"You suggested I write this. You, the writer, couldn't. You tried writing the refugee story. Many times, many different ways. You failed. And failed again. Maybe failed better. Still, you couldn't. More than two years after you and I met in Lesbos, you were still trying. You tackled it from one direction, then another, to no avail."
The person writing this is the protagonist of the story. The "you" to which it is directed is the author of the book. This is where the novel takes an unexpected direction away from simple narrative fiction. Suddenly, without warning, it takes a hard left into meta-fiction in which the author has inserted himself into the fictional story being told. These lines are the opening sentences to the second chapter and come after Mina has already been introduced in a standard first-person narrative account. This accusatory outburst to the author whose story is being read thought Mina is insisting he was incapable of doing so introduces a complexity that the novel will explore. The question become whether words are really those of Mina or are they the creator of Mina talking to himself and, ultimately, aren't both of those possibilities really the exact same thing. Ultimately, Mina's story is all about identity, so answering this question correction may be more essential than rhetorical.
"I'm not a man. I was born male, but that wasn't who I was."
Mina is answering a question posed by a young girl. The girl's query as to whether Mina is a man is actually a misunderstanding that is explained by the girl's parents. That explanation is a story about a male Muslim doctor who is forbidden to treat women in his village, but secretly treats them anyway by dressing up as a female. Mina is a doctor and thus the girl naturally assumes that any female doctor is really a man in drag. Which, for some, would exactly describe Mina at that moment. Except that Mina actually is a trans woman who is simply honestly answering the question she has miscomprehended. What makes this scene even more significant, and complex, is it leads directly into another chapter in which Mina is addressing the author. And this address describes are several incidents from the author's life—the author who has created the Mina who is addressing—that reveal gender dysphoria in which the author experiments with dressing as a woman. Which leads to questioning if the Mina who is directly addressing the reader is actually the author addressing himself, then is the Mina who admits that a man isn't who she really was actually the making a confession through fictional distancing.
"I should write to make sense of my world, to grasp my story. Writing simplifies life, you said, forces coherence on discordant narratives, unless it doesn't, and most of the time it doesn't, because really, how can one make sense of the senseless?"
This is Mina addressing the author. Complaining about the author telling her to write her own story on the alleged basis that it simplifies it. But if this novel is really disguised autobiography and Mina is merely an avatar representing the author and, given the distancing fiction allows, the result is anything but simple. The result is a discordant narrative that maybe should force coherence on itself, but actually does the opposite. And that confused ambiguity makes this quote all the more appropriate and meaningful. In part, because it comes early enough in the book to allow the attentive reader to begin questioning whether the straightforward narrative of the first chapter is really the story the novel is telling.
