Bushra Rehman’s stunningly beautiful coming-of-age novel “Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion” is set in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, which was enshrined in pop culture by Paul Simon’s 1972 hit “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” Rehman’s exuberant young protagonist, Razia, knows the song well, although it puzzles her. “Why would Paul Simon be singing about Corona?” she muses. “I didn’t see many white people there unless they were policemen or firemen, and I didn’t think Paul Simon had ever been one of those.”
In the late 1980s, Razia’s Corona is home to a growing Pakistani Muslim community, along with Dominican and Korean immigrants. The earlier, largely Jewish and Italian, immigrant residents of Simon’s day have moved on to wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.
Rehman evokes time and place like a poet, with descriptions both precise and lyrical, making the streets of this working-class neighborhood come alive on the page. One house has so many roses that “they grew up and over, through the fence like they were some kind of convicts trying to scale the walls”; during the evening call to prayer, she writes, “everyone in the neighborhood tilted their heads and listened. Out of basement apartments and sixth-floor walk-ups, Muslim men started walking toward the sound, pulling their topis out of the back seats of their pockets.”
At the novel’s opening, it’s 1985 and Razia is a precocious fifth grader just starting to bridle at the restrictions placed on her as a girl — by her parents and by other members of her first-generation conservative, religious community. While boys are allowed to play freely, their misdemeanors forgiven, girls are expected to help their mothers with the housework, raising younger siblings, training for a future as wives and mothers with no options for a career or other path. Forbidden from cutting her hair or wearing clothing more revealing than the salwar kameez that her mother buys for her, Razia is jealous of other teenage girls “decked out in makeup like tropical birds, laughing and being loud.”
However, Razia’s mother recognizes her daughter’s intelligence and allows her time for homework, reading and study, which ultimately leads to Razia testing into the prestigious, public Stuyvesant High School.
The only member of her immediate circle accepted at the school, Razia travels alone to Manhattan, which opens her eyes to a new world. Still, Rehman keeps it real. The school is its own insular community, made up of various cliques of teenagers and not always sympathetic adults, like the math teacher who demands every time she gets an answer wrong, “How did you get into Stuyvesant?”
Here Razia falls in love with a classmate, coming into her own queer identity and wondering where she fits in. Rehman again proves her bona fides as a New York writer by making the Strand bookstore (“where barricades of books lined the sidewalk”) and its shelves of titles by queer authors the first place Razia begins to see herself as part of a larger community.
When a conservative “Aunty” spots Razia on a date and reacts with odium, Razia’s journey into adulthood becomes more perilous. Where a lesser book might have stooped to stereotypes about Muslims or immigrants, Rehman shows readers the complexities within Razia’s community. Individuals are allowed to be surprising, even to themselves, in this deft and empathetic novel.
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