Blog post written by MIZOKAWA Takami, Japanese student of literature, and published “On August 15, 2024, the day Japan pledged never to wage war again”
Novels, especially full-length novels, are not universally possible. You can’t write a full-length novel while being bombed, and reading one would be difficult. As far as I know, there are no full-length novels written in Gaza under total blockade. For example, Sayed Abdelwahed’s Gaza Report, a record of the 2008 Gaza invasion, and Atif Abou Saif’s Gaza Diary: A Record of Genocide, a record of the Gaza invasion since October 2023, are records written in English for the outside world, not fiction.
Arab literature scholar Oka Mari quotes Joe Sacco’s words that “Palestinians are not allowed the luxury of chewing and digesting one tragedy,” and points out that it is difficult for Palestinians to reconstruct the ongoing ethnic cleansing they are experiencing as a novel (Oka 2024: 68-69). While one is chewing on one tragedy, the next tragedy comes. From this perspective, writing a full-length novel is a privilege only allowed to a select few. If that is the case, does Gaza become a blank space in the world of fiction? Does it mean Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Western Sahara become blank spaces? I pondered these questions while reading “The blue pen,” a full-length novel by a Syrian author that was released in June of this year.
The moment when I had to stop being a writer
In June of this year, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s “Blue pen” was translated into Japanese.
Yazbek is a writer born in Latakia, Syria, and comes from the Alawite religious minority, the same as the family of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. However, since the Syrian revolution, she has supported the opposition and published two non-fiction works, “In the crossfire” and “The crossing” in order to convey the reality of the revolution, which attracted worldwide attention.
She started out as a novelist, but when the Syrian revolution hit, she could no longer be a novelist: Witnessing the Syrian government’s continued lies to the world while murdering its own people, Yazbek was forced to turn to documentary literature.
“I was a novelist, a journalist, a women’s rights activist, but I had never written a documentary. There came a moment in the midst of the revolution when I had to do so. It was painful, it went against my very existence as a novelist.”
Kaoru Yamamoto (ed.), “Dialogue with Syrian Intellectuals: Yassin Haj Saleh and Samar Yazbek,” Chiba University, Center for Global Relations Studies, 2021, p. 92
Yazbek left novels and published “In the crossfire” (2012) and “The crossing” (2015), documenting the current situation in Syria and sending it out to the world. These two works attracted a lot of attention, won many awards, and the latter was translated into 20 languages. However, her first work after returning to writing, “The blue pen” (2017), did not attract as much attention as the previous two.
Yazbek asserts that “there is not a single Arab writer who is read as a literary person in the West or anywhere in the world,” and points out that the fact that only documentary works sell in the market “robs us of our characteristics as writers and artists and turns us into activists and correspondents only” (ibid.: 95).
Not only was Yazbek forced to become a documentarist, but the world expected her to be one too. In both respects, not only is it impossible to produce feature-length novels or feature films, but also that only archival literature and documentaries can attract attention, representations of Syria, including Yazbek’s works, and representations of Palestine, for that matter, are in an asymmetric relationship with the rest of the world .
“The blue pen”
With all this in mind, let us now read “The blue pen” Yazbek’s monumental return to fiction. When Yazbek wrote this work, it had been six years since she had written a novel.
“The blue pen” is written in the form of a memoir by a young girl named Rima. The protagonist, Rima lives in a one-room house with her mother and brother in the south of Damascus, the capital of Syria. Because she has a strange habit of walking on her own, regardless of her will, her hands are always tied with a rope, both inside and outside the house. She cannot speak of her own volition, and can only recite aloud, such as from the Quran, or scream.
One day, Rima goes to visit Ms. Souad’s house with her mother, but on the way, at a checkpoint in the city, her mother is dragged off the bus, and the rope that was tied to her hands comes loose. Released from the shackles, Rima shakes off the voices telling her to stop and walks toward the checkpoint. Rima does not stop and is shot in the shoulder, and her mother, who tries to shield her, is shot and killed.
