodies

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I still believed I could will my body to become what my mind knew it should be: free and strong as a coil of brass wire. My chest and belly felt swollen and full, and every movement reminded me of how wrong I felt. I moved slower. A chasm had opened between me and my skin, as though I were fumbling around in a too-big pair of gloves. The only words I had back then were for what I knew I wasn't—a girl. But how to explain this feeling that my body was a tracing of something else, and not all the lines matched up?”

Gender Trans Dysphoria Transmasc

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“When I was a kid, I never wanted to leave the pool. I used to throw tantrums at the end of open swim. I told you it was because I loved swimming, because I wanted to feel like a dolphin, because I wanted to pretend for another five minutes to be a mermaid. Looking back, it wasn't that I wanted my body to feel magical; I wanted it to feel transparent.”

Dysphoria

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“If I am in a state of becoming, it has no endpoint. I imagine replacing the memories of everyone I've ever spoken to with the impression that they have only ever seen me as a being clothed in light. In the early part of the twentieth century, homophobes and eugenicists joined forces to study what they called inversion, an early term for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and transness. They believed they could read and police queerness on the body. Maybe this is why I don't want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless.”

Gender Divinity Trans Transmasc Trans Bodies

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“There is nothing behind the door in my chest that should uncage the kind of feminine softness I should have, the kind you told me would settle into my chest and my hips. It never did.”

Trans Transmasc Trans Bodies

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“Girl. Who are you hiding from?" Sami means well. He means to include me in that sisterhood of femmes, a sacred circle to which Reem belongs. But it's a place I've never been at home. "Please don't call me that.”

Gender Femininity Trans Transmasc

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“We are seated across from a couple of pregnant women and their partners, who glance at us over their magazines. I can imagine that we make a strange pair, but it's the way they glare at me that makes me pause, as though I'm rude for appearing this way, with my square jaw and unreadable face, in a space where they had expected someone legible.”

Gender Masculinity Femininity Trans Transmasc

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I've tried to block out the awkward years of my puberty, but we've played this same what-if game before, you and me—what if it's just a matter of finding the right haircut, the right outfit, the right boyfriend, the right femininity. Maybe you were right in some way; you never gave in to expectations of what a woman should be.”

Femininity Trans Transmasc

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“My body came with borders. I've lost count of the times I wished I could share in sisterhood, could lay my head on an auntie's lap and know we bore the same weight. But I've borne a different burden, and I've borne it so long that, as I turn the barrette over in my hand, I don't yet have the heart to tell Aisha that I have tried all the ways I can think of to make myself fit in.”

Gender Femininity Trans Transmasc

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“I have been taught all my life that masculinity means short hair and square-toed shoes, taking up space, raising one's voice. To be soft is to be less of a man. To be gentle, to laugh, to create art, to bleed between the legs—I have been taught all my life that these things make me a woman. I have been taught all my life that to dance is to be vulnerable, and that the world will crush the vulnerable. I was taught to equate invincibility with being worthy of love. But here in the darkness of this abandoned subway platform, I can almost imagine a world big enough for boys like Sami and me to love each other, to dance and let the pain out of our bodies, to breathe and make love and be enough and be enough and be enough.”

Love Gender Masculinity Trans Transmasc

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving. If the Lenape were forced from their ancestral home on the island of Mannahatta, the eviction of Little Syria's impoverished immigrants is no surprise, and it's hard for me to imagine that things will ever be any different.”

New York Immigrants Colonization Displacement Natives

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

“Mr. Harris kept glancing up and down Omar’s body, lingering around his chest and his groin. At first, Omar pretended not to notice. It was a compulsive kind of looking, one that cis people indulged in when they believed they could do it without being seen, though it was so common to catch them looking that their lack of shame was obvious.”

Lgbt Transgender Trans Lgbtqia Lgbt Quotes Kink Cis The Voyeurs

Book:Kink: Stories

Source: Kink: Stories

“I opted not to go to Beirut. I refused to admit it, but Damascus was the last place I wanted to go. It was as though as long as I didn't go back, I could pretend that you would be there waiting for me, having a coffee on my auntie's patio and bouncing her baby on your knee. Going back to Damascus meant facing your absence, dispelling the illusion. Facing myself in the mirror is like that. If I never cut my hair if I don't acknowledge that I've never allowed anyone to really know me, I can pretend that a perfect road awaits me. I can pretend their some medicine that will magically allow me to see myself. But going down that road might mean discovering that there is no magic strong enough to bring me into harmony. Breaking the illusion means acknowledging the parts of myself that will never be visible.”

Peace Self Love Illusion Harmony Self Knowledge

Book:The Thirty Names of Night

Source: The Thirty Names of Night

Zeyn Joukhadar Books

The Thirty Names of Night

The Map of Salt and Stars

Kink: Stories

Related Quotes