“Bookshelf of the Week, Ask the Author”, by Hideyuki Tanabe for Mainichi Newspaper, published on July 20th, 2024
Samar Yazbek, The blue pen (A planet of Clay), Syria, 2013
Translated by Ayumi Yanagiya
Confronting violence with imagination.
Syria in 2013, during the civil war. The daily life of oppression and violence is depicted in the form of the memoir of a teenage girl locked in a basement.
The narrator, Rima, has been unable to speak her mind since she was a child, and when she starts to walk, she cannot stop. As a result, Rima’s one wrist is restrained to someone when she goes out and somewhere else when she is indoors. Multiple layers of restrictions are implied.
“I have created a metaphorical puzzle. To keep walking is an unstoppable thought, a movement of the intellect, ensuring a margin of freedom. I also wanted to portray that silence in the face of so much violence is in itself a defiance of violence.”
In some scenes, the city is sealed off and chemical weapons are used. The unreasonable and difficult situation progresses and she is eventually locked alone in the basement of a printing house. She continues to write to ‘you’, using a blue pen.
‘You’ means everyone who reads it, everyone who is not anyone else. In her inner life, violent language is not used. The imagination is more open and sharpened. It is also richer in color. “‘”I thought I could express intense violence through fantasy,” the artist states.
(…)
“Imagination is the most important means of confronting violence,” she reiterates the power of the novel. It has been hailed as “the earliest example of the literary success of the “Arab Spring”.’
She tells Japanese readers: “Japan would know the pain of war because of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and other events. Use your imagination and don’t forget about Syria”.