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A review by spenkevich
Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek
4.0
‘We wait, everyday, for the bombs to fall on us.’
In April 2013, Syrian Government forces laid siege to eastern Ghouta, which lasted 5 years and continued even after a UN ceasefire resolution in early February 2018. Exiled Syrian journalist Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, brilliantly translated by [a:Leri Price|6727952|Leri Price|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] (for which it was shortlisted for the National Book Award in Translation), is brutal and poetic tale of the horrors of the Syrian Civil War told through the eyes of Rima, a young girl who spends much of the novel hiding from the bombings. Rima, who has chosen to never speak, has been deemed to suffering from mental illness yet through her writings we see that perhaps it is her mind that is the most rational tool in an irrational world. ‘I’m writing to you from my cellar, my secret new planet,’ she tells us, and through her love of literature she reconstructs what she understands of the death and dread around her into fantasy with frequent allusions to her favorite stories, [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SY75_.jpg|2180358] and [b:Alice's Adventures In Wonderland|24611820|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland|Anna Bond|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1426117422l/24611820._SX50_.jpg|55548884]. Yazbek looks horror directly in the eye through astonishingly poetic language and imagery, highlighting the brutality of war and the ways the most vulnerable suffer most in this passionately delivered story of survival and beauty in a world blown to pieces.
‘How could you escape dying if not by standing in front of it? Or at least looking straight at it?’
Samar Yazbek was forced into exile in Paris with her daughter in 2011 after being detained multiple times by Syria’s secret police under the Bashar al-Assad regime. However, she began clandestine returns into Syria to write about the descent into revolution and the early days of the uprisings, which she published in her 2012 book [b:The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria|25838272|The Crossing My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria|Samar Yazbek|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441556772l/25838272._SY75_.jpg|43272226], for which she was awarded a PEN/Pinter Prize for an “International writer of courage”. In an interview with DAWN, she says ‘I felt it was my duty as an intellectual and as a writer to write the truth of what had happened in Syria. The victims needed to have this voice.’ She also founded Women Now for Development, an NGO for empowering women in Syria. ‘Writing nonfiction actually was more like an exile from my true self,’ she says, ‘ I was exiled both from my land and from my true self—from my identity as a novelist.’ With Planet of Clay she says ‘when I started writing this novel, it was like getting back to my true land.’ And what a land of literature it is, with both terror and compassion pouring out of every page.
‘Don’t think that what you are reading is a novel,’ Rima writes at the start of the novel, ‘what I am writing is the truth and I am doing it to understand what happened.’ Non-verbal Rima sees the world much differently than others, and because her habit of uncontrollably walking away she has spent her whole life either tied to her mother’s wrist or tied in the school library in which her mother works, being cared for by Sitt Soud, a loving librarian. In fact, Rima sees the library as one of her ‘special planets’, a safe space inspired by the planets in [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SY75_.jpg|2180358], which really sold me on loving this novel. She has a love for words but says ‘it is difficult to form relationships between words and reality’. She prefers images, often drawing but has a gift for beautiful writing and believes ‘every adjective in language is a painting.’ Her mind is always racing, and often in many directions, which makes the narrative quite circuitous, crisscrossing the timeline and often getting ahead of herself. But writing, she believes, is like a magical spell or talisman that can save both herself, and you, the reader from the horrors of humanity.
She describes her way of unfolding the story like an elaborate ‘fairy ball’ of mirror fragments reflecting each other in pieces of reality all jumbled together. ‘It’s not necessary for an event to be inside a square frame,’ she explains, which feels an honest assessment in a world crumbling into chaos, and the novel progresses as ‘stories inside stories. Stories interweaving with stories.’ Admittedly, this can be frustrating at times and feel like going nowhere fast as the plot seems to slowly drip forward. Though this is fitting for a story told tied to a bar in a bombed out basement for days on end with no end in sight to the threatening thunder of bombs in the distance. The narration style also builds terrific tension to the point where, at times, you feel it may shred you from the inside out.
