Characters Death in the Mouth: Original Horror by People of Color Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart

Jolie Toomajan: Witness to Transformation in Death in the Mouth

Overview

Jolie Toomajan is a fifteen‑year‑old Armenian girl who narrates the third chapter of Death in the Mouth, “Water Goes, Sand Remains.” Living through the Defense of Van during the Armenian Genocide, she witnesses her mother Mayr and the other women of the Garden neighborhood turn into a lake creature. Jolie’s story is one of traumatic observation, the unraveling of family certainty, and the struggle to hold onto a recognizable self when the people around her become something else. The chapter weaves Jolie’s immediate experience with Armenian monastic folktales, each echoing themes of destruction, transformation, and haunting.

Plot Role

Jolie serves as the reader’s eyes and ears inside the besieged city of Van. Her narration grounds the supernatural events—the mothers’ metamorphosis, the lake’s sentient attacks—in the mundane details of a girl who plays word games with names to calm herself and studies coffee grounds for omens. She is not a hero who fights; she is a witness who runs, hides, and eventually flees. Her perspective makes the horror intimate: she notes the raw‑pink hands of the women, the muddy slime leaking from Mayr’s lips after eating lake fern, and the sound of soldiers being choked by inky water. Through Jolie, the reader experiences the dissolution of a community and the birth of something inhuman.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Jolie’s primary motivation is to understand what is happening to her mother and to survive. She is observant and introspective, traits shown by her habit of “playing a game with our names” to lead them somewhere good—a coping mechanism against the fear of losing her father. She is also loyal: she follows Mayr to the lake at night and later returns to the Garden to find Lili, despite the danger. Her inquisitiveness drives her to ask direct questions, like “What are you?” when Mayr eats the seaweed, but her mother deflects with the simple assertion “I’m your mother.” Jolie’s fear is palpable—she vomits into flowers, she runs from soldiers, she hides in grasses—yet she never stops looking. That persistence makes her a reliable though traumatized narrator. Notably, she rejects the passive role assigned to girls: when the men tell Mayr she will cook and sew, Jolie notices her mother’s silent defiance, and Jolie herself begins to piece together the women’s secret activities.

Chronological Arc

Jolie’s arc moves from ignorance to horrifying knowledge and finally to flight. The chapter opens with her father missing and men planning defense in her home. She observes the mothers sneaking to the lake and follows them, witnessing the first attack: seaweed whips from the lake and strikes soldiers. Later, she sees Mayr’s transformed hands and her ritual of eating and vomiting lake fern. Jolie is then forced to flee when soldiers enter her house; she escapes as black water chokes them. She stumbles to the lake and hides among grasses, where she encounters soldiers again and sees the lake creature rise. The chapter ends with Mayr asserting her identity even as she changes. Jolie’s final position is ambiguous—she survives the immediate moment but is left without her friend Lili, her home destroyed, and her mother no longer wholly human.

Relationships

Mayr (mother): The central relationship. Jolie watches Mayr’s transformation with a mixture of terror and desperate hope that she remains the same person. Mayr insists on her motherhood even as her hands become raw and her body part‑creature. The bond is strained but not broken; Jolie clings to the question “What are you?” even as Mayr refuses a full answer.

Lili Vahanian: Jolie’s friend and neighbor. They cling to each other during the night watches, and Jolie tries to protect Lili by pulling her away from danger. Lili disappears during the bombardment, and later Jolie finds her house empty except for a corpse, implying Lili’s death. Her loss deepens Jolie’s sense of isolation.

The other mothers (Mrs. Vahanian, Mrs. Krikorian, etc.): They form a collective of transformation, all “changing” together. Jolie views them with suspicion and awe, recognizing that they share a secret knowledge she cannot access.

Father: Absent for most of the story. Jolie dreams of him with flies in his eyes, symbolizing her fear that he is dead. His absence leaves her without a stable paternal figure and forces her to rely on her mother, who is herself becoming unstable.

