Dear Mr. Kawabata

by Rashid Al Daif, Rashid Al-Daif (a.k.a), Paul Starkey

A stream of confession about a life and the history of Lebanon in which this life is lived. A great many things merge and melt into one another. There is the change of outlook of the village population on the world and the universe -- is the earth flat or round as they say on television? There is the younger generation looking towards Beirut. There are recollections, both bitter and sweet, harsh and tender, about Beirut and Lebanon as it was and as it could have been.

Genres: Fiction, Lebanon, School, Middle East

166 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Mariel]

Mr Kawataba,
Today you know well what death is, so you are better able than anyone else to understand what I am saying: after every lapse into unconsciousness, I would open my eyes for the first time in history. Perhaps the same thing didn't happen to you, since I believe you closed your eyelids once only. And remained like that.

He remembers everything. A life flashed before his eyes in the unseeing gaze of another him. If you lost your body mass to the forces of time, a geological phenomena in the sped up time of your body hitting the pavement from heaven's skyscrapers. I saw it all and I want to rewrite it with the big red editor's pen in the sky. This other him is his enemy. Baby powder skin, knees that will never scab in prayer's questions. Your feet will not leave foot prints where he stands.

His body is rescued with the corpses from an accident, an incident, a disturbance, aka history. Whatever it is they are calling the wrong place and time these days. The women mourn their son's deaths. There's an extra coffin so he could get inside one and let someone else live. The other him, the above him, or this guy who is just any other asshole. Why not him, instead? If he could, he would, or so he says. Maybe he'd be like the son of his God and die for everyone else. I have felt that too. I have wished to help carry their weight in a closer way, out of helplessness in my soul. But he's not like Christ either, he doesn't love them or see them in purifying love. I couldn't love everyone and I feel where it isn't. There might be a me on every street corner to look back in blind what have you ever done too. He can kill me a little when he feels like that too. But then he says it's not up to him, it's all inevitable, doesn't matter. He says what goes around comes around.

He says, Dear Mr Kawabata. I am telling you these things because.... He says it in the way that he might like a reply but he's talking a dead guy, so maybe he will only look for blind guys in his future. I don't know if he learned anything as he fell to Earth. (He also says that it's been said this flash vision only happens to drowning men. I remember this again but I can't remember which book. I guess if I looked over all my reviews I'd find it but there's no way I'm doing that torture. Anyway, it was said in some book about peace of drowning men. That when you give up on the struggle you are no longer cold. It was better than this in the book. I like it better falling but drowning has that decision to stop fighting that's interesting for the ability to "see".)

We went before them. But in this sense no one goes before anyone. It is the oldest honour. I know that in Japan you have a very ancient custom of redemption and self-sacrifice.

He says what goes around comes around and it is the no one is a winner, a loser but just a dead stranger war. His peasant neighbor spills blood on the geography lesson from younger Rashid's school days. The red spots denote lands given to na na na I can't hear you. (It is sad when a local peasant causes the death of a kid geography student because this kid going to school apparently robs him of his life's meaning. I see this as just bat shit craziness and a tragedy, not a point in argument.) Father and mother are distant to what he brings home from every day. I didn't understand how the Earth being round questioned a belief in God (it was all of the adults). It didn't anywhere else in the round world. Why the Lebanon of his youth? Why did they need permission? This was what I asked myself repeatedly while reading Dear Mr Kawabata. I had this feeling not of a man confronted with his untouched self. Did he write to Yasanuri Kawabata because as a man of suicide he would understand wiping the blade clean? The contradictory nature (one page he would say that Lebanon suffered as it produced tragedies being "too beautiful to extinguish its desires" only to say a few pages later that he didn't believe in a conspiracy of history to one place) felt to me the restlessness of a person who doesn't want to be alone in their convictions. I didn't get a sense of loneliness as much as the fervor of the devout. I wonder if they get hungry for reassurance that their path is right and this is why others must share their beliefs.

Rashid is a communist. For every time he speaks of the glory of the party and comrades he is not generous with his eyes that remember everything, see all (at one point he goes into great detail of his own birth, claiming that he remembers it all with perfect clarity. Bullshit). He will purchase a prostitute. I don't believe these women were the property they were written to be. On the edges of his ego I see that his brothers and sister do not get to attend school as he does. He has an Aunt who moves into a room built on the top of their house. What will her life be like when her support, her brother, dies? She's not even mentioned when this death happens. His comrades also have women in their family who remain under their feet.

