Loss

Sabaa Tahir organizes her novel around Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” – a poem about coming to terms with loss – in order to reinforce the message that, no matter how disastrous our misfortunes seem, we can find the strength to survive them. Bishop’s poem appears in its entirety over the course of the novel, in the form of epigraphs, but it is also the subject of the English essay which Noor has to write, so that the characters’ responses to it aid the reader’s interpretation. Salahudin fights hard to save the motel because he identifies it with Misbah, and feels that he “can’t lose this place. Not after losing her” (77). When Noor explains to him that the song which his mother loved (“The Wanderer”) is about how “you shouldn’t put value in things. In places,” he complains that she sounds “like the narrator...