These Impossible Things

Bilquis “Kees” Saeed is one of the protagonists of These Impossible Things, and she is best friends with the other two protagonists, Jenna and Malak. Kees is a highly ambitious lawyer and is focused on ideas of justice. At the beginning of the novel, she is finishing her legal studies, which she then applies to help immigrants, migrants, and refugees at her law firm. This is work that demands high focus and long hours for little pay. Though Kees’s intense academic focus and ambition leads others, such as her sister, Saba, to see her as cold or unfeeling, Kees’s primary struggle in the novel arises from an excess of feeling, not a lack.

At the beginning of the novel, Kees keeps her love for her partner, Harry, a secret from her family because she does not want to lose their approval. She struggles with this because she cares deeply for Harry as well as her family. It is not until after seeing how much Jacob suffers in the aftermath of his breakup with Malak that Kees decides that she won’t break up with Harry to earn that familial approval, instead opting to accept his marriage proposal. When Kees reveals to her family that she intends to marry a white Catholic who has no intention of converting to Islam, they reject her.

Kees grieves the loss of her family’s affection in the latter half of the novel, and this grief is compounded by the ongoing fracturing of her relationship with Malak and Jenna. She blocks out this emotional pain by throwing herself into her work, which puts strain on her relationship with Harry. Malak’s decision to reach out for Kees’s help at the end of the novel pushes Kees to recall the importance of her friends to her life, as well as appreciate her strong romantic connection with Harry, who supports her and tries to help her through her emotional struggles. At Jenna’s canceled wedding, Kees fully expresses her anger and hurt to her mother, which is a potential first step toward a reconciliation between Kees and her family.

Jenna Khatieb is one of the protagonists of These Impossible Things. Her best friends, Malak and Kees, are the novel’s other protagonists. Jenna is, at the beginning of the novel, the most lighthearted of the three friends. She likes to perform and thrives on attention, which leads her to her acting hobby, at which she excels. Jenna is bisexual and confident in her sexuality at the beginning of the novel, though she chooses not to have penetrative sex. She frames this as adhering to a technical framework of virginity, which she considers important for a future marriage to a Muslim man.

Jenna struggles in the middle and latter parts of the novel after she is raped by one of her casual sexual partners, who disregards her refusal of penetrative sex. Jenna’s self-esteem suffers when she considers how she did not fight back against her attacker because she was confused about the circumstances of the rape, even as it was taking place. This leads her to experience a protracted period of unhappiness that her friend Lewis later likens to “someone [having] reached inside her and turned off all the lights” (367). In order to manage what Jenna feels is her own lack of responsibility, which is tied up in her self-recrimination about the rape, she enters into a relationship with Mo. On the surface, Mo seems to be an ideal partner, but Jenna does not love him and is not attracted to him.  

Despite this, Jenna nearly marries Mo. However, on her wedding day, Kees and Malak confront her about marrying someone whom she does not love. Jenna, aided by her friends, finds the courage to admit to her mother that she was sexually assaulted, and they call off the wedding. At the end of the novel, Jenna begins to address her trauma, and she still has to face her former fiancé and explain her decision to call off the wedding. Yet, her jokes and quips with her friends in the novel’s final chapters show that Jenna will return to her earlier sense of happiness and comfort with herself.

Harry DuVaughn is Kees’s love interest in the novel. At the beginning of the novel, he is her boyfriend; later, they become engaged and married according to Islamic tradition, though they are not yet legally married under British law. Harry is a largely static character in the novel, one who does not investigate his reactions or thought processes. Rather, he represents Kees’s struggles between her family’s expectations and her romantic desires.

Harry symbolizes British hegemonic privilege and power in the text: He is white, rich, and Christian. Unlike his race, wealth, and sex, however, Harry’s devout Catholicism is highlighted in the text as something that brings him closer to Kees rather than distancing him from her. Though the pair have two different religions, they feel close due to their mutual worship of a monotheistic God, highlighting the theme of The Similarities Between Islam and Christianity. When Kees attends church with Harry and his family in the novel, therefore, she finds only the trappings of Catholicism to be off-putting compared to her experiences with Islam, but she finds Harry’s overall devotion admirable.

Unlike many of the other white characters in the novel, Harry puts in considerable effort to understanding Kees’s cultural and religious background. He supports Kees by pointing out when his well-meaning family has erred in their gestures toward acceptance, sometimes in instances that Kees herself would let pass without comment, as when his mother purchases “nonalcoholic” wine that technically contains a very small portion of alcohol in it. At the end of the novel, Harry protests Kees’s harsh words against her mother, symbolizing how he understands Abida’s cultural expectations about filial piety. Though he technically opposes her actions in this moment, Kees sees this understanding as overall signifying Harry’s broad understanding and acceptance of her culture, rather than presenting his understanding as something that operates merely on the surface.