The Map of Salt and Stars

“But the earth and the fig don’t know the story like I do, so I tell it again. I start the way Baba always did: ‘Everybody knows the story of Rawiya,’ I whisper. ‘They just don’t know they know it.’ And then the words come back like they had never left, like it had been me telling the story all along.”

Nour feels that repeating Rawiya’s story in the same manner as her father is essential to keeping both his memory and the story alive. By telling the story to the fig and the earth of their new house in Syria, she believes she is rooting both her father and his story in her land of origin. Despite Nour’s efforts of faithful replication, the story’s opening words suggest that everyone knows the story instinctively and that the manner of its telling is irrelevant. 

“The most important places on a map are the places you’ve never been.” 

Rawiya solves the riddle regarding the most important place on a map when she realizes maps are only needed to get to the places you have never been. The importance of unknown places as opposed to familiar ones symbolizes the quest for personal growth and challenging oneself.

“Stories are powerful […] but gather too many of the words of others in your heart, and they will drown out your own. Remember that.”

Al-Idrisi gives Rawiya advice that will play into both heroines’ self-definition, as he warns that while stories are enchanting, they can also enchant the listener away from their own voice. He therefore encourages Rawiya to follow her own stories rather than seeking the example of sages. This serves her well in later battles as she prioritizes her instinct and her own judgement. Nour, who idolizes her father’s stories, also begins a journey to trust her own voice.

“An oily mist hangs over the alley, and I can’t tell if it’s twilight or dust. It’s gotten too dark to tell color. I breathe in through my nose again, desperately wishing for the scent of rain.”

This passage encapsulates Nour’s feeling of overwhelm as the bombing commences in Syria. She cannot trust her senses, unable to distinguish between the natural phenomenon of twilight or the unnatural dust from bombing. Moreover, her usual synesthetic perception of colors in everything is submerged by terror. She longs for a cleansing rain that will wash away this confusion and allow her to see the world as it was before.

“Mama lays Huda next to me, and our blood mixes like spilled paint. Mama’s canvases loom up. Some are ripped, others torn clean out of their frames. They’re scattered around the garden, in the alley, and in the branches of the fig. A root has come loose from the dirt, reaching a finger out. I stretch my hand towards it, but I can’t grab it. My fingers are too slippery.” 

Chaos envelopes the house in Homs following the bombing. Ravaged art supplies symbolize violence as separate bloods now “[mix] like spilled paint.” The canvases displaying Nour’s mother’s maps are destroyed and scattered, symbolizing how the family’s path is now unclear. Nour’s gesture of reaching for a tree root shows her attempt to ground herself, but her hands have become too slippery, likely with blood.

“I think to myself how stupid it is that acrylic paints dry so fast. Things change too much. We’ve always got to fix the maps, repaint the borders of ourselves.” 

Nour thinks resentfully of how quickly her mother’s painted map dries. The map’s forms remain intact when everything else is falling to pieces, and this seems false to her; a more honest map would change its borders in time with changing circumstances. She feels that in her expedition, she must repaint the borders of the map, and of herself, as she embarks on a period of rapid change.

“There are no reliable maps of this region and its routes. This is our task—to create a more complete map than has ever existed before. For now, we follow the accounts of other travelers. Only when we see for ourselves will we know the distance for certain.” 

Al-Idrisi seeks to create the region’s most reliable map that has ever existed. He emphasizes empirical knowledge based on the travelers’ findings, rather than the accounts of their predecessors. He thus shows that others’ stories have limited relevance for the individual, who will encounter a different road than the ones from anecdotes. In the full scope of the novel, al-Idrisi will learn that all maps, even the most meticulous and reliable, have only temporary relevance to the terrain of a changing world.

“Abu Sayeed keeps walking, scanning the pebbles on the ground. I wonder if the stones are talking to him. I wonder if they have anything to say he hasn’t heard before, words he can hear in his bones.” 

Nour feels close to Abu Sayeed, a former professor of geology who still finds his way by consulting stones. She learns through her conversations with him that there is more to life and people than meets the eye. There is a theme of the known versus the unknown.

“Remember […] it isn’t the place that matters. Your family is here. That has to be enough.” 

When Nour laments leaving Syria, a place she was just beginning to consider home, her mother reminds her that sentiments of home must arise more from a connection to people than place. She encourages Nour to feel grateful that she is still with her family and to draw her sense of belonging from them.

“At first, Jordan is rocky and as flat as the bottom of a foot. But then the road curls west across low hills like crinkled paper. As we wind away from the border toward Amman, everything is yellow earth: ripe-banana earth molded into valleys, knobby amber earth cracked by sun, olive-pinky earth smooth as a spatula.” 

Although the context of Nour’s drive through Jordan is a traumatic one, she still appreciates the varied landscape, which keeps changing and surprising her. The rich and detailed appreciation of color suggests that the curious, synesthetic part of Nour is still active, even as her family run away to survive. While it is traumatic, their journey is still an expedition.

“The buzzing, the whine. I shut my eyes. I’m not Rawiya. This isn’t an adventure. A yellow wail bubbles out of me.” 

When Nour’s mother forcibly shaves Nour’s hair so that she can pass as a boy, Nour’s appetite for adventure dries up. The clipped sentences reflect Nour’s anxiety, and she shuts her eyes to temporarily blind herself from reality and numb out the pain of her sacrifice. Her synesthesia colors her cries as yellow—a color traditionally associated with fear.

