18 July 2023 – RM Watters
Before I begin this in-depth character analysis, be advised it comes with many SPOILERS. If you have yet to read this incredible series by epic fantasy author SA Chakraborty, I recommend you go and pick up book 1 (The City of Brass) and start reading–and don’t come back here until you’ve finished the entire trilogy. Trust me, it’s worth it.
The novels are hefty (each book in the trilogy running between 526-752 pages). The plots and characters are deeply complex–such that I can never do them justice when discussing them, but I’ll do my level best. This is fiction of truly epic proportions, which is my favorite kind to read. It is so good that I devoured the trilogy in under three weeks, devoting every bit of free time (and losing a great deal of sleep) to reading these novels with the same ferocity of a thirsty man who comes upon an oasis in the desert.
I’m an avid reader, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything that captivated me this thoroughly. Which is why I’m even bothering to write this mini-review as a preface to my character analysis: both as a warning and an invitation into a world of magic and intrigue the likes of which I have not seen since George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series came into being. (And, if I’m being honest…I think it far surpasses GRRM’s series. There, I said it–flay me alive, if you must. Just be advised, I don’t stay dead for long and then I’m back at it again, scheming my next bit of mischief.)
Also, if you have read and loved Chakraborty’s trilogy and its companion, The River of Silver: Tales from the Daevabad Trilogy, but still want to see more of Manizheh’s story, check out my Daevabad Fan Fiction.
And now, without further ado…I begin my character analysis, abundant in SPOILERS from the entire trilogy. Continue at your own risk–you have been warned. 😉
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Banu Manizheh e-Nahid is first introduced in book 1, The City of Brass, as the mother of Nahri who is believed to have been murdered by ifrit within hours of Nahri’s birth. That would make Nahri the last remaining member of the Nahid bloodline, and her powerful healing abilities are as coveted as were her mother’s before her. As we discover at the end of The City of Brass, however, Manizheh is alive and well (relatively speaking). We learn in book 2, The Kingdom of Copper, how she faked her own death and has been living in hiding ever since. This is when we actually get to meet Manizheh and learn of her decades-long plot to take Daevabad back from the Qahtani usurpers who stole it from her family fourteen centuries ago.
At first, Manizheh seems like someone who would be an ally for Nahri. She’s working with Darayavahoush e-Afshin (Dara), Nahri’s first friend in the the djinn world, after resurrecting him from the dead and freeing him from Suleiman’s curse. And, I mean, she’s introduced to us as Nahri’s mother and the most powerful Nahid healer since Anahid–should be no problems there, right? Well, unfortunately, Manizheh will prove to become a greater villain and threat to Nahri and the people of Daevabad than Ghassan al Qahtani ever was. Cue many layers of heartbreak, both for Nahri and Manizheh and all the people they’ve ever dared to love.
(Damn, this story breaks me–but in a good way. Like being in a cleansing fire.)
While we have already caught glimpses of Manizheh’s fear-factor and power-hunger, we first start to really see the cracks in her psyche in chapter 19 of The Kingdom of Copper. She has just unveiled the poison she has finally succeeded in crafting, which will be used to assassinate Daevabad’s tyrannical king. Ghassan is another complicated villain whose love for his children and his city is apparent, but whose utter ruthlessness and coldhearted willingness to torture and manipulate others to maintain his power makes him at first appear to be far worse than Manizheh could ever be. After all, he is the main reason she has had every person she loved stripped away from her; the main reason she was pushed to such limits that she had to stage her own brutal murder and go into hiding; the main reason she has the potential to become a villain in the first place.
