The Devil as the Dream

Aria Aber considers “The Coin” by Yasmin Zaher.

By Aria AberFebruary 19, 2025

• Fiction

WHEN I FIRST MOVED to the United States in the summer of 2016, I lived in New York City. Like Yasmin Zaher’s protagonist in her debut novel The Coin (2024), I was a young woman at home neither in this country nor in this language, but I was keen on making it in the city where everyone’s dreams either flourish or die. I was in exile everywhere I lived, and yet New York offered the most perverted form of exile to date—American troops still occupied Afghanistan, my tax dollars funded the bombing of my own people, and I was occasionally interrogated in a separate room at JFK or LaGuardia airports when I entered the country. But even to an Other on the fringes, a foreigner on a visa, New York is brutally intoxicating, a fountain of hope and possibilities. The silvery machine of the city at the hegemonic center of capital and warfare was an allegory for all of life, I thought back then. New York favored the icy, the stoic, the cunning; you had to be hardworking, smart, and gritty to make it. I was young, and I believed in it, the American dream.

“[H]ow could the devil be the dream?” Zaher asks early in the novel, and yet her protagonist is compelled to try, just as her ancestors tried and failed. The password to the safe that holds her inheritance is America. In her family, “America was both the key and the curse.”

Glamorous and unhinged, The Coin explores the profound contradictions of the young exile’s hopes and dreams in the metropolis: “I thought there was no better feeling in this world than leaving work to walk along a Manhattan avenue, wearing a violent perfume with no one waiting for you at home.” Such a sentence could be written in any contemporary novel set in New York, but Zaher upends the expectations and cultural parameters of American literature. She isn’t from Ohio or another so-called “flyover state”; she is an orphan from Palestine. But the tragedy of that double loss, of both homeland and parents, is complicated by the fact that she is incredibly rich, an heiress with a couture wardrobe and a multistep skin care regimen. Set over eight months during the first Trump presidency, before the pandemic, the stream of consciousness first-person account unfolds in short chapters that follow the protagonist’s employment at a boys’ school for underprivileged children as she reinvents herself. She oscillates between devoted boyfriend Sasha, whom she avoids, and a gay European paramour she calls Trenchcoat, with whom she participates in a Birkin bag pyramid scheme. Eventually, she descends into what reads as a psychotic break.

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“Dirt” is the first word of this novel, and dirt is what this book is preoccupied with: dirty people, dirty cities, dirty money, dirty politics. Implicit in this obsession is the protagonist’s subjugation as a second-class citizen under apartheid back home, as a Palestinian with skin “the color of dirt.” Zaher knows that in place of a homeland, the exilic body—with its plainly mapped borders and controllable urges—becomes the new motherland, but one’s own body might be as unknowable as a country. Spiritual cleanliness—despite meticulous showers and ritualistic ablutions in bleach-infused baths she calls “CVS Retreats”—remains unattainable: “I wore a dress by McQueen, my arms and legs were like polished bronze, but underneath my dress everything else was dirty, beginning to rot.” And still, like Sisyphus rolling his stone, the protagonist begins the project of cleansing every day anew.

Metaphorically creative depictions of these cathartic CVS Retreats and tidying sessions occupy a sizable chunk of the narrative. Between working at the middle school, organizing the trash cans outside her apartment, and tanning herself on her living room floor, the protagonist rigorously scrubs herself with a hammam loofah—commonplace in Turkish, Middle Eastern, and Korean households—which physically exfoliates the first layer of your skin. Zaher describes the peeled-off skin as biblical “snakes” of dirt. At times, the imagery is abject (toenails and shaved hair litter the water’s surface), but elsewhere, the debris recalls the homeland in all its beauty and violence:

It was the most magnificent sight. […] [T]hin long hairs like supple grass, clusters of pubic hair like spindly bushes. A film of slimy soap, the primordial matter pooling around the dead bodies, the red nail polish on cotton balls. Snakes and cuticles in rows like limestone terraces. It was beautiful like summer in Palestine, uneven and seared.

Dirt is what makes up this earth; dirt is what we return to and what we continually make with our bodies. The Coin operates in that demystifying space of contradictions, between the two sides of the coin: capital and love, antisepsis and filth, savage nature and sanitized culture, Palestine and America. The friction generated by these dialectic opposites of Orient and Occident occasionally tears the veil between humans and the socioeconomic structures of ideology and oppression, but this only happens briefly before the veil settles again.

Zaher literalizes the unreachability of the desired object—there is a square of skin she cannot reach between her shoulder blades, which remains uncovered even during her “Cattier Method,” when she lathers her whole body with expensive French fluoride-free toothpaste to study her reflection in the mirror. Polluted and untouchable, that square remains the “dirtiest” spot on her body. The titular coin of the novel is lodged underneath this spot, a shekel she swallowed as a child.

