Huda Hamed’s novel Allati Ta‘ud al-Salalim [She Who Counts the Stairs] tells three intertwined stories, told by three different narrators, Zahiyya, a Omani artist who struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder and a deep fear of the “Other”; Faneesh, an Ethiopian domestic worker who pursues a job in the Gulf so that she may provide for her family; and Hamdan, Zahiyya’s father-in-law, who spent a large part of his life in Zanzibar and was ultimately forced to abandon his African wife when the inhabitants of Zanzibar revolted against their Omani occupiers. Zahiyya becomes obsessed with finding the “perfect” maid who would transform her house into a spotless paradise—without getting too close or crossing the line. Zahiyya’s fear of sharing her space with a black maid illustrates David Sibley’s assertion that “The anatomy of the purified environment is an expression of values associated with strong feelings of abjection, a heightened consciousness of difference and, thus, a fear of mixing or the disintegration of boundaries.” The reader learns that Zahiyya’s obsessive compulsive disorder may have been a result of her traumatic childhood. Her racism, however, cannot be extricated from broader political realities, including Zanzibar’s subjugation under Omani occupation. Unlike Zahiyya, Faneesh had enjoyed a rather peaceful, if impoverished, childhood in Addis Ababa. It is later in life, when she moves to the Gulf, that Faneesh suffers abuse at the hands of Arab employers who belittle and violate her because of her black skin. But Faneesh is not a passive victim. She keeps a journal documenting and reclaiming her story—a journal that Zahiyya decides to read and which allows her to recognize Faneesh’s humanity. Zahiyya also reads her husband Amer’s novel-in-progress, which documents his father Hamdan’s journey into and out of Zanzibar and his relationship with Amer’s African mother. Drawing on critical studies on race, gender, and space, by scholars including Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, David Sibley, and Etienne Balibar, I argue that Huda Hamed’s novel reveals anti-Blackness as it intersects with personal and systemic violence, illuminating not only the dangerous consequences of hate and racism on perpetrator and victim, but also their reversibility through “ethical encounters,” to use Sara Ahmed’s term. By vividly portraying the lived realities of characters who both internalize and resist hegemonic notions of gender, race, and citizenship, the novel offers a discursive intervention that interrogates racism and xenophobia in an intersectional approach that eschews sensationalism and Orientalism.