“These boys look different from the boys in the square—not angry, but bored, like they’re about to steal a couple of sodas from a mini-mart just because they can.” 

The simile comparing Huda’s would-be-rapists to bored, opportunistic thieves in a mini-mart underscores the sadistic cruelty of their assault. They act out of neither passion nor need, but on the whim of the moment. This episode emphasizes to Nour that she and her family traverse patriarchal terrains and that men have the advantage.

“Abu Sayeed’s hand reaches up toward mine through the green, way down below us, and then his fingers wind away from me into the onyx black, and he’s gone.” 

This passage shows the crucial moment of Abu Sayeed’s disappearance from life and from Nour’s world. Following her father’s death, Nour saw Abu Sayeed as a possibility for hope. As she watches his fingers slip away into the abyss, Nour’s grasp on hope slips as well.

“‘Part of me is dead,’ I say. The sun stings my pock-marked shins. ‘I never even knew it was alive.’” 

After Abu Sayeed’s death, Nour comes close to despair. Her sensation of partial death denotes her lost hope, while the idea that she never even knew that part of her was alive expresses she did not know what a good life she had before her father’s death.

“I spot a woman with an easel, delicately stroking watercolors across a canvas. She’s painting a cityscape. And I think to myself how many people have created beautiful things here, how many people go on creating beautiful things even when life is full of pain.” 

Nour reflects that creativity still exists in a broken world. The delicate watercolors seem ephemeral—much like beauty itself—when compared to her mother’s sturdy acrylic. War-torn lands are also sites of great creativity.

“His voice grew thick with an ancient pain that crossed his face like a shadow. ‘I would rather see the book burned than in someone else’s hands.’” 

Mennad, a warrior obstructing Rawiya’s expedition, would prefer to see al-Idrisi’s book destroyed than in the hands of enemies. The “ancient” shadowy nature of the pain that crosses his face indicates a generational wound. It also foreshadows the conflicts of subsequent centuries, such as the ones encountered by Nour and her family.

“But the dark below the ferry’s deck has more people in it than anything else, and I’ve learned already that people are more dangerous than animals, more dangerous than anything else in the world.” 

After a disastrous voyage and witnessing an attempted rape, Nour must confront her fears. Nour and Zahra find themselves at the bottom of a ferry, and although her recent experiences have taught her that people are untrustworthy, Nour is forced to trust the people who will ensure their ferry crossing.

“While I think, I lay my head back against the wall. I read another line, scrawled on the wall in pen by someone else who must have passed this way: We aren’t on any map.” 

In the smuggler’s house, Nour realizes that she is one of many who attempt the perilous exodus from Syria. The anonymity of the scribbles on the wall conveys the common predicament of refugees losing their identity and becoming, in the eyes of others, one agglomerate, homogenous mass. Certainly, Nour feels much in common with the others who share her same experiences. The sentiment that “we aren’t on any map” echoes the novel’s theme of the unreliability of maps.

“I listen to them talk in a language I’ve never heard before. I don’t have to understand everything. The blue-violet voices wind around me, protecting me from my fear. I am covered with a thick rind of safety, like an orange.” 

Nour’s encounter with an Amazigh tribe restores her faith in people. The Amazigh are kind to her and Zahra and show that they want to help. As a result, Nour feels less pressure to understand their language to figure out whether they’re safe. The ability to feel safe and protected—by a rind as thick as that of an orange—suggests that Nour approaches a more trusting phase.

“You may be American, but you are still Syrian […] a person can be two things at the same time […] the land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.”

An Amazigh woman whom the sisters encounter in the desert, Itto tells Nour that her place of birth and American passport make her no less Syrian than her sisters, as her Syrian identity is in her blood. Being nomadic herself, Itto gives short shrift to physical borders between countries, saying that stories and blood-lineage are far more important in determining a person’s identity.

“I press my hands to my face. I am someone I don’t recognize. My nose is a sharp hill, my lips thicker. These miles have carved me. Time has a sculptor’s hands. You don’t even notice them.” 

When Nour faces her reflection after a long, transformative journey, she feels as though she does not recognize herself. With her sharpened nose and fuller lips, she has a more mature appearance. She feels sculpted by time as though she has been changing without realizing it. Her external changes symbolize her deeper internal changes.

“She touched the place where the roc had cracked her ribs, the skin over her heart that had healed into a crooked scar.”

Rawiya is marked forever by her encounter with the roc, given her cracked ribs and scarred skin. The crooked shape of her scar conveys the roughness of her journey. However, the sense that the skin above her heart has healed means that this vital organ is now protected, and she can continue to live a full, brave life.

“‘Must there be a lesson?’ al-Idrisi said. ‘Perhaps the story simply goes on and on. Time rises and falls like an ever-breathing lung. The road comes and goes and suffering with it. But the generations of men, some kind and some cruel, go on and beneath the stars.’”

When Rawiya asks al-Idrisi for the lesson behind the world’s beauty and suffering, al-Idrisi proposes that life’s continuation is lesson enough in itself and is not enriched through moralizing. The image of an ever-breathing lung connects the perishable matter of the body with the spiritual idea of eternal breath. For al-Idrisi, the essence of life is the survival of people and the perpetuation of stories into subsequent generations.