The coin, ingested on a summer road trip that led to the accident that orphaned her and her older brother, becomes a clef for the narrative and both a symptom and the cause of the protagonist’s neurosis. The coin functions not only as a metonym for the money that funds the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, leading back to the British Mandate and the Nakba, but also as an insignia for the inequality of the oppressed—after all, Palestinians don’t have their own monetary currency but are dependent on the Israeli shekel.

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Although the United States—embodied by the filth of New York—is dirtier than Palestine, the protagonist’s proximity to capital as a rich woman equips her with newfound power, unlike in her home country where “only violence spoke.” If New York, where someone like our protagonist can be a “free woman” whom others want to embody, finally morphs into the object of desire, and her Birkin bag and designer clothing are legible signifiers of wealth and polish, then such a protagonist is also the right person to illuminate the cultural decay and paradoxes at the center, precisely because of her position as an Other. She is writing from the periphery: like Kafka writing in German in Prague, Zaher occupies, as do many other Palestinian writers, the position of what we call “minor literature.”

When defining minor literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari posit that its “three characteristics […] are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.” It’s no secret that Zaher has written a political novel and that the book takes on “a collective value.” Early on, the narrator admits to never having read Melville, Twain, or even Brontë. Still, by narrating the story in English, the protagonist—and, by proxy, the author—rejects, ridicules, and eventually transforms the tradition of English literature. The Coin can be read as an irreverent kiss and a middle finger to the language, the culture, and the ideology of the funders of the genocide, the United States of America.

But the most extraordinary political analysis can be derived from the protagonist’s sly, precise, and often surprising descriptions of the material world. After all, in the United States, commodity fetish rules everything, and as a lover of shiny objects, she basks in its glory. Poverty repulses her, and she loves walking “uptown, or to the West Village, it didn’t matter where, as long as there was beauty there.” The “pink veins in the marble” of a restaurant bathroom, “crocodile skin” Hermès wallets, “a metallic pair of shoes,” Prada shirts, and Celine miniskirts are the source of jouissance. “Glamour” gives her “a feeling that [she is] good enough, very good, better than others, the best.” She knows which of her students have “style,” attuned to their tucked-in shirts and belts, the subtle modification of their uniforms.

The attention to clothing and fashion, something that is largely absent in contemporary literature, recalls luxurious passages in 19th-century novels, and the exilic writing of 20th-century feminist writers such as Marguerite Duras and Jean Rhys. For a whole page, she lists her capsule wardrobe, ravishingly detailing the “faille pants from Chloé,” the “raw denim from Gucci,” and a Valentino top “with structured lace sleeves.” Personal style and apparel set the scene and give clues about class and social status as much as they provide characterization for the often flat secondary characters. But they also serve as a window into the protagonist’s psyche and attachment to surfaces. It is through the interpretation of exteriority that she derives meaning about others’ interiority; she knows that physical details render endless information.

These symbols of luxury clutter the novel and the narrator’s consciousness, their sheen reflecting the metal of the shekel, but they don’t necessarily hold any one stable meaning. Of course, they are metonymic with endless production. The Birkin bag pyramid scheme, for which she and Trenchcoat buy the hard-to-get bags directly from Hermès and sell them on the black market at a higher value, succinctly illustrates this inherent lack at the center of infinitely increasing capital: “Every year, regardless of poverty, war, or famine, the price of the Birkin bag increases. Its value is more solid than gold or the S&P 500.”

It’s important to note that the protagonist’s position as an outsider not only allows her to defamiliarize everyday objects, like the television’s hypnotic hum of images or the “millions of pieces of gum on the sidewalks like polka dots by Yayoi Kusama,” but to some extent also demystifies our relationship to money itself. She rarely uses a credit card, that ubiquitous piece of plastic alienating the consumer from his consumption, and instead cashes her inheritance checks. Here, even money becomes corporal, becomes old. Money assumes its physical form, and the bills and coins, like the designer logos that are worn by the richest and poorest people of the world, become the great equalizer; they enter the realm of the natural order of things. In this world of antithetical truths, what is ugly is beautiful, what is dirty is clean, and what is unnatural is also natural: “Even the shekel is a native of this earth, mined from the depths of Chile or Utah.”