In fact, there’s not much to like about the jealous and possessive djinn king Manizheh has developed this vendetta against. Seeing all that he has done, especially all the ways he has hurt Manizheh directly, one cannot help but to side with her and want to see him taken down. Except, the vaporous poison she created to take him down is brutal. To be fair, the Gerziri prisoners she tests it on had just tried to murder her, so I’m not feeling a great deal of pity for them: all’s fair in love and war, after all. But if anyone deserves to die in such a way, it is Ghassan al Qahtani–the man who tortured her brother to keep her in line, who denied her happiness with the man she loved because that man was not him. And considering the poison’s speed and effectiveness, its as merciful a death as she can possibly grant to her sworn enemy.
Except that it can’t be contained once its been released. Instead of dissipating, it will target the relics of every Geziri man, woman, or child who has the misfortune to stumble upon it as the vapor spreads and intensifies indefinitely.
When Dara recognizes the danger of this new poison, he goes to speak with Manizheh right away, hoping to warn her of the potential for it to target innocent Geziris along with the ones they need to take down. Her reaction is not the one Dara was expecting of the woman he serves and reveres: she admits she was aware of this problem and that she has been “trying to find a way to contain its spread and the length of time that it’s potent… But I haven’t had much success, and we are out of time” (319). Dara comes to realize then that, when Kaveh (the grand wazir) releases the poison to kill Ghassan, it could not only kill every Geziri within the palace, but within the entire city: thousands, guilty or innocent, will be sentenced to a swift yet painful death.
“And what of it?” Manizheh asks coldly. “How many Daevas died when Zaydi al Qahtani took Daevabad? How many of your friends and relatives, Afshin? […] The sandflies are not complete fools. At least a few will figure out what is happening and take out their relics. Which is why the timing must be perfect” (319). She has a point, but it becomes clear as Dara continues trying to talk her out of going down this ruthless path of vengeance, that Manizheh is driven by prejudice as much as she is by her sense of righteousness. In fact, that sense of righteousness feeds her prejudice, and vice-versa. As reprehensible as it is, if one knows her people’s history with the Geziris, one cannot help but to understand where she is coming from. But it’s still wrong, and this is when we really begin to see the downward spiral of her character arc and can predict that she will become the next villain once Ghassan is neutralized.
In fact, she turns out to be the true villain of the Daevabad Trilogy.
Nevertheless, Chakraborty does a superb job writing Manizheh’s character arc and showing us that we are not to hate the villain. Because to hate is to become like the villains themselves. Hate is the root cause of all villainhood. In order to avoid becoming like the villains, we must learn instead to understand and, by understanding, to forgive. Manizheh’s story is the perfect place to begin that path toward understanding, because she did not start out a villain. If you walk her path alongside her, see what she could have been if only everything had not been so cruelly taken from her, only then can you begin to understand what makes her not only a sympathetic villain, but one of the most compelling villains in literary history.
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The truth of how much has been taken from her and how far she is willing to go to get it back, finally begins to come out in the open when Manizheh tells Dara, “You don’t get to pine for peace with your family after what you did to mine.” He thinks she is talking about Nahri, who would never agree with what Manizheh is about to do, but she says, “I’m not talking about my daughter… I’m talking about my son.” (322)
Her son, revealed to us at the very end of The City of Brass, is Jamshid: son of the grand wazir, Kaveh e-Pramukh. This is news to Dara, however, and the implications for him are devastating. Shortly before he was killed, Dara had riddled Jamshid with arrows leaving him nearly paralyzed and in a great deal of pain. This is why Dara is incredulous when Manizheh reveals this secret to him in The Kingdom of Copper: Jamshid doesn’t appear to have the healing abilities that any child of a Nahid would possess. If he had, he should have healed from those injuries almost instantly. With a great deal of genuine agony, Manizheh explains, “He has no abilities because when he was less than a week old, I had to brand my infant child with a tattoo that would inhibit them. In order to give him a life, a peaceful future in the Zariaspa that I loved, I had no choice but to cut him off from his very birth-right” (322).