Key Decisions and Consequences

  1. Following Mayr to the lake. This decision exposes Jolie to the truth of her mother’s metamorphosis. It shatters her innocence but also gives her the knowledge she later uses to survive. The consequence is a painful awareness that cannot be undone.

  2. Staying to watch when Mayr tells her not to look. Jolie’s refusal to obey (“Don’t look. Don’t look.” … “I looked.”) asserts her agency. It leads directly to her witnessing the lake creature and the soldiers’ deaths, which imprints a traumatic image that may haunt her forever.

  3. Fleeing the house when the soldier discovers her. After the black water kills the soldier, Jolie runs into the deserted street. This decision likely saves her life, but it also separates her from any remaining community and from Mayr. She ends the chapter alone on the lakeshore.

  4. Hiding in the grasses rather than surrendering. When she encounters five soldiers, Jolie chooses to hide. That moment of stillness leads to the lake’s attack, which she survives, but it leaves her “a nameless corpse” in potential. The chapter ends with her still hiding.

Theme and Symbol Connections

  • Transformation: Jolie’s entire story is about bodies and identities being remade. The mothers become lake creatures; the monasteries are repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt; the folktale of Tamar shows a woman transformed by grief. Jolie herself is transformed from a girl who plays name‑games into a witness who understands that “some deaths didn’t leave remnants but instead created something entirely new.”
    See the transformation theme page.

  • Trauma and Memory: Jolie’s narration breaks between present action and historical interludes, mirroring how trauma fractures linear memory. She notes that “each of us remembers a different part, and that is how we keep the memory whole without losing our minds.” This hints that her story is a collective coping mechanism.
    See trauma and memory.

  • Identity and Otherness: Mayr’s question “What are you?” becomes a two‑way interrogation. Jolie must decide whether her mother remains “mother” despite becoming a lake creature. The theme resonates with the immigrant and assimilation motifs in other anthology chapters (e.g., the Good Girls in Chapter 1 who forget their mothers).
    See identity and otherness.

  • Revenge and Justice: The lake creature’s attacks on the soldiers can be read as a form of ecological vengeance. Jolie does not participate, but her mother is part of that violence. The chapter leaves ambiguous whether this transformation offers justice or simply more destruction.
    See revenge and justice.

  • Family Bonds: Mayr’s repeated statement “I’m your mother” is a desperate anchor. Jolie’s bond with her mother persists even as Mayr’s body changes. Likewise, Lili’s loss shows how genocide destroys family networks.
    See family bonds.

5 Book‑Specific Questions and Answers

1. Why does Jolie play a game with her family’s names?
She does it to soothe herself when she cannot sleep, trying to “lead them somewhere good.” The game is a mental escape from the fear that her father may never return, and it reveals her imaginative, detail‑oriented mind.

2. What does the lake fern represent in Jolie’s chapter?
The lake fern is the substance that enables the mothers’ transformation. Mayr eats it and vomits it back, indicating a cycle of consumption and renewal. The fern symbolizes the lake’s power to reconstitute human flesh into something aquatic and vengeful.

3. How does the folktale of Tamar parallel Jolie’s experience?
Tamar the “siren” swims across the lake but loses her lover, then is haunted by his corpse. Like Jolie, Tamar is a witness to death and transformation, and her name is linked to signal fires—just as Jolie’s mother Mayr becomes a beacon of change. Both stories explore how women are punished for longing and how grief can become monstrous.

4. What is the significance of the mothers being assigned to cook and sew?
The men assign the women domestic roles, but the mothers secretly undergo metamorphosis instead. This subverts the patriarchal attempt to control them; they use the cover of obedience to carry out a transformation that grants them agency—and the power to fight back.

5. Does Jolie fully accept that Mayr is still her mother?
The text suggests she wants to believe it but remains uncertain. Mayr insists she is the same person, but Jolie’s question “What are you?” implies a fracture. The ending does not resolve the tension; Jolie flees without a final answer, leaving the reader to interpret whether maternal identity can survive such a radical change.

For more about the overall plot and ending, see the ending explained and questions and answers pages.