Such effortlessly astute observations are everywhere in the novel, quotable sentences that read like aphorisms. When Zaher’s narrator considers karma and the circularity of life, she declares that the “Federal Reserve keeps printing money, but otherwise there are a finite number of particles in this world.” Elsewhere, she wittily remarks that “Americans are very protective of their children, maybe because it’s the only country in the world with the cultural practice of school shootings.” Every time she sees the Statue of Liberty, she also sees what lies behind the promise of Ellis Island: Cuba, where her entire story started. Though Zaher does not analyze the symbolism, what comes to mind is not just the flood of immigrants who sought a life of liberty in the United States over the past centuries but also the ideological and material shadow of the American dream, alive and well on the island of Cuba: communism, Fidel Castro’s lasting influence, and, of course, Guantanamo Bay.

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For all the talk about revolutionaries and struggles of solidarity, our protagonist insists that her project is not “Bakhtin’s carnival, [but] a centralized nervous system.” Indeed, her neurotic fixation on cleanliness is personal, rooted in a real mental breakdown. But we can read her ruin as an allegory that embraces the possibilities of carnivalesque purification and resolution, as brief medicine to colonial warfare.

The narrator’s solution is to initiate a kind of artificially constructed “wilderness suicide,” “a new natural order,” a “regression to [her] biblical homeland.” She transforms her otherwise spotless living room into a natural garden of Palestine replete with “wild thyme, crates of citrus fruit, bags of dirt,” “nails for [a] cross,” a koi pond, and even a wall with barbed wire. The pages where she describes the earthly breakdown in the soil-filled apartment are some of the most dazzling and original passages I have encountered in contemporary literature. Here, all the psychoanalytic data of the novel—the dreams, the obsessive tics, the specular image, the Palestinian female lover in whom she searches for a doppelgänger, the tower that looks like a phallus, the ubiquitous and mysterious interlocutor—comes to a culmination that feels both explosive and utterly moving.

Like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, one of the only things that alleviates her neurosis and pain is the sound of music. In The Metamorphosis (1915), Samsa is moved by the energetic “sound of the violin” his sister plays, and the giant bug leaves his room, believing that the “sustenance for which he yearned” was coming to light. In a similarly destabilizing moment, Zaher’s protagonist hears her neighbor playing the clarinet, and the shekel inside her responds with gentle vibrations until “it [i]s blazing and spinning inside [her] body.” Music “entered me immediately,” she says; its emotional power overtakes her, posing the danger of undoing her inhibitions. When she breaks down, she fully lets go of these inhibitions and surrenders to filth in its physical and spiritual valence. She throws rocks at the self-imposed wall and finally gives in to her national identity, which connects her to the “collective enunciation” of a revolutionary cry: “I really was Palestinian, I really was an animal.” But what Kafka’s characters cannot achieve, our glamorous Palestinian woman knows to master: sexual pleasure offers our protagonist a true relief. During this return to the preoedipal state of wilderness before language, she freely explores her sexuality and desires; she covers her limbs with dirt, “plays” with her “sex,” talks to her body, and begins to form an understanding of its basic needs:

When I was hungry, I asked my stomach, Baby, what do you want. And often it would say lentils, or rice, or occasionally cabbage, because the intestines were chiming in. Or if my heart was aching then I would ask, Baby, what’s missing. And it would say a man, a hug, a cry, an uncontrolled laughter. […] If it wanted a hug, then I would hug myself, I would coil into a snake. And I couldn’t give it the man that it wanted but I could imagine, and I had some great memories I could call up.

Suicide evades her; suicide remains unsuccessful. And her lifeline, she says, is her sexuality, which “no brother, father, fucker” can take from her. “Orgasm is dignity. I pissed myself in dignity.”

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The Coin remains singular in its achievement: it transcends the crazy girl/sad girl trope common in Ottessa Moshfegh–influenced novels with an ending that feels philosophically complex, multilayered, and as humorous as it is heartbreaking. Ultimately, the protagonist must return to Palestine: her time in New York is not forever. Her students, intent on rebellion and protest, burn a room in the school. Destruction pervades, but it does not lead to a resolution. Palestine is not yet free, but we must continue the struggle. Destabilization and agitation pave the way to the goal; language is only one part of it. Zaher’s intelligence is inhabited and enacted: it is in the fabric of its explicit prose and narrative observations, from the “feminine delicacies” of Trenchcoat’s clean and perfect feet to “the roots or hollows of ancient olive trees” she hallucinates in the dirty toes of a woman on the Paris Métro. When novels look and truly see, as Zaher’s does, “the smallest detail is a portal into another world.”

The Coin is a psychoanalytic wonder, a prismatic and pithy gem of a book, which is both light and dark, exilic and utterly at home in the tradition its narrator denounces. Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher of the Lacanian-Marxist tradition, calls the novel “a masterpiece,” and I cannot help but agree.