Book Review - The Coin
The winner of this year’s Dylan Thomas prize, The Coin, by the Paris-based Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher, follows the unravelling of a wealthy Palestinian woman over eight months in New York City. After leaving her homeland, Zaher’s unnamed narrator struggles to settle in a country marked by wealth and privilege. The young woman teaches at a school for boys from disadvantaged backgrounds, most of whom are Black or immigrants. She doesn’t need to work; her brother, who manages their late parents’ estate, provides her with a regular monthly allowance. Her parents died when she was a child and on the day of their death, she accidentally swallowed a shekel. She is convinced that the coin remains trapped inside her, and it becomes a powerful motif for buried trauma.
The narrator is fastidious about personal hygiene: “The women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little they could control in their lives”. She finds America dirty, and her fixation on cleanliness reflects her need to impose order on a world that feels increasingly inhospitable. As her dislocation intensifies, so does her erratic behaviour at school – she splurges on burgers for the entire class, assigns unconventional writing exercises and teaches her pupils that “a six can easily become a ten with the right manners and clothing”.
The obsession with high fashion continues at home. She notices that the Hermès Birkin bag she inherited from her mother turns heads: “I came from a place where a bag could never have power, where only violence spoke. And suddenly I had something that others wanted”. She becomes involved in the fraudulent buying and reselling of Birkin bags and reflects on the irony of wealthy Americans spending thousands of dollars on sweatshop hoodies because “the rich want to look poor”.
The narrator’s growing alienation strips away any desire for glamour, while her twin preoccupations – status and cleanliness – heighten her sense of otherness: “I had never been so aware of the color of my skin as I was in New York”. She wearies of keeping up appearances: “I was tired of shaving, I was tired of cleaning, I was tired of sanity”.