Dara, wracked with guilt, refuses to believe her words and the evidence that has been staring him in the face for quite some time. With all the nobility of her bearing fighting against the pain of a mother who has been separated from her child his whole life, she goes on, “He’s my son…. And because of your heedlessness when it came to my daughter, you nearly killed him. You stole from him the only future he ever wanted and left him wracked with such physical pain Kaveh says there are days he can’t leave his bed…. What is the punishment for that, Afshin? For sending arrows into a man you should have greeted with your face in the dust?” (322).
The gravity of her words and the sincerity behind them hits the mark, leaving Dara–an ancient Daeva warrior whose sole purpose has always been to protect and serve the Nahids–horrified by what he has done. At last accepting the truth, he drops to his knees and whispers an apology, to which she replies, “I don’t want your apology. I want my children. I want my city. I want the throne, and the seal Zaydi al Qahtani stole from my ancestors. I want my generation of Daevas to stop suffering because of the actions of yours. And quite frankly, Afshin, I do not give a damn if you approve of my methods” (323). For all her apparent deceitfulness on certain matters, it is in these moments–when she speaks of her children and the suffering of her people–that Manizheh is the most authentic and honest. As the Banu Nahida, Manizheh sees herself as the mother to all the Daevas. For all her faults, no one can deny the love she bears for them. And what mother would not burn down the entire world to protect and defend her children?
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Many of the most beloved and reviled characters in the trilogy made me think in depth, but none made me think as deeply as Manizheh; none made me feel as much empathy and sorrow and disappointment as Manizheh–not even Nahri, who is definitely the wiser and more sensible of the two. Yet, there are so many similarities between the two women–similarities that even Nahri understands, leading her to lament “I’m sorry you and I didn’t grow up in a time of peace, where we could have lived happily together. Where you could have raised Jamshid and me and taught us the Nahid sciences. I mourn, truly, the kind of relationship we could have had” (The Empire of Gold, page 633). These similarities, and the loss of what could have been, make what happened to Manizheh that much more heartbreaking. Both Nahid women are clever, pragmatic, ambitious, and kindhearted. Both want to create a better world for their people; to bring peace to a divided kingdom. The difference is that Manizheh is more sensitive, and therefore more emotionally unstable than Nahri. As brilliant and capable as she is, Manizheh never had the chance to become wise, because she was so busy just trying to survive and protect the people she loved while being trapped within a broken system that offered no other way of thinking. She didn’t come into Daevabad from the outside, the way Nahri did. The only perspective she had was the same twisted mentality that broke the system in the first place. On top of that, she suffered a great deal more and for a great deal longer than Nahri had even been alive:
“You think you didn’t have choice?” she asks during one of their stand-offs in The Empire of Gold. “Try living under your enemies for a century, Nahri, instead of five years. Watch your brother beaten for your defiance and have it be Ghassan, not Muntadhir, trying to touch you. Burn a mark into your newborn child’s shoulder, stealing his heritage and abandoning him forever. Then you can lecture me about choice. I did not want this violence. It will haunt me to the end of my days, but I will be damned if it was for nothing” (629). Although Manizheh is not always reliable, her words here come across as genuine, because they are spoken with raw emotion instead of the calculating logic that she uses when she speaks dishonestly.
After learning by her own words some of the worst she and her family have suffered at the hands of the Qahtanis and their supporters, who can blame her? Her methods are undoubtedly cruel, but who can blame a mother for wanting to avenge her children? Who can blame a sister who had to watch the Qahtanis torture her beloved brother to punish her for every time she refused to submit? A woman who has been denied every bit of happiness she might have had, forced to hide her love for Kaveh and deny her son the love she so clearly bears for him, in order to protect them from Ghassan’s jealous wrath? This is what makes Manizheh so compelling. At this point, she is undoubtedly the true villain, but the endless tragedy she has faced creates such complexity that one can’t hate her no matter how much one disagrees with the way she handles everything. That doesn’t justify her actions; but one cannot hate a traumatized person for being a product of their experiences, and acting accordingly. Manizheh bears over a century of trauma; it’s no wonder she has lost her sanity.
