The Map of Salt and Stars

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

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Part 3

Parts 4-5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

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Symbols & Motifs

Maps

A crucial motif in the novel, maps symbolize both the known and unknown. When Rawiya joins al-Idrisi’s quest to map the known world, the expedition must traverse unexplored or previously misunderstood territories. The result, which “was to be the most accurate map of the inhabited world that had ever been made, a collaboration on a grand scale and the culmination of the long journey that had been taken” is the fruit of both close observation and personal experience (258).

Maps also represent individuality and creative agency—and, when layered with the signification of the known and unknown, maps further symbolize self-discovery; to an extent, a map’s charted shapes will always be subjective, and the surveyed land will always reflect the individual traveler’s journey. Nour’s mother, a practiced cartographer, tells Nour that “when you make a map, you don’t just paint the world the way it is. You paint your own” (315). When Nour receives a map of her mother’s world without placenames, she must use her synesthesia to crack the code. Once this is done, she scratches the paint to reveal her mother’s Arabic handwriting, which she can now understand. In phrases such as “this ache has a thousand faces, this huger two thousand eyes,” Zahra realizes that their mother “talks about everything that happened […] the sad things. All the things she wished for” (314). Nour feels the map is a portrait of her family and their journeys. At the end of the novel when they are reunited, she feels she has the authority to fill the final space and document their journey thus far.

Nour comes to see people’s travelworn bodies, with their scars and blisters, as truer maps than the paper ones, as bodies can be maps of lived experience. For example, when Nour contemplates how her hands slip off Zahra’s wrist “like invisible bracelets” and Zahra’s scar “ripples her jaw like a bruise on the skin of an olive,” she considers that “life draws blood and leaves its jewelry in our skin” (331). Thus, the original jewel, which was the gold filigree bracelet that Zahra gave to the smugglers, is replaced with the scars garnered through her journey. The idea of the body as a map democratizes the lofty art of mapmaking and makes it accessible to all travelers, whose bodies universally bear the stories of their unique journeys.

A Girl Disguised as a Boy

The girl disguised as a boy is a motif in both strands of Joukhadar’s narrative, symbolizing the subversion—and re-creation—of gender roles. Both Nour and Rawiya disguise themselves as males to have an easier passage through a patriarchal world. In Rawiya’s case, the disguise is voluntary; she wraps her cropped hair in still another disguise when she dons a red turban and tells her mother that she is going to the market in Fez to sell her embroidery, concealing her true mission. Rawiya’s disguise as Rami—a masculine name meaning “the one who throws the arrow”—succeeds, and she fulfills the name’s promise when she proves herself the most valiant warrior in al-Idrisi’s expedition (8). However, she struggles to maintain her disguise when she meets Khaldun, her desire for whom is immediate. Rawiya focuses on self-preservation for a long time, but when her life is threatened, she can no longer hide her feelings or identity from Khaldun. After her confession, her female identity is discovered by al-Idrisi and the Sicilian rebels who scorn her, saying that a woman’s presence as a defender is a symbol of the decadence of William’s court. While Rawiya initially adopted the disguise as a means to social agency, she now seeks to create a new category of woman—one who embodies the freedom and agency of a male, but who can be equally at ease in her identified gender.

When Nour’s mother disguises her as a boy and points out that the name Nour can be both masculine and feminine, it is the first hint of subterfuge. Nour, who endures a shaved head against her will, finds the transition far more difficult than does Rawiya. She sees herself “as a boy, my head a lopsided melon” (139). Although her favorite heroine comes to mind, she rejects the resemblance and feels she has lost her identity. She laments the loss of her feminine beauty, wondering “if the real me is gone forever, shorn off with my hair” (142). However, Nour finds her boyish disguise helpful when she eludes the lascivious gaze her sisters endure.

Nour is grateful for her period, which arrives when they are at the refugee camp in Ceuta. The boy-disguise firmly off, Nour finds comfort and pride in her bodily changes. While she will never be the pretty, untouched little girl that she was before her journey, she is happy for her body to be a map of her experiences, and she relaxes into the new identity her journey has shaped.

Memories of America

Nour’s memories of America—the country associated with her father, whom she imagines buried in Manhattan—are a recurring motif in the novel. America is the country far from Syria in which her father wanted to find himself, and it is the one that primarily English-speaking Nour considers her first home. In contrast, her mother heads east, leaving America for Syria.

Even as Nour traverses the lands of Rawiya’s journey, she carries her memories of America with her. Such memories intersperse and inform Nour’s experiences on the road, offering a different perspective on her present challenges. For example, following the bombing of her new Syrian home and the surrounding neighborhood, Nour recalls losing her doll in a Manhattan playground. While the family searched everywhere for the doll, they could not find it, and “that was the first time I knew something was really gone for good” (57). Nour feels a sense of irretrievable loss as she inspects the ruins of her home: “This street, like all the streets I saw in Baba’s Polaroids, with the same tan buildings, the same black-and-white archways Baba and Abu Sayeed stood under with their orange shirts—this street is really gone” (57). Here, the treasured object—either the doll or the place that hosted her father’s memories—is gone. Nour is left to make sense of the loss.

Later, she re-experiences the connection between the lost doll and the lost streets. She contemplates Abu Sayeed’s leveled house, and she immediately thinks “if I hadn’t played in so many parks, would I still have [the] doll?” (72). Ruminating on her family’s overwhelming hardship, she feels an aimless, lingering guilt.

Moreover, Nour’s frequent references to America indicate her relative inexperience in the Middle East. The memories show that her life in America, where she had her father and spoke English, is a central well from which she draws her strength as she tries to understand her experiences. Ordinary childhood misfortunes—such as losing a favorite doll—can resonate with the devastating losses of war, indicating a universality in human experience. Joukhadar shows how a heroine who might have much in common with American readers handles an unprecedented challenge.