Rima also does not have a good grasp on the events occurring, told much like a child experiencing big events but more focused on the fantasies in her head and it takes some parsing out to understand what is going on. She doesn’t know the politics unfolding in Syria but is aware her brother has opinions that cause their mother to silence him and cry fearfully. Armed checkpoints seem commonplace and watching vicious arrests doesn’t strike her as odd. Mostly she just noticed how everyone’s ‘eyes had become strange.’ This style isn’t unlike how in university we studied Faulkner’s Barn Burning as an example of an unreliable narrator that simply doesn’t know how to processes the events before them, yet here it is almost a mercy as we remain safely in Rima’s secret planet of thought with the violence and fear mostly glimpsed in the peripheries.
That said, Rima is very underestimated. While she may seem unable to exist in society, she also has a very clear sense of self. This helps her to remain calm and collected under the traumatic conditions around her, and during the siege she becomes a beacon of hope with her drawings and demeanor. She remains positive even when things are at their bleakest, though often this is partially through not understanding what is happening. ‘How can people feel miserable when they possess such a gigantic quantity of meanings?’ she wonders, and for her the world is full of meaning, mystery and magic. Colors are especially important in her world—possibly hinting at synesthesia though her influence on ascribing meaning to color comes from Al-Tha’alibi’s writings on color—and through her eyes even the darkest of days have a whimsical quality to them. People, such as her brother’s friend in the resistance, Hassan, are written with mythical heroic attributes and demeanor. Moments of pure terror and violence are viewed a bit detached however, such as watching political prisoners beaten to death by guards while in the hospital. It takes a bit to get in the groove of this book, but it is worth it and functions both poetically and cerebrally as it asks you to process and survive along with her.
‘This planet won’t disappear until I disappear.’
It is a book where it seems that nothing much is happening and everything is happening simultaneously due to the elusive plot threads. Early in the book her mother is shot in a checkpoint tussle and she is taken in by her brother as the siege unfolds. She thinks about death but only thinks of others as ‘disappearing’, having no context of the bloodshed occurring all around. She focuses on her art and writing, going from one safehouse to being left in a cellar, her final secret planet, the planet of clay. Her story captures the key elements of the Seige of Eastern Ghouta. For context, A 2018 report from the Syrian Network for Human Rights said approximately 13,000 civilians were killed in the siege, including 1,463 children and 1,127 women. During the siege 80% of the approximately 9,700 children in Ghouta suffered from severe malnutrition and 70% of the population lived underground due to the mass bombings. Despite being banned, goverment forces used aerial chlorine gas attacks, shown as the ‘smelly bubbles’ in some of the most horrific scenes in the novel and the aftermath being just as terrible.
Planet of Clay is a chilling novel that looks hard at the brutality that can occur within humanity. It is also a reminder that the dangers increase exponentially for the most vulnerable, demonstrated in many ways but most pronounced as Rima’s survival depends on someone else always getting her to safety and providing for her. She is easily forgotten and if something happens to her caregivers she may be stranded forever. While this is a story to evoke compassion it is also one that weighs very heavily in your heart and mind. But we must not look away, as Yazbek is giving voice to the people who need to be heard most. Refugee crises and war play out on the nightly news in the comfort and safety of “away from there”, and Yazbek needs us to know they are just like us and how quickly we could become just like them. ‘Here people are dying,’ Rima writes, ‘and there they hear the sounds that people die from.’ This is a moving novel worth the work and one that will cling to me long after I have finished it.
4/5
‘Actually the world wasn’t at all colorful like Wonderland was. The cats vanished and didn’t reappear.’