By this point, her mental state has been revealed: a century or two of learning to obscure her emotions have actually made her less capable of doing so, especially when she is feeling backed into a corner and growing increasingly desperate. As the narrative, told from Nahri’s POV, states: “Manizheh’s calm was gone, the words bursting out of her as if they had been penned up for too long. And what was worse was that Nahri understood. But that didn’t justify it” (629).
It is not justified, but anyone with a high emotional IQ can understand that this woman has faced a horrendous amount of undeserved suffering at the hands of cruel tyrants and their henchmen. A century of being used, abused, and manipulated by Ghassan; of watching everyone she loved murdered or tormented by the Geziris, or having to hide those she loved so that they wouldn’t be; plus the pressures of being a Nahid, expected to be an example of divine perfection to her people; and learning the history of her family and the other Daevas, while seeing how they have continued to suffer in the fourteen centuries since the Qahtanis and their supporters betrayed and slaughtered her family.
Underneath her cold and hardened exterior, Manizheh is a very sensitive person; she cares about people, can sense and feel not only everything that’s going on inside their bodies, but the pain they carry in their souls, too. Apart from her own painful experiences, all those centuries of simmering tribal resentments, compounded by the blood of her ancestors that stains the ancient city washed over Manizheh, shaping and twisting her until she broke. Had Ghassan been a good man; had he shown her compassion instead of brutality; had he allowed her even some semblance of happiness with Kaveh, instead of coveting her for himself; she would not have become a villain. She might even have become an ally to Nahri, and one of the saviors of Daevabad. Instead, she turned into Daevabad’s destroyer. But that is not who she wanted to be.
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In the first two books, and most of the third, we only get to know Manizheh through dialogue and through the eyes of the other characters around her. Of the three POV characters, only Dara knows her well, and even he can still only catch a glimpse by what he has witnessed or what little she is willing to reveal of herself. Kaveh is the only person in the story who can be said to really know Manizheh; her brother, too, but since he’s dead we don’t get to see his perspective. We truly get to know Manizheh in a couple of scenes written from her perspective (Prologue of The Empire of Gold; Chapter 1 of The River of Silver). Here, alone, we get to see the inner workings of her mind as much as one can through a third-person narrator. We get to watch her struggle between her dual natures–those very same dual natures that exist within each of us, every day from the moment we are born to the moment we pass from this life to the next. It is here, and in some of the later scenes of The Empire of Gold, that we really get to see her slipping further away from the righteousness of her cause, to watch the final break within from the last traces of goodness she had managed to hold onto through so much pain and undeserved suffering.
The prologue in The Empire of Gold opens with Manizheh standing on the terrace overlooking the city following her invasion. Nahri and Prince Alizayd, one of Ghassan’s sons, have thwarted Manizheh by taking Suleiman’s seal and fleeing the city, leaving her vulnerable without her magic. Standing there, with Ghassan’s heartless corpse lying nearby, she remembers the last time she had been on that terrace with Ghassan. It was many years ago, when he was newly made king after his father’s death. As a preface to his marriage proposal, he had apologized for not standing up to his father whenever the previous king had tortured Manizheh’s beloved brother before her eyes. Such a charmer, right? She did not take kindly to his half-hearted apology or his proposal. Seething with decades of unexpressed hatred, she had “laced her fingers between his and smiled…. And then she’d closed off his throat” with her magic (2). The punishment for having turned him down–and in such a brutal way–was being forced to watch yet again as her brother was tortured by the new king. So much for his apology, right?
