Stories versus State: A Reflection on Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter

By R. Benedito Ferrão

As The Night Counter nears its end, an unexpected death occurs. The elderly character in question was taking a bus ride in Detroit when he breathed his last. This person would go routinely to the airport to see passengers arrive on the flight from Lebanon, his homeland. As I read about the character’s death, I was on a bus myself. I put the book down in my lap and realized that I had been crying. The person, an immigrant, had died alone while trying to catch a glimpse of new arrivals from the old country. I thought of my own father.

Like Fatima Abdullah, the tale’s octogenarian protagonist, I was in Los Angeles as I finished reading the book. Fatima decamps to the west coast from Michigan after divorcing her second husband, Ibrahim. She hopes this act will spare him from having to live out their last years together in what she believes to be a marriage he agreed to only out of a sense of obligation upon the death of Marwan, her first husband and Ibrahim’s friend. Fatima takes up residence in the home of her grandson Amir, whose queerness she initially refuses to acknowledge, leading to many comedic moments.

Like Fatima, in a place famed for its car culture, I took the bus everywhere in the City of Angels and happened to be on one of the routes the book mentions as I read about the death of the old Lebanese character. The bus route referenced passes a 7-Eleven on Wilshire Boulevard, a place my dad once worked at. As a young man, he too had lived in Lebanon. That was in 1969, before the political instability, before the refugee crisis, before a long list of events…

Reading Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter in 2009, the year of its publication, little did I know that the book would become one I would use in my classes so consistently. The text has been a staple on the syllabus of my course titled Outside In: Transnational Asian American Literature. The premise of the course is this: moving away from the idea of Asian Americans as those solely of immigrant heritage, the class asks students to think about what it might mean to consider such literary subjects as being the product of displacement within and beyond the United States. Concurrently, the course also asks students to dwell upon the involvement of America beyond its own borders.

The class requires that every text we read involves the crossing of a nation-state’s boundary, often of a character who is identifiably Asian or Asian American. Thus, when not viewed as being only immigrant (or descended from immigrants), how might we see the construction of Arab and other Asian (American) characters as also being influenced by transnational histories and events? In other words, what happens when one looks beyond the purview of a single nation or the state to understand identity?

Certainly, the most transnational figure in The Night Counter is Scheherazade. Yes, that Scheherazade of the One Thousand and One Nights fame. But where she is the teller of stories in the original text, here, in her appearance in this non-Arab setting, she is the receiver of tales about Fatima’s family. The exchanges between the two women are the framing device for the novel, within which is ensconced several other stories. In this way, Yunis’ novel not only makes One Thousand and One Nights an intertext, but also echoes the earlier book’s form of intertwined stories in this 21st century version. In so doing, The Night Counter brings the Asian literary form of a framing narrative with other stories within it to an American setting. Before Disney and before orientalist adaptations of Scheherazade’s tales, the legends themselves originated transnationally in many lands, including Iran and the Arab world, as well as South and East Asia.

An early-twentieth-century immigrant to the United States along with Marwan, Fatima’s time in the new country parallels the durée of her fellow-Lebanese and other Arab communities in America, an immigrant history that is longer than a hundred years. In her mid-80s at the time at which she tells her stories to Scheherazade, Fatima recounts for this legendary figure how she, Marwan, and Ibrahim endeavored to acculturate in an unfamiliar land with an unfamiliar language. After all, Fatima had only known a rural life in a small Lebanese village prior to America. Entwined in her stories are legacies of labor struggles, racism and Islamophobia, and intergenerational conflict.

The stories Fatima relays to Scheherazade include accounts of how Marwan and Ibrahim both worked in the burgeoning industries that marked the rise of capitalism in America, chief among them the manufacture of cars in Detroit, that hub of Arab American life and heritage. Fatima recounts the injuries immigrant men faced in unregulated factories, leading to the struggle for unionization and labor rights-protections that Marwan and Ibrahim find themselves involved with, too.

Because of the many children Fatima had between her two marriages, the novel is a multigenerational family saga, one that is replete with the expected conflict between immigrant parents and their American-born progeny. However, Yunis weaves into these parent-child tussles a bit of the history of the settings in which these events unfold. One such poignant moment ensues during a family road trip which Ibrahim only agrees to after being nagged by his most malcontent child, Randa, who wants the Abdullahs to do things like other Americans.

Stopping at a restaurant in Georgia on their trip, the Abdullahs are faced with the choice of entering one of two bathrooms – one for whites and the other for “coloreds.” At the restaurant, a white man unable to identify Randa ethnically calls her the prettiest mulatto he has ever seen. The cringe-worthy moment makes Ibrahim vow that the family will never vacation again.