Much of the book is a little boy holding onto his mother's hand. Does she have her own face or is she only a hand to hold? He is aware that his mother loves another man. A clean man (and ahem if they had succeeded with their communism there would still be the dirty working poor versus the clean in cushy authoritative jobs. He will bitterly ask about how the West portrays them yet is just as ignorant of the realities of those who lived in the USSR). To Rashid she loves her son only if she does not kiss the son of the other man. He finds daily reassurance in the relationship between his parents, as proof of his father if he's only an extension of himself. This is the child's memory but not that of the all-seeing eye. They are not people outside of what they can do for him.

I said then: 'These people's stomachs churn at the sight of blood, and they proclaim their love. But the tons of misery must not be weighed.'
What I meant, Mr Kawabata, was that these people who preach love but whose hearts are nauseated and revolted by killing, these people don't want to see the misery in which the vast majority of mankind live, weighed down by its burden, and don't want to take it into account. I nearly said 'into the eye of the account'!

I think that's purchasing something with someone else. After all, he's not fighting himself. If you can talk about the cause but it is someone else dying you aren't different than those who are against war for any reason.

He writes to Mr Kawabata as if he is the only one who will understand. No other Arabs, no one.

His mother will remind him of a scene from his favorite Bertolt Brecht play when she responds to his proclamations of the shape of the Earth with:
'So we spend our lives on a pebble, then, on a pebble turning among other pebbles, too many to be counted, in an infinite universe! What's got into that fine brain of yours? We're a round object lost among a lot of other round objects, lost in the universe! Have some sense! So we're not under God's eyes now?'


Okay, so the Kawabata part. His novels are not mentioned except the once when he states a mission to accomplish of writing about the age through describing an "ordinary event". I don't know. The repetitiveness of the world is round argument felt more manipulative to distract the reader into the hopelessness of seeing eye to eye missive. Really, if you can believe what you believe why is it in danger if someone believes something else? I also didn't see how Kawabata's suicide (well, why not Yukio Mishima? His ritualistic and very public suicide seems to fit Rashid much more) made him the only one who understood unless it was that he couldn't read or reply to the letter that he was the preferred audience. But the hatred for his other self, the one who could sleep easily at night, spoke of something else and I don't think it was what he kept saying it was. This book was kind of a pain in the ass for all of that. You know how you talk to someone who lists to you all of their qualities all of the time? Maybe something that obviously isn't true, like "I'm really laid back" or "I'm always honest"? It could be they believe these things about themselves or they have some kind of an agenda in selling you some version of themselves. The selling feeling makes you feel not as a person but an audience. Dear Mr Kawabata had a lot of feeling of THAT kind of confessional and it all goes back to why do you need anyone else's permission? Is there anything that will satisfy you? It seems to me in these blood soaked histories that they have long memories that are born again in the mind's of others. If there could be a way to rewrite history would they then forget or would they look for an untouched person to hate on the street as Rashid does? I wished he had written out of a need to understand others as well as a need for himself to be understood (as he wanted, not as own eyes). This wasn't something you are alone in.

Kawabata wrote my favorite novel The Sound of the Mountain that spoke to me about this life lived with others. When you were a let down to those close to you, a too late history of what you never had the courage to say, or eyes to see. And when you were still a person that could be redeemed in open or new eyes. What did it look like when you were going to die and you had lived your life all alone. What would it feel like if you really listened to the sound. What did it look like to others when you were deaf to them. Time ends and goes on in his story. I thought it one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read. I know that he talks to Kawabata in this book but I wish that he had taken to heart how Kawabata spoke to others instead. Is he that different than the man he despises who will only see what he wants to see if will talk to others not as someone you live with but as someone to say it was all too late. And not to say how you felt about it. But that it was too late, because this is how it is to Arabs. And no one else can understand, not other Arabs. Just him. If people live in the world as you do then how can you believe that no one will understand but you? (And Rashid is freaking annoying all of the times he pats himself on the back for being "the only one" who can understand stuff. Jeez Louise.) It may be he was making a point about people who live on pedestal mountains and can not come down again. But it was tedious as hell to read most of the time (some of his lines are absolutely killer, though). I don't really like points as much as feeling like people have lives of their owns with or without me. If I get to know them I'm damned lucky. No soap boxes, please.