This scene reminds us just how cruel Ghassan and his family were to Manizheh and her own. At this point, we have been lulled into sympathy for Manizheh. But then we read: “And now, because of Nahri, Manizheh knew the first step after finding them would be to cut out the heart of Nahri’s djinn prince.” Just when one starts to sympathize too much with her character, this sentence serves as a stark reminder that she is the new villain–as much a monster as Ghassan, created in his own image. The new ruler of Daevabad gazes upon the quiet city; the only sound a distant wail to remind Manizheh and the reader just how much damage her invasion had caused to the city and the people she had hoped to liberate from its previous tyrant. “Daevabad’s people would be hiding, weeping silently as they clutched their children close, the sudden loss of their magic only one more tragedy this night.” (3)
When Nahri and Ali fled from Daevabad with Suleiman’s seal, all the magic was lost to the city and its inhabitants. “For a woman who’d endured the ripping away of everything she loved–the shy country noble she might have married, the dark-eyed infant whose weight in her arms she’d yearned to feel again, the brother she’d betrayed, her very dignity as she bowed before the Qahtanis year after year–the loss of her abilities was the worst. Her magic was her life, her soul–the power beneath the strength that had enabled her to survive everything else.” Not at first understanding that the seal’s absence from Daevabad is what has caused the loss of her magical abilities, Manizheh believes it is a punishment from the Creator: the price she had to pay “for using healing magic to kill.” (4)
In order to cope with the loss of her magic and the injury Nahri’s betrayal has caused, Manizheh focuses on her anger at the situation and the need to fix the damage she has caused. She talks of Anahid, the founder of her ancient bloodline, with Aeshma, one of the ifrit who “helped” her and her followers take the city. When Aeshma criticizes Anahid for working with Suleiman, accusing her of having betrayed her people, Manizheh thinks: “She saved her people. I intend to do the same” (5). This unspoken thought is clear evidence that she truly does believe in what she is doing: that she believes her actions were a necessary evil to further a just cause and serve the greater good. But the loss of her magic on top of everything else is too much for her already fragile psyche to bear.
Even with everything falling apart around her; even as she continues in desperation to make poor decisions that result in more loss of life than she ever intended, Manizheh still wants to do the right thing. She attempts to make peace with the other tribes, releasing Ghassan’s eldest son Muntadhir from his cell in the dungeon and working with him to fix the problems she has created by her impatience and emotional instability. But Muntadhir still harbors resentment toward Manizheh for not being around to save his mother’s life when he was only a child: at the time when Muntadhir’s mother fell ill, Manizheh had been hiding out with Kaveh, giving birth to their son in secret. Even though she has since told Muntadhir the true reason she was not there to save his mother when no one else could, and even though Muntadhir himself had been considering a plot to take down his father before Manizheh beat him to it, he is secretly working against her the whole time she thinks he is helping to arrange a peace summit.
The final break in Manizheh occurs when Kaveh is murdered viciously at the hands of those she had invited to the palace for the peace summit. The problem Muntadhir and his co-conspirators didn’t realize was that by murdering Kaveh, they were actually taking away the only person who could probably have kept Manizheh from going completely over the edge of insanity. As Dara later points out, “Kaveh was not just her grand wazir. He was the love of her life, her closest companion since childhood, and she had to pick pieces of him up in the street. She is not going to show mercy” (511).
Desperate and grieving for the man she has loved faithfully for nearly two centuries, Manizheh embarks down a path of self-destruction–and she intends to take everyone down with her. She believes even “the Creator would not help her now. She saw no alternative, only the path she’d forged and had to keep walking–even if there was nothing left of her by the time she finished” (9). At the urging of Aeshma, the scheming ifrit who has been using Manizheh’s suffering as a tool for his own vengeance, she turns to blood magic in order to gain the upper hand. She will either win, “no matter the cost” (9), or she will die trying.