As with the previously mentioned history of labor rights-organizing that impinges upon the lives of the first generation in the novel, the history of segregation and anti-Black racism reveals itself in the existence of the second-generation characters. Subtly, the novel portrays the history of the Abdullahs – internal conflicts and all – as one that cannot be separated from American histories of marginalization, institutionalized as they are by society, capitalism, and the state. Nevertheless, the most overt encounter the family have with such state power is in the discovery that they are being racially and religiously profiled in the contemporary moment of the novel’s setting, a subject I will return to soon.

Although Lebanon seems to recede into the backdrop of the family’s history in the novel as the Abdullah’s children and then their children’s children are born in America, readers are constantly reminded of the home country. Apart from the old character who dies on the bus en route to see the planes arrive from Lebanon, it is Fatima herself who is always thinking of Lebanon. Because of Scheherazade’s visitations, Fatima believes she only has 1001 nights remaining on Earth and thus becomes obsessed with figuring out to which of her descendants she will bequeath her village house upon her death.

While Fatima never returns to the homeland, the most unlikely of characters does. It is Fatima’s white-passing granddaughter Dina Bitar, the Texas-born, part-Palestinian child of Randa’s (who belatedly goes by “Randy” to also appear white). On a foolhardy mission to impress an Arab American college activist she becomes infatuated with, Dina joins the fuckboy at a refugee camp in Lebanon where for the first time she encounters a community of other diasporic Palestinians like (and definitely unlike) herself.

In this, the most evidently transnational moment in the novel, one that my students find elucidative of the course’s themes, the All-American Dina (a cheerleader, no less) comes face-to-face with the effects of state-sponsored violence on people with whom she shares an origin. One of the refugees, a seamstress named Sarah, produces a document to show Dina – it is the deed to the woman’s house in Palestine. Just before an Israeli airstrike occurs and Dina and the others have to evacuate the camp, the Palestinian woman confides that she lives with the hope that, one day, she will return to her own country. This year, after (unbelievably) the one-year anniversary of the genocide of Gazans that began on October 7, 2023, teaching this novel has had profound resonance. It has revealed to my students that persecution against Palestinians is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it continues to divest many of their homeland as the world looks on.

Indeed, the question of where one’s home is is a persistent theme in The Night Counter. This is a query the Abdullahs find themselves faced with when it becomes clear that they are being targeted by their own government because they are Arab Muslims in post-9/11 America. This, after four generations of the family have been in the United States, with a fifth-generation-child soon to arrive. State surveillance is the unknown soundtrack to the family’s lives as the crackle of static interferes with telephonic conversations. In fact, this is why their relative – the old person on the bus – dies alone and away from the family. The character’s repeated attempts to reach the family are thwarted by phone taps authorized by the government. It is state-sanctioned Islamophobia and racism that gets in the way of this character being with his kin in his final moments.

The Night Counter brings together themes of state persecution, familial conflict, transnationalism, and Arab American history, but it also has a strong feminist perspective. Fatima’s house in Lebanon – the one she never sees again – was a gift to her from her mother, one that would allow Fatima to have a place to return to should things go awry in America. This matrilineal offering is in keeping with Scheherazade’s own legacy. As we may recall, the storyteller offered herself up in place of her sister, Dunyazad, who was to marry King Shahryar. The reason Scheherazade wished to replace Dunyazad was because the marriage meant certain death, the king finding little reason to prolong his unions were he to be displeased in the least with his brides. It is Scheherazade’s enchanting storytelling (the basis of One Thousand and One Nights) that causes Shahryar to fall in love with her, thereby keeping her and other women from being murdered.

While I tell my students that this is proof enough of the power of literature to save lives, the other lesson one learns is that Scheherazade grapples with state power, as represented by the king, through the use of culture (and wins). Arguably, Scheherazade’s story ends with the preservation of heteropatriarchy and not with the demise of the king (or the state). Yet, in demonstrating that stories and their telling preserve heritage while state-sanctioned violence looms, both The Night Counter and its ancient inspiration ask us to consider how even those made marginal hold on to what is most important to them and preserve it by passing it on in the stories they tell for more than a thousand and one nights. 

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R. Benedito Ferrão was born in Kuwait and has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary and winner of the Jinlan Liu APIA Faculty Research Award. Ferrão’s academic writing appears in Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Research in African Literatures, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias among others. His fiction and creative nonfiction can be read in Mizna, João Roque Literary Journal, and Riksha. He is also a regular contributor to the journalistic platform Scroll.in.