In April 2013, Syrian Government forces laid siege to eastern Ghouta, which lasted 5 years and continued even after a UN ceasefire resolution in early February 2018. Exiled Syrian journalist Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, brilliantly translated by [a:Leri Price|6727952|Leri Price|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] (for which it was shortlisted for the National Book Award in Translation), is brutal and poetic tale of the horrors of the Syrian Civil War told through the eyes of Rima, a young girl who spends much of the novel hiding from the bombings. Rima, who has chosen to never speak, has been deemed to suffering from mental illness yet through her writings we see that perhaps it is her mind that is the most rational tool in an irrational world. ‘I’m writing to you from my cellar, my secret new planet,’ she tells us, and through her love of literature she reconstructs what she understands of the death and dread around her into fantasy with frequent allusions to her favorite stories, [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SY75_.jpg|2180358] and [b:Alice's Adventures In Wonderland|24611820|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland|Anna Bond|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1426117422l/24611820._SX50_.jpg|55548884]. Yazbek looks horror directly in the eye through astonishingly poetic language and imagery, highlighting the brutality of war and the ways the most vulnerable suffer most in this passionately delivered story of survival and beauty in a world blown to pieces.
‘How could you escape dying if not by standing in front of it? Or at least looking straight at it?’
Samar Yazbek was forced into exile in Paris with her daughter in 2011 after being detained multiple times by Syria’s secret police under the Bashar al-Assad regime. However, she began clandestine returns into Syria to write about the descent into revolution and the early days of the uprisings, which she published in her 2012 book [b:The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria|25838272|The Crossing My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria|Samar Yazbek|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441556772l/25838272._SY75_.jpg|43272226], for which she was awarded a PEN/Pinter Prize for an “International writer of courage”. In an interview with DAWN, she says ‘I felt it was my duty as an intellectual and as a writer to write the truth of what had happened in Syria. The victims needed to have this voice.’ She also founded Women Now for Development, an NGO for empowering women in Syria. ‘Writing nonfiction actually was more like an exile from my true self,’ she says, ‘ I was exiled both from my land and from my true self—from my identity as a novelist.’ With Planet of Clay she says ‘when I started writing this novel, it was like getting back to my true land.’ And what a land of literature it is, with both terror and compassion pouring out of every page.
‘Don’t think that what you are reading is a novel,’ Rima writes at the start of the novel, ‘what I am writing is the truth and I am doing it to understand what happened.’ Non-verbal Rima sees the world much differently than others, and because her habit of uncontrollably walking away she has spent her whole life either tied to her mother’s wrist or tied in the school library in which her mother works, being cared for by Sitt Soud, a loving librarian. In fact, Rima sees the library as one of her ‘special planets’, a safe space inspired by the planets in [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993._SY75_.jpg|2180358], which really sold me on loving this novel. She has a love for words but says ‘it is difficult to form relationships between words and reality’. She prefers images, often drawing but has a gift for beautiful writing and believes ‘every adjective in language is a painting.’ Her mind is always racing, and often in many directions, which makes the narrative quite circuitous, crisscrossing the timeline and often getting ahead of herself. But writing, she believes, is like a magical spell or talisman that can save both herself, and you, the reader from the horrors of humanity.
’I pick up the blue pen which I found among the stacks of paper, and I begin. You must not set off before the sound has started. Don't stop unless you are faint from exhaustion, but it must be from exhaustion and not fear. If all this isn't done properly, I mean using the blue pen to play with words on a blank page, then my instructions will fail, the blank page won't like you, and the roar of the aeroplanes won't disappear.’
She describes her way of unfolding the story like an elaborate ‘fairy ball’ of mirror fragments reflecting each other in pieces of reality all jumbled together. ‘It’s not necessary for an event to be inside a square frame,’ she explains, which feels an honest assessment in a world crumbling into chaos, and the novel progresses as ‘stories inside stories. Stories interweaving with stories.’ Admittedly, this can be frustrating at times and feel like going nowhere fast as the plot seems to slowly drip forward. Though this is fitting for a story told tied to a bar in a bombed out basement for days on end with no end in sight to the threatening thunder of bombs in the distance. The narration style also builds terrific tension to the point where, at times, you feel it may shred you from the inside out.
