The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher is one of the stories of Palestinian diaspora that I have been particularly excited to get hold of. Reviews made it sound right up my street – and it absolutely is. It celebrates language and storytelling; questions ideas of truth and honesty; features queerness; and is beautifully written.

Betty Rumanni tells the story of her life so far, starting with the day of her birth. At first she wasn’t breathing, doctors thought she was dead, then she took her first breath and her skin turned cobalt blue. Betty’s skin has been bright blue ever since.

This is not some alternative universe where some people are blue-skinned. Betty is one-of-a-kind. And while it’s a clear metaphor for standing out as an Arab American “soon after 9/11”, it also makes for a kind of modern myth.

It becomes clear that Betty is telling her story to a specific person, her great aunt Nuha. Or more accurately, Nuha’s grave. Betty is trying to figure out whether to stay in America to take care of her mother, or to follow her girlfriend overseas to build a new life together. But more than that, she is trying to piece together her aunt’s story and that of the Rumanni family.

Betty’s knowledge of the Rumanni family largely comes from Nuha’s bedtime stories. There’s a family feud relating to a soap factory in Nablus; a girl who follows a silver gazelle to Haifa; even a tattooed ogre. And mixed in with these stories of Palestine are Bible stories, retold by someone who believes in God but does not feel God has ever been there for her. How do these tales relate to the friction between her grandmother Saeeda and great aunt Nuha in America? Are these the roots of Betty’s mother Tashi’s fragile mental health?

“Thus Babel became the predecessor of every faraway city that would ever be translated to a plume of smoke. It also became the point at which the human family begins to fork. When we humans finally tore our gazes from the rubble, and our shock began to harden into outrage, the Lord noticed that there were a million of us and only one of it, so the Lord made some hasty decisions. It assigned us to districts and put up checkpoints and required ID cards to be stamped and counterstamped by approved stampers only, and it changed the colours of our skin and implemented a randomized system of worship requirements, and gave some of us all the timber and took away all the water from others, and for good measure, it twisted our words and consonants and vowels like putty.”

Saeeda and Nuha lived through the Nakba. When Nuha’s landlord wants to sell the Oakland apartment building she lives in, she clings on to her home as long as she can. Not because it is a particularly nice or well-located home. She simply does not want to be forced out of her home. “Not again. And not for someone else’s profit.”

This is a story about women. Although Betty’s father is part of her life, she has been raised largely by her mother, grandmother and great aunt. What this is not is a story of immigrants scraping by in America. Nuha is a retired teacher. Tashi is a scientist. Betty is an archivist. They have comfortable homes, food on the table. What they struggle with is being torn from their history, racism and being othered.

“And because they are not just their names and birth dates and government-issued identification numbers, but also my parents, there is no ending to that story…They were just two people, speaking different languages, having lost a way to communicate with their future…But the future emerges anyway, never as expected. There I was, a blue syllable pulling their stories together again.”

Betty’s blue skin amplifies these struggles. She is stared at wherever she goes. Harassed with anonymous letters. Subjected to endless medical tests. And this is what makes the prospect of leaving her quiet little corner of the world for her girlfriend a difficult decision to make.

Cypher’s language is beautiful. I bookmarked several quotes and each time I look back at those, I find myself reading on for a few pages, enjoying the language again. I can definitely see why this book got a lot of praise when it was published two years ago. And I’m surprised that it is already hard to get hold of – I could only find it secondhand and there were very few copies even then. I can only guess it had a short print run and hasn’t had a reprint yet. I hope that changes, as I really would highly recommend this book.

First published 2023 by Penguin Random House in the US.

Source: Bought secondhand from Thrift Books in Atlanta.