After that, Rima’s brother takes her in and heads to Zamarka in Ghouta, an opposition-held area. Ghouta is surrounded, blockaded, and bombed by the government, and Rima lives with a family in the midst of the constant bombings. However, the house is also bombed, and the people who were looking after Rima are killed, so she lives with her brother in the half-destroyed house.
One day, Ghouta is attacked by chemical weapons by the government forces. Rimar survives the attack, but her brother decides to stay behind, and Rima escapes to Douma with her brother’s friend Hasan. There, Rima is hidden in a semi-basement room of a building. One day, Hasan goes outside saying he’ll be back soon, but he never does. Out of food and water, and suffering from the scorching heat of August, Reimar is tied to a barred window with a rope and writes this note on paper with a blue pen, waiting alone in the basement for Hasan’s return.
The story is based on true events: the chemical attack that took place in Ghouta, near Damascus, on August 21, 2013, when Syrian government forces attacked the rebel-held areas of Eastern and Western Ghouta with rockets carrying chemical weapons, believed to be a sarin-like nerve gas, killing hundreds of civilians.
Why is the Walking Girl the narrator?
What is important about this story is that the narrator (writer), Rima, is a disabled person who cannot walk or speak freely and has had many things taken away from her. Rima’s hands are tied, restricting her ability to walk freely, and she spends most of her time at home. She did not receive compulsory education, and received no education other than the Quranic school she attended until the age of nine. She went to the school where her mother worked and spent a period of time reading books in the library there, so she has a wealth of reading experience, and is artistic and skilled at creating, but she is ignorant of the world around her. Rima knows nothing about society, has no friends, and is considered by society to be abnormal.
If the Syrian Revolution were to be depicted as a novel, the protagonist could have been someone like Rima’s brother, who witnessed the corruption of the Syrian dictatorship, joined the revolution as a young man, and took up arms to fight on the front lines. However, Yazbek chose a character like Rima as her protagonist, and chose to express violence in a way that was not violent. Why? It is difficult to give a complete answer to this question, but one thing we can say is that Rima is someone who needs literature.
First, for her, the act of writing was an act of Rima regaining her autonomy . Not only had she been deprived of many freedoms, but she had also been forced to take a passive role as a woman and as an unusual person with the strange habit of walking against her will, and had to be protected by others. In the end, she lost everyone – her mother, her brother, and Hasan – and in extreme circumstances, she waited alone for Hasan to return. When she realized that Hasan would not return, she wanted to cut the string connecting her hand to the iron bars of the window, trying to go outside of her own volition, but was unable to cut it. Under the scorching August sun, there was no water, no food. People rarely passed through the bombed-out city, and she could not call for help. In such a harsh and unreasonable situation, writing was perhaps the only act that allowed her to regain her autonomy.
Secondly, she delivers this story to us by writing it herself, rather than having it recorded by someone else. Hasan carries a camera and is responsible for recording the regime’s killing of civilians. Even during attacks with chemical weapons, he takes photos of the bodies of those who died from inhaling gas. However, the camera is never pointed at the living Rima. Through this novel, Yazbek has demonstrated the significance of a Syrian woman writing with her own hand, rather than through the proxy representation of documentary literature .
“Only a detailed retelling completes the story.”
Let’s look at this work from the perspective of the narrative format of the novel. Rima’s notes are not written in the order of events A → B → C, as is the case when a story is generally described. The story progresses little by little from the past to the present, with many flashbacks and going back and forth between various memories. She repeatedly writes about her life with her mother and brother, and what happened after the checkpoint incident, while going off on a tangent many times. Rima describes this narrative structure as “circles with overlapping centers” and says that “the story is complete only if it is retold in detail” (Yazbek 2024: 225-226).
Why did Rima organize her story into a single storyline and arrange it in a straight line, but instead use a structure in which things are retold repeatedly, likened to concentric circles? This is Rima’s own obsession, but it can also be considered the process by which she recalls, digests, and understands his own experiences. Rima says the following:
“People don’t have time to think about what is happening to them. We are like a herd of cattle, pushing and jostling each other. Like me, we are all ignorant of what is happening. Like a rat the size of a cattle! And like everyone else, I am bracing myself every day for a bomb to fall on my head.”