Rima also does not have a good grasp on the events occurring, told much like a child experiencing big events but more focused on the fantasies in her head and it takes some parsing out to understand what is going on. She doesn’t know the politics unfolding in Syria but is aware her brother has opinions that cause their mother to silence him and cry fearfully. Armed checkpoints seem commonplace and watching vicious arrests doesn’t strike her as odd. Mostly she just noticed how everyone’s ‘eyes had become strange.’ This style isn’t unlike how in university we studied Faulkner’s Barn Burning as an example of an unreliable narrator that simply doesn’t know how to processes the events before them, yet here it is almost a mercy as we remain safely in Rima’s secret planet of thought with the violence and fear mostly glimpsed in the peripheries.
That said, Rima is very underestimated. While she may seem unable to exist in society, she also has a very clear sense of self. This helps her to remain calm and collected under the traumatic conditions around her, and during the siege she becomes a beacon of hope with her drawings and demeanor. She remains positive even when things are at their bleakest, though often this is partially through not understanding what is happening. ‘How can people feel miserable when they possess such a gigantic quantity of meanings?’ she wonders, and for her the world is full of meaning, mystery and magic. Colors are especially important in her world—possibly hinting at synesthesia though her influence on ascribing meaning to color comes from Al-Tha’alibi’s writings on color—and through her eyes even the darkest of days have a whimsical quality to them. People, such as her brother’s friend in the resistance, Hassan, are written with mythical heroic attributes and demeanor. Moments of pure terror and violence are viewed a bit detached however, such as watching political prisoners beaten to death by guards while in the hospital. It takes a bit to get in the groove of this book, but it is worth it and functions both poetically and cerebrally as it asks you to process and survive along with her.
‘This planet won’t disappear until I disappear.’
It is a book where it seems that nothing much is happening and everything is happening simultaneously due to the elusive plot threads. Early in the book her mother is shot in a checkpoint tussle and she is taken in by her brother as the siege unfolds. She thinks about death but only thinks of others as ‘disappearing’, having no context of the bloodshed occurring all around. She focuses on her art and writing, going from one safehouse to being left in a cellar, her final secret planet, the planet of clay. Her story captures the key elements of the Seige of Eastern Ghouta. For context, A 2018 report from the Syrian Network for Human Rights said approximately 13,000 civilians were killed in the siege, including 1,463 children and 1,127 women. During the siege 80% of the approximately 9,700 children in Ghouta suffered from severe malnutrition and 70% of the population lived underground due to the mass bombings. Despite being banned, goverment forces used aerial chlorine gas attacks, shown as the ‘smelly bubbles’ in some of the most horrific scenes in the novel and the aftermath being just as terrible.
‘The planes dropped bombs on us that had poison gas inside, and these gases can penetrate clothing, and if someone is affected you have to take off their clothes so they won’t die. The women who had been treated had stayed in their clothes because the men said it was sinful for women to be uncovered in front of men, and Hassan was furious.’
Planet of Clay is a chilling novel that looks hard at the brutality that can occur within humanity. It is also a reminder that the dangers increase exponentially for the most vulnerable, demonstrated in many ways but most pronounced as Rima’s survival depends on someone else always getting her to safety and providing for her. She is easily forgotten and if something happens to her caregivers she may be stranded forever. While this is a story to evoke compassion it is also one that weighs very heavily in your heart and mind. But we must not look away, as Yazbek is giving voice to the people who need to be heard most. Refugee crises and war play out on the nightly news in the comfort and safety of “away from there”, and Yazbek needs us to know they are just like us and how quickly we could become just like them. ‘Here people are dying,’ Rima writes, ‘and there they hear the sounds that people die from.’ This is a moving novel worth the work and one that will cling to me long after I have finished it.
4/5
‘Actually the world wasn’t at all colorful like Wonderland was. The cats vanished and didn’t reappear.’