I write with blind eyes and forty fingers

In a story written for this publication, Syrian dissident author Samar Yazbek reflects on what it’s like to be a writer of fiction faced with the violence and atrocities of civil war and asks: how we can produce literature right now, in this era of bloodshed?

Everything is back to front as I start writing my novel.

Borrowing from the four elements, I try to change the flavour of things. I squeeze all these heaped up human body parts into my fine, wiry script.

It’s the novel that is writing me, not the other way round. The text and I have a strange kind of relationship: we write each other and side by side we metamorphose. This novel is one I can never end; it continues to grow inside me, or an offshoot of it, and within it I grow, too. Writers are wrong if they don’t believe that they are written by their words, that it is the text that gives them form. Before we write the narrative, it writes us.

The world is spinning on its gravitational axis, stripped bare of all but its insanity. I defy this force of gravity; I pluck at the flakes of skin in the downy hair of my forearms; I drag city after city behind me. I am not a real person, I am a figment of the imagination, and I long to steep myself into the details of real life – quite the opposite of the people I write about. My characters are real, of flesh and blood: they are not the product of fiction. I alone am the one swimming in the realm of the imaginary; an idea of reality, a fantasy floating in the madness.

I write, fumbling with 40 fingers. I write with eyes that do not see.

I am not a woman possessed as I have seemed all my life. I am just a word. The text spins it into an entire lifetime, a reality which I live and write, and from which I hide. I look at the people around me as though I were one of them, a world made of paper, of beams of light gone astray. I hear the roar of the larger-than-life jet planes and I whisper to myself that these are only words, a mere detail in a written text, a short text which reads:

“She hears the thunder of the shelling and she trembles. Forcing herself to continue, she prays that the planes won’t take any of the children she has just said goodbye to. She’s worried the other women might notice the trembling in her eyes and hands, so she grasps their hands and together they form a circle under the colonnade of the house. ‘The shelling is far away,’ she says. ‘No need to panic.’”

When I compose to myself in my head, I have to make myself believe that I’m a character in the narrative to start describing the real world and the people within it. If, after another round of shelling, in the bright, sunny light of day, I discover the body of a child who has wet himself, I close my eyes and brush soil over his innocent, young corpse. I whisper to myself:

Above: A woman carries bread in the countryside town of Minbij City near Aleppo, Syria, 18 October 2013

Credit: Aref Hretani/Reuters

“She covers him with the heaps of dust that have fallen from the ceiling of the house, feeling the warmth that is still present in his body, a body that only a moment ago was pulsating with life. She feels the moisture on the boy’s mangled trunk and looks to his waist where a damp patch seeps a dark brown into the dust.”

I write with 40 fingers. I myself am far from a lifelike character. I write about the woman whose fingers tremble as she examines the flesh flayed from the child’s body. I have no need to panic, because I am me – not her. And she is not me. I can lead my life as I please. I am a coward, a woman of flesh and blood. I can feel my heart pounding as the bodies are heaped up in a small truck before my eyes. We swap roles and I become nothing but a storyteller from a time of legends, whose dreams are haunted by the jinn and the siren call of orphans, where the earth is sodden with the blood of young men and the rage of grieving mothers bereft of their sons. MiG fighters scatter a honeycomb of shell holes across the plateau: entrances not to Alice’s Wonderland, but to a wretched inferno.

I am lost in this garden, floating through this dark underworld. I’m the only one to come from nothingness and return to the make-believe, amidst a range of characters strewn throughout the narrative from start to finish, all trapped in the blazing heat over the flames of the hellfire. I hover above – neither tumbling in, nor rising out of reach of the tongues of fire. Since we were children, life has descended into this purgatory, the flames licking and looping into nooses around our necks.

I devour my heart, swallowing it haltingly, without relish.

Onwards I walk, without a head on my shoulders. My father carries me and looks at the emptiness that was once his daughter.