Like Sweeny Todd’s epiphany, we watch the last remaining shreds of Manizheh’s sanity slip away as she succumbs to the darkness she has depended on to survive all the horrors wrought upon her family and her people at the hands of the Qahtanis. In a way, she becomes the literal scapegoat for all the atrocities both families and their respective tribes have committed. She wanted so badly to be good, but everything was against her from the moment of her birth and one can only feel pity. One can only feel a sense of loss for the great woman she might have been; the ally and mentor to Nahri, who turns out to be her niece; the loving mother Jamshid always needed; the savior of her people she strived so hard to be… She might have been the next Anahid, but instead she became the antithesis of her revered ancestor. Manizheh was a good person who was broken, driven to do terrible things–such that she believed herself unworthy of salvation.
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There is one person, in the end, who understands Manizheh better than all the rest–better than she even understands herself. One person who understands that she is worthy of salvation: Dara, her Afshin. But it is a salvation that can only come to her in death. He tells her, “You were correct. This only ends in violence. But then it will end… Let me bring you peace… Let me help you, like you dreamed I would when you were a child. Let me save the Daevas.” (673). Then he betrays her, dealing her a mortal blow that only Nahri has the power to heal since she took possession of Suleiman’s seal.
Manizheh falls but is caught by her son, Jamshid, who she believed could never love her after all the terrible things she did. Although he sided with the people working to take her down, he begs Nahri to save his mother. Nahri refuses and, although he doesn’t want to see his mother die, Jamshid understands. Then “Manizheh reached out with a shaking hand to touch his face. Jamshid turned back to her, still cradling her body, seeming to think if he prayed enough, he could still save her” (675). This is a poignant moment, and the moment I lost all my composure. This is the moment when I broke down and wept for the villain. Even though I knew this was the only way her story could end–how her story needed to end–it left me in pieces.
This is why Manizheh is the most compelling villain in literary history, at least by my reckoning. I have sympathized with other villains. I have understood where they were coming from, however misguided. I have hoped for them to change their evil or misguided ways and embark on a fitting redemption arc. (MTG’s Liliana Vess is the prime example of a superb villain redemption arc, by the way.) But I have never wept for a villain. I have never been utterly devastated by their story. I have never felt anything but a sense of justice and satisfaction when the villain got what they deserved. Manizheh changed all that for me, because it was not what she deserved. It was simply what had to be done. I like to think dying in her son’s arms brought her some semblance of peace in the end, at least. I also like to think–even though none of these characters are real–that, reunited with Kaveh, she found rest and healing in the afterlife from all the traumas she had faced in life. That is what she deserves–what we all deserve, even in our brokenness: to be loved, to be understood, to be forgiven, and to be healed.
By the end, Manizheh had indeed become a monster, but before she was a monster, she was a victim. She was a victim who wanted to find her strength and take it back; a victim who wanted to make the world a better place; a victim who sought justice for herself and for her people but who, like Dara said, “just got very, very lost” along the way (699). Because of her clear conviction that what she was doing was right, that everything she and her people had suffered somehow justified the violence she committed in the name of a righteous cause, Manizheh is also a warning. She is a warning about what violence and hatred does to good people. She is a warning of what any one of us is capable of becoming if we don’t overcome the tribal instincts that drive human beings to commit atrocities against one another generation after generation, all in the name of vengeance. She is also a reminder to show compassion to everyone we meet, because only then can humanity ever hope to find peace.
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Works Cited
Chakraborty, S. A. The City of Brass. Harper Voyager, 2017.
–. The Empire of Gold. Harper Voyager, 2020.
–. The Kingdom of Copper. Harper Voyager, 2019.
–. The River of Silver: Tales from the Daevabad Trilogy. Harper Voyager, 2022.
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Photo Credits
- Manizheh character card from The Empire of Gold Hangover Kit (FaeCrate). Source: Daevapedia Wiki, Characters: Manizheh e-Nahid.
- Featured Image: The Kingdom of Copper alternate cover art (FaeCrate edition). Source: Daevapedia Wiki, Characters: Manizheh e-Nahid.
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Disclaimer: This review is my own personal opinion; it is not connected to or endorsed by the author or her representatives, whom I have never met or spoken to under any circumstances.
RM Watters, Author 
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