Ballantine Books
Content Warnings: suicidal ideation, depression, bullying, generational trauma, colonialism, occupation, death
Soon after her birth, Elspeth Rummani died. Except she didn’t. She came back to life before anyone could even write the time of her death, her skin cobalt blue and otherwise a healthy infant. On the same day, the Rummani’s blue-soap factory was bombed across the world in Nablus of the West Bank in occupied Palestine. Now, 25 years later, she visits her great-aunt Nuha Rummani’s grave at a crossroads akin to the decision her aunt faced years prior to Elspeth’s birth: whether to choose her beloved or a separate future. Elspeth recalls her childhood of ostracization, family, and mystery, woven together by tales from her great-aunt about her family’s history and their soap factory.
Reading “The Skin and Its Girl,” I felt like I was in Elspeth’s mind; the author, Sarah Cypher, brings the storytelling to life with Elspeth’s narration as if she was reliving childhood with an adult brain. She tells a story so many queer people know: not fitting in because of something she can’t control (her blue skin), with the added layer of being Palestinian American and thus multiply marginalized. Aunt Nuha’s stories attest to the power of mythicality and oratory tradition in passing down lessons and history, and she repeats over and over, “‘there is no truth but in old women’s tales’” (49, 59…), as a reminder that truth is subjective. The stories Elspeth’s great-aunt tells her emphasize to the reader the experience of living in the West Bank, the near impossibility of returning home as a Palestinian emigrant, and the heartbreak of having to hide your truth to survive.
Nuha doesn’t just illuminate the historical Palestinian reality of going from being under the British mandate to Israeli occupation; she shows the complexities of being an immigrant forced to hide her queer identity, paralleling Elspeth’s dilemma that brought her to her aunt’s grave in the first place: should she continue her family’s cycle of exile by following the woman she loves?
The queerness of the book is a reminder that, despite the colonial narratives that deny queer Palestinian existence, queer Palestinians are real and vital to the LGBTQ+ movement. In Michelle Simota’s essay about the importance of “The Skin and Its Girl” in telling queer Palestinian stories, she points out that “queer Palestinians in Cypher’s novel tell stories in private and to people with whom they trust. To do otherwise is dangerous” because queerness is seen as antithetical to being Palestinian. As Simota furthers, the stories of queer Palestinians in real life are buried under the rubble of genocide, because to oppress or kill anyone is to harm queer people — queer people are everywhere. This novel is one step in recovering the reality of queerness and humanity denied to Palestinians in the mainstream media.
With the plot being so complexly layered, “The Skin and its Girl” has a similar feel to “Beloved” by Toni Morrison in the intertwined telling of present day and the history preceding it (both complete with generational trauma). While somewhat difficult to fully understand and follow if only read once, it is beautifully written and tied together by the end (and definitely worthy of a reread). As Nuha directly states: “Nothing happens in a straight line, not life or love or even time” (26) — a sentiment true to the novel’s storytelling centered around a creature, a child, shrouded in mystery and history.