Jasmine

Half-Face drives Jasmine through Florida, which reminds her of “monsoon season in Punjab” (109). They stop at the Flamingo Court, a run-down, dilapidated motel where Half-Face leers at Jasmine, who exits the car as fast as she can. A man at the motel calls Half-Face by the name “Bubba,” which Jasmine at first mistakes for the Indian name “Baba.” Half-Face makes it clear that Jasmine will be staying with him in his room.

When Half-Face opens the motel room door, he puts Jasmine’s bag inside, then tells her that she is clearly “entering because you want to. No coercion involved” (111). When Jasmine thanks him and offers to shake his hand, he pulls her into the room and paws at her. When she does not respond to his advances, Half-Face accuses Jasmine of being a “cold fish” (111) who “don’t like white men” (111).

When Jasmine mentions her husband, Half-Face becomes outright violent, dragging her to the television screen and slamming her head against it until the screen cracks. He throws open her suitcase and rummages through her things, mocking her husband’s suit and Jasmine’s mission in America. He tells her that she would not be in this situation had she not insisted on carrying her husband’s suitcase hallway across the world.

Half-Face makes clear to Jasmine that she has no choice in what he is about to do to her. He gleefully tells her that “there ain’t nobody here to help you, so my advice is to lie back and enjoy it” (115). Nothing changes his mind, not even Jasmine pleading, “Please don’t do anything to me” (115). Half-Face threatens to kill Jasmine if she does not submit to rape.

As she looks at Half-Face, Jasmine realizes that “For the first time in my life I understood what evil was about. It was about not being human” (116). Half-Face violently rapes Jasmine as she stares at her statue of Ganpati, praying to survive long enough to commit suicide.

After the rape, Jasmine goes into the bathroom, takes a hot shower, and vomits. A part of her mind marvels at how easy it is to access hot water in a standing shower, even in a building where the most terrible of crimes are committed. She cleans her body thoroughly, preparing to kill herself.

She reaches for the knife given to her by Kingsland and holds it to her throat, although she cannot see her reflection in the steamy bathroom window. Jasmine questions if suicide is the right choice: “I could not let my personal dishonor disrupt my mission” (117). She has not had a chance to go to the college campus and burn her husband’s suit. Instead of killing herself, she slices her tongue with the knife.

Jasmine exits the bathroom to find Half-Face asleep on the bed. With her mouth full of blood, she stands over his body, puts the knife against his throat, and slices at his neck. Half-Face staggers to his feet, but cannot stop the blood from his wounds. He falls to his knees on the bed, and Jasmine throws a bedspread over him, continually stabbing him through the fabric.

After Half-Face is dead, Jasmine purifies herself in the shower once more. She is careful to wipe her fingerprints off of anything she had touched. In the quiet night, Jasmine takes the suitcase around the back of the motel to the large metal trash bins and sets it on fire. Then she walks down the front drive of the motel and begins her American journey.

The novel’s theme of violence and bodily harm continues, as Jasmine’s rape echoes in many ways the suicide bombing that killed Prakash. Of course, many things distinguish these episodes: Prakash dies during a larger conflict between religious groups, while Jasmine’s assault only ideological component is the ability of predators to target vulnerable undocumented people. Nevertheless, the novel dwells on the physicality of violence, its disruption of the human body, and the fact that both personal and impersonal attacks end up creating horrific bodily contact. There is something disturbing about the parallels weights of Prakash’s dead body and Half-Face’s assaultive one, both of which end up on top of Jasmine.

Surviving the violent rape forces Jasmine to make a choice: accept the idea that a woman assaulted in this way has lost all value and so kill herself, or reclaim power and agency in spite of what she has suffered. Underscoring the choice with symbolic imagery, the novel describes Jasmine being unable to see her reflection in the mirror when she is about to kill herself—she has literally lost her humanity and personhood. Though she does not take the most drastic step of slicing her throat, she does cut her tongue with a knife, an action that is a clear allusion (though Jasmine does not know it) to the Greek myth of Philomena, whose rapist cuts out her tongue so that she cannot speak of what has happened. But Jasmine does not go through with it. Instead, she seizes her opportunity to exact brutal revenge on Half-Face and escape into America without a trace, acting out the second part of the Philomena myth, in which the wronged woman takes violent revenge on her rapist and then flees in the form of a nightingale.