The Map of Salt and Stars

Both Nour and Rawiya set off on their adventures in the wake of a father’s death. Both heroines enjoyed close relationships with their fathers, with Nour’s Baba passing on his stories to her and Rawiya’s father teaching her how to use a sling and telling her about the roc. This transfer of paternal power to a daughter would have been unusual in the patriarchal society of each heroine, and it sets up each heroine with expectations that subvert the traditional feminine role.

Though “Rawiya tried to be content with her embroidery and her quiet life with her mother […] she was restless” and “loved to ride up and down the hills and through the olive grove atop her beloved horse, Bauza, and dream of adventures. She wanted to go out and seek her fortune” (7). In an extraordinary manner for a 12th century young woman, Rawiya relates more to her father than her mother. Following his death, she takes on his role as breadwinner so that she can “save her mother from a life of eating barley-flour porridge in their plaster house under the stony face of Jebel Musa” (7). Her father is absent through death, and her brother disappeared at sea—and these absences create the opportunity for Rawiya to assume the previously male power.

Before his death, Nour’s father gifts Rawiya’s story to her as an example of strength and bravery. Nour initially associates Rawiya with her father when she tries to tell the tale in his words exactly. However, the clue in the tale’s initial words that “everybody knows the story of Rawiya […] they just don’t know they know it,” encourages Nour to make the story her own (6). Hereafter, as Joukhadar interweaves the two heroines’ tales, Rawiya’s narrative shapes Nour’s interpretation of her own life, rather than being a souvenir of her father’s presence.

Both heroines replace the initial lost patriarch with another, as Rawiya becomes al-Idrisi’s apprentice and Nour follows her mother back to Syria so their family can be reunited with Abu Sayeed. Al-Idrisi and Abu Sayeed are sages who share their wisdom, educating the heroines and encouraging them to trust their instinct. Inevitably, as is common to many hero’s journey narratives, both heroines lose their second patriarchs and must stake out on their own. While Rawiya does not lose al-Idrisi to death, she increasingly proves a better warrior than he was, and has to rely upon her own instincts, and on what her father has taught her, to develop military strategy. Nour’s loss of Abu Sayeed to drowning is a more tragic initiation of independence. With the loss of Abu Sayeed, who filled the paternal role of helping her discover the wonders of the world, she must rely on herself and her more elusive, map-making mother.

While Nour’s father and Abu Sayeed impart their lessons more didactically, Nour’s mother is more enigmatic. As a woman navigating a terrain run by dangerous men, Nour’s mother is conscious that her daughters would be more at risk if others found out where they were going. She therefore disguises the destinations on her map with a code that corresponds to Nour’s synesthesia. Here, the implication is that the feminine route to safety must be one of secrecy and dissimulation. When Nour succeeds in the mission her mother gives her—a mission that only she can fulfill—she creates her own adventure story that has been informed by her own abilities rather than those of patriarchs. Using their own strategies to succeed, the heroines stand out as the authors of their own adventure stories.