JEDDAH: Following the international success of “As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow,” Syrian-Canadian author Zoulfa Katouh, who was raised between Dubai and Switzerland, returns with “The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue,” following Jihad Dabbagh, a Syrian-American girl who loses her ability to see color in the wake of her mother’s sudden death.
While her debut brought the devastation of war and displacement to young readers’ attention, Katouh’s new young adult fiction depicts the emotional reality of being a Syrian child trying to grow up under the weight of prejudice in a contemporary American context.
Grief-stricken and increasingly isolated, with a married sister who has moved away and a father who has retreated into his own grief, Jihad turns to a rediscovered heirloom, a sketchbook that seems to hold something magical.
She starts using it to paint “miraculous murals” all over New York that resurrect her mother’s life in Syria, returning color to her world one painting at a time.
Tensions arise when she is transferred to the elite, overwhelmingly white Braxton Academy for her senior year. Jihad finds her hijab and her name turned into targets by classmates who treat her faith and identity with suspicion.
The author does not flinch from depicting the Islamophobia and xenophobia in American institutions supposedly built to nurture youths: the slurs disguised as jokes, the teachers who look away, and the exhausting calculus of when to explain yourself and when to simply endure. With this urgent issue as its propulsive core, the novel’s heart is in the right place.
Jihad’s restraint in the face of her tormentors — while frustrating for the reader who wants to see her be vocal and fight back — seems to argue that healing through art can be its own form of resistance, that does not require meeting cruelty with cruelty.
Katouh’s decision to name the protagonist Jihad is itself an act of reclamation, restoring dignity to a name that has spent decades distorted by Islamophobic rhetoric and the legacy of the so-called War on Terror.
With the fragile architectures of adolescent friendship under scrutiny in the novel, the friendship arc between Jihad and Jamie — a classmate of Vietnamese heritage who is clear-eyed where his peers are clouded by prejudice — is the novel’s most alive thread, both tender and complicated.
Compared with the visceral immediacy of “As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow,” the latest feels more studied and self-conscious, sometimes to its own detriment. Some creative and stylistic choices, rather than reinforce the novel’s lyricism and urgent themes, potentially distance readers from scenes that ought to devastate or offer consolation.
Even so, “The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue” remains a compassionate portrait of grief, healing through art, and the complicated journey of becoming yourself after the world has decided it knows exactly who you are.