I lay naked stretched out on the pavement. A sniper takes his pleasure filling my body with a series of bullet holes. It was here that not long ago they threw me down and raped me. They stole my baby and I could hear his screams as they threw themselves on top of me. I carry the limbs of my children in these hands; I look up at the sky that shortly before was swarming with aircraft. I am the sky, slain in battle.

I am made by the act of writing about it. It is through these women that I take on real form. And yet, inside I am hollow.

Those long months were marked by the smell of blood in a small room under bombardment, where I crept furtively into a corner one day and secretly watched two old women sleeping alone in a house abandoned by its owners. Everyone had died in the fighting. There, in that surreptitious moment, I realised that we authors cannot possibly see writing as an ordinary act, and indeed perhaps should not even contemplate starting to write at a time like this, for to attempt it means stumbling on the threshold of madness. How is literature even possible at the moment? Like philosophy and history, the art of literature and storytelling is supposed to broaden our knowledge, endowing us with heightened sensitivity and shrewd insight. But how can we produce literature right now, in this era of bloodshed? As I watched those two old women huddled up together under the aerial assault, I wondered how much time I would need before I could return to writing fiction. Working towards a novel is the least I can do to try to document this pain. But what I write now is not fiction: I am simply revealing the many layers of hell to the light.

What simple and honest way is there to express it all? Well, perhaps that’s beside the point. Right now, what’s important is that while we’re beheading one another, devouring each other’s raw entrails, wandering headless, aimless, lost in a void, we have so far failed to realise the impact this all-engulfing collapse of humanity has had on our relationships, our friendships and our sense of the purpose of life. We have failed to grasp the scale of the slaughter, seeing it always from one perspective, one point of view. Perhaps we haven’t lost everything yet, but while we lay waste to our land, heads continue to roll.

It’s impossible even to conceive of writing about heads rolling under a hail of missiles from helicopters, when they have just this minute slaughtered a quiet, gentle lad who was looking after some refugee children, a harmless youngster who knew nothing more of life than how to smile and breed pigeons.

I cannot stop thinking about the old woman I lived with during the airstrikes who, when she fell into a deep coma, was taken by her sons far from the house out onto the Saraqib steppes, so that she wouldn’t be killed in the shelling. Her flesh started to decay while she was still alive, and yet she didn’t wake up. Her heart is still beating.

Would someone like to tell me that this is a true story? Or is it perhaps a surreal detail from a Latin American magic realist novel, so popular among Arab readers?

No, it’s a real story which I’ve pulled out from deep within me, which I’ve lived, which I’ve smelled myself and seen with my own eyes; I can’t describe it as an event from a fictional narrative. It’s the story that made a woman choose silence and isolation, after seeing the political elites rip each other’s organs to shreds and collapse in a vacuum of hatred, while the stars of simple souls rise to light up a world that cowers in hiding. All this has forced the writer to master the art of spinning silence and weaving pain until the last spark of life within her fades. And yet, still, she cannot write it as a novel. Is pain given living testimony through her alone? She will narrate this pain as it is, alive and all-consuming, as long as fiction can also be documentary and as long as the author herself can carry on playing a role in the fabric of the novel.

I still haven’t found my own skin. I am wandering amidst the bodies gone astray in the burnt wastelands beneath the aerial bombardment. I’m still looking for a small flicker of meaning in all of this destruction and insanity, which emerged so suddenly from the clay of the earth and rained down on us from the sky in torrents.

I can write and write and write.

Every day, I write. I know no other art but this, and there is nothing I have mastered besides immersing myself in the narrative. I write about myself as someone who lives in real life, but who is in fact only observing it. I’m not really here. I’m in another world, far away. A world not bounded by four walls of clay, the walls of a shallow grave.

I was there.

And I still am. I watch how in a flash the light of their eyes is extinguished.

I watched this woman as her trembling hands sensed the warm dampness which suddenly burst from a little girl. She embraced her, mistakenly believing she was still alive as she wet herself. In vain, the woman hoped to preserve the girl’s faint heartbeat. Neither did the writer realise at first that her heart had been silenced in an instant; she had not seen the gaping black hole pierced through her chest.

Translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp