Yasmin Zaher: ‘Sex Lives of Real People Still Carry Discomfort’

Early in our conversation, the Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher gets to the heart of her irreverent, darkly hilarious debut novel The Coin (2024) – published in the US last month by Catapult. ‘Pornography is no longer taboo,’ she tells me from her Paris office. ‘But speaking about real people’s sex lives still carries a level of discomfort.’ Though a novel about many topics – fashion, alienation, displacement and, of course, Palestine – The Coin circles back time and again to the subject of sex. Readers are whisked through New York and Paris as the wry, libidinous protagonist – a wealthy Palestinian exile – collects lovers, compulsively grooms herself and hatches a scheme to resell Birkin handbags. The Coin is a smart and fun novel but, beneath all its haute couture cons and erotic intrigues, simmers an almost-surreal tragedy.

Sammy Loren The Coin’s narrator has numerous lovers and is rather unsentimental about sex. Why did you decide to create such a sexually uninhibited character?

Yasmin Zaher I enjoy books that have sex scenes and discussions of sex, but I wasn’t making very conscious decisions. I was just going with my intuition in terms of what I felt like writing about, which is very close to what I want to read about. Sex ended up in there because it’s something that interests me in other people’s books and interests me in my own life.

SL Why do you think sex remains such a compelling topic?

YZ Because, on the one hand, it’s still somewhat taboo: we don’t talk about it with just anyone. On the other hand, our animal instinct means we’re programmed to procreate, so we’re also inevitably drawn to it. Interestingly, pornography is no longer taboo, but people’s real sex lives are still carries a level of discomfort.

SL The Coin’s protagonist has money but spends a lot of her time with the poor. She’s Palestinian but keeps her distance from the Palestinian community. Why is it so difficult for your character to feel at home anywhere?

YZ Because it’s difficult for me to feel at home anywhere. Many people feel alienated from their classmates, their family, their community, not just artists. Writers are often misfits. I feel alienated from almost every group that I belong to – my family, other Palestinians, other women. I don't know what the causes are, it's just how I feel, and with age it hasn't gotten any better. That’s what draws me to writing.

SL Where are you living these days?

YZ I live in Paris now; it’s the writer’s dream. I married a Parisian and we were living in New York but recently made the decision to move to France. I still feel alienated here, too. I can blame it on being a foreigner – on the language, the culture, the social codes – which is a nice excuse, although I know that I'll be alienated anywhere. 

SL The Coin’s protagonist is a clean freak, which is really a response to trying to keep control of a world in chaos. Why do you think order and control are so alluring?

YZ Life is a very disorganized, dirty experience. It’s understandable that people want to exert some control over it. And New York is a very disorganized, dirty city, so it made sense that this character would be striving for control over material things. Some people, on the other hand, look to control those around them.

SL Are they related conditions? Trying to control people seems much worse than trying to control the cleanliness of one’s environment.

YZ Definitely one is less harmful than the other. In Palestinian culture, being clean and organized is seen as a good quality in a person, especially in a woman. It’s an enormous virtue.

SL At one point in the book, the narrator says: ‘To love is to be taken hostage. Boys, it’s Stockholm syndrome.’ That line illustrates the character’s central conflict: despite her desire to be in love, she fears intimacy.

YZ Her fear of vulnerability, of intimacy, of other people means that she doesn’t have any close friends. That’s why she’s says love is like Stockholm syndrome: when you love someone, they have – I’m not going say control – but they have an enormous impact on you. They can hurt you; they can ruin your day. When you are not close to anyone, you are freer.

SL Which writers inspired this book?

YZ I read The Passion According to G.H. [1964] by Clarice Lispector right before I started, so that gave me the courage to avoid following logic. I also read Die, My Love [2012] by Argentinian writer Ariana Harwicz. I don’t think there were any Palestinian influences, but I try to resist promoting the notion that Palestinian literature is like this, or Jewish literature is like that, or French literature is like this. Maybe Palestinian citizens of Israel do write a little differently, simply because our life experience is different. There’s a novel by Emile Habibi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, called The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist [1974], which tells the story of a Palestinian man who’s half pessimist and half optimist. Maybe that’s a way of describing the political atmosphere: we are Palestinians living in Palestine on our ancestral land. We are not refugees, but we are now living in a hostile state called Israel, so we feel like refugees in our own country. It’s a very alienating condition.

SL The politics in contemporary fiction are often heavy-handed. The Coin, by contrast, is almost amoral. Tell me about that choice.

YZ It’s hard to write something about a contemporary political moment because that moment has not been processed yet. It’s like writing a book the day after your boyfriend breaks up with you: it’s going be a bad book. The politics of The Coin have been well processed both in myself and in culture.

SL What are those politics?

YZ The Nakba of 1948 is central to The Coin in terms of the Palestinian question. It’s about the protagonist’s grandmother, the loss of land, the landscape. There isn’t much about the Second Intifada or Gaza. I’m sure many things will eventually be written about the events of 7 October 2023, but it’ll take many, many years for that to be processed in a way that could be also universal. Because a good book conveys a universal feeling, and it’s hard to do something universal when you’re still inside the event.

SL The Coin’s narrator has a trust fund worth 28 million dollars – a reality far removed from the image of the poor, disenfranchised Palestinian refugees that the West typically envisages. Why was it important for you to create a character from an elite social milieu?

YZ Because I come from that same milieu. It doesn’t interest me as an artist to write about an experience I haven’t lived myself. It’s also a matter of representation. It’s dehumanizing, reductive and racist to think of people as conforming to stereotypes: all Palestinians are like this; all French people are like that. To realize the huge diversity that exists within any group of people is profoundly humanizing.

Yasmin Zaher's The Coin is published with Catapult 

^{Main image: Portrait of Yasmin Zaher. Photo: Willy Somma.}