Samar Yazbek, “The blue pen,” translated by Ayumi Yanagida, Hakusuisha, 2024, p.106
Rima’s concentric narrative is imprinted with her struggle to understand what is happening to her as she is under blockade, siege, and air raids . At the same time, this suggests the difficulty of those under blockade, siege, and air raids writing a well-organized story, that is, that well-organized stories are only permitted for those in safe zones not under blockade, siege, or air raids. This coincides with the impossibility of writing novels under occupation and air raids, as mentioned at the beginning. The concentric narrative, which is not organized into a single storyline, probably indicates the impossibility of organizing a story and the non-narrative nature of events. Could this itself be considered the message of the novel?
The power of writing
By writing her memoirs, Rima tries to understand what is happening and resist forgetting. If we consider that the memoirs were discovered by someone and then printed and published in the form of a novel, then by writing, Rima was able to make her voice heard in the outside world. What is noteworthy here is that, far from being powerless, literature was indispensable to Rima’s life.
In the opening of “Arab, Literature as Prayer,” Arab literature scholar Oka Mari quotes Sartre’s words, “When children are dying of starvation in Africa, ‘vomiting’ is powerless,” and asks, “What can literature do when Palestinians are being killed like insects in Palestine?” In response, Oka cites her own experience when she visited Bethlehem in the West Bank of Palestine in April 2002.
“The Israeli army occupying the town issued a curfew, and even cats moving outside were shot, leaving Palestinians unable to leave their homes for weeks. In the midst of this, Oka heard a woman in her mid-twenties say, “Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy,” but “I try to distract myself by reading books.” Hearing this, Oka realized that books, like the flowers on her balcony and the lemonade she uses to entertain guests, were what made her human in this absurd situation of being a prisoner in her own home for weeks on end.
Sartre’s words that writers must stand on the side of the two billion people who are starving today, and that in order to do so they have no choice but to abandon literature for a time, contrast the act of literature – the act of writing and reading works – with the starving children dying in Africa on the other side. However, if humans read literature to maintain their sanity in an absurd reality, then contrary to Sartre’s suggestion, can we not say that those who are starving to death in Africa and the two billion starving people on the other side are the ones who desperately need literature more than anyone else?”
Mari Oka, “Arab, Literature as Prayer”, Misuzu Shobo, 2008, 12-13
The same can be said about “The blue pen.” When we face the Syrian civil war and the repeated massacres of civilians, we may think that literature is incredibly powerless. However, when we think like this, we are only thinking about ourselves. We place those of us who can read and write literature on this side of the world, and push the Syrians into the other side as people who cannot.
In the face of genocide and starvation, the power of literature is extremely weak. Even if literature can only provide a small amount of support to the lives of those being killed, this is no excuse for shutting ourselves up in the shell of the literary world and doing nothing. To save lives, to stop us from participating in genocide, we cannot rely solely on literary methods. But even so, literature has power. There are people who desperately need literature right now, like the walking girl Rima and the woman of Bethlehem.
Facing the Limitations of Literature
Between January 1 and October 7, 2023, more than 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank of Palestine. But the world did not mourn their deaths. On April 2, 2024, the Israeli military bombed a car carrying seven staff members of the World Central Kitchen. When the Australian and British staff members were killed, the world was outraged. But did they show the same anger to the death of the Palestinian driver of the car, or to the deaths of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza?
As Judith Butler says, the possibility of grief is extremely unevenly distributed. Furthermore, given that Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Western Sahara, and other countries are hidden in the shadow of Palestine, the possibility of grief is unevenly distributed, even doubly or triply. What should literature be like in this imbalance?
In the case of Syria, Yazbek spoke for Rima. However, without such people, will Sudan, Yemen, and Western Sahara become absent from the world of literature?
This is a question that may confront the limitations of literature while at the same time expanding its possibilities.
On August 15, 2024, the day Japan pledged never to wage war again