P.s. Oh, thank goodness I finished reading this. I've had Human Leagues "The Lebanon" stuck in my head. "...when the soldiers have gone!....with the Lebanon! THE LEBANON!" on repeat. I can't remember how the whole song goes so pretty much this refrain in my head on hellish repeat. No more!

[ابوشريف محمد عبدالله]

♦كيف يمكن مقاومة القهر !؟
♦وكيف يمكن مقاومة ضحية تحولت إلى جلاد خوفا من أن تبقى ضحية !؟
♠الإمبريالية نمر من ورق ، فكيف إذن ربيبتها ؟؟
♠لو إبان كل عما فى نفسه لعمت في الأرض رائحة لا تطاق.
♦سيادة العقل خلاص الجماهير.

♦حوار شيق مع السيد كواباتا عن اوجاع العرب والمنطقةوالحرب والدين والحياة ..

[إبراهيم عادل]

نسخة الهيئة العامة لقصور الثقافة طبعًا
سلسلة آفـاق عـربية
الرواية جيدة بشكل عـام
أول تجاربي مع "رشيد الضعيف" لم يخيِّب ظني
ظلت أسئلة معلقة بعد الرواية
لماذا "كـاواباتا" تحديدًا وفيم يتماس معه؟
.
الرواية انتهت كأنها لم تبدأ
ولا أعلم أهذا يحسب لها أم عليها :)

[وليد الشايجي]

قصة خيبة الأمل الكبرى والأسئلة المعلقة، بقلم مشاغب تحت راية روائي ياباني منتحر. الرواية التي يجب ان تُقرأ.

[Sima Bu Jawdeh]

Who was that man Rasheed saw on Hamra Street? Was it a reflection of a purer self before being tainted by the Lebanese civil war, or a friend he once knew in a distant past he now no longer identifies with?

There is something melancholic, if not ominous, about a novel written as an open letter to the Nobel Laureate writer Yasunari Kawabata who is unable to reply to our protagonist Rasheed, because Kawabata had long passed away by committing suicide.

Why did Rasheed choose to write a letter to someone that cannot answer? In essence, perhaps the pains of his journey and the questions that arise in the futility of the civil war never can be truly answered. Rasheed passes a tedious journey of self-discovery in a land that demands conformity. He is from a small Maronite village in Lebanon's North and where he first learns to embrace "modernity" and science, and veers away from traditions deeply rooted in family ties and religion.

This is a story (is it a story- or a memoir of many who possess the same fate?) of a young man who detaches himself from a legacy forced upon him, and relocates to West Beirut (the heart of the leftist parties) and joins the Communist movement wholeheartedly, but he soon begins to question the discrepancies found in its views.

What remains of a man in search of meaning between sectarianism, tribal loyalties, and religious extremities after 15 years of brutal violence, is the cruel realization that all you have sacrificed for amounts to nothing.

[Abdullah Abdulrahman]

"ما من شعور مبتدع، جميع المشاعر راسيه أبداً في قاع الإنسان".

أحببت هذا النص، أحببت طريقة "الضعيف" في التعبير، أنه من النصوص التي تتخللها الفوضى لأن تتبع مسار الحديث فيها يحتاج إلى تركيز عالي، فأنت تتبع "رشيد" وهو يسرد في رسالته المطوله هذة لـ "كواباتا" وهو روائي معروف من أصل ياباني تخيله "رشيد" في ذهنه موجهاً له هذة الرساله والتي كانت وسيلة إفتراضية ليحكي لنا من خلالها حكاية "رشيد" بطريقة غير مباشرة.

إنه نص من تلك النصوص التي تحكي معضلة كونك لبنانياً أولاً وعربياً ثانياً، معضلة الشعوب في مقاومة إحتكار السلطة وتدخل الدين والنشأة في حياة الفرد في بيئة ضيقة الفكر والمنهج، إنها رساله تحمل في طياتها شخوص عدة وحكايا لا تتوقف عن الهطول بغزارة على لسان "رشيد" ليحكي لنا شكل الحياة في لبنان الخمسينات والستينات والسبعينات الميلادية، عن أوهام الