The Map of Salt and Stars

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

Touchstone, 2018

Genre: Novel

This is a story of survival as a refugee family from Syria, but it is also about the gift and art of storytelling. The central narrator, Nour, provides a parallel narrative about an imagined earlier time occupied by a character named Rawiya. The story of Rawiya was given to Nour in oral form by her beloved father, Baba, who has recently died. While Nour is enduring the pain of war and strife in Syria, Rawiya journeys toward fortune as a young explorer accompanying a mapmaker. She wants to earn enough money to return home and help her family. Nour's mother is also a mapmaker, and her work is the primary income for their family. 

One of my immediate pleasures in opening the novel is the map provided on the inside cover, with the blue of the Mediterranean spread across two pages, and its accompanying cities (Benghazi, Tripoli, Palermo, Cordoba, etc.) appearing gracefully at the edges. The Atlas Mountains and the Sahara capture my eyes next, and I see the path of Rawiya, leaving behind everything she knows and taking the risks that travel for a young girl entails. Courage and confidence are required, and Nour will need the same qualities to face her own ordeal.

In the peculiar way that things often happen to me, I first opened this book right after I had taught about the importance of maps in studying the Humanities, how maps are graphic history and help us orient ourselves in any time or place described in fiction or non-fiction. In the case of Rawiya, we may be traveling "Where the Camel Sleeps" (chapters are not numbered, so we are given titles that place our feet with Nour or Rawiya). In this case, we are in Homs, a large Syrian city, "a place of many gardens, fruit trees, and vineyards" and marvel with the girl at the Great Mosque of Al-Nuri, a  12th century Sunni mosque within a few days travel from Tripoli in Rawiya's time. The mosque was destroyed during conflict in 2017. You can read about the plans to rebuild it at the link above.

For Rawiya, however, it stands in all its glory, a place from which to gather strength for the next journey through an area that her guide explains is not well-mapped, so they will follow the temporary loose paths described by previous travelers to reach ash-Sham. These are our paths as well. Part of the richness of a reader's experience is this privilege to visit places as they once existed, regardless of their eventual demise in reality. It is temporal and spatial travel, and we can go from our reading nooks.

See you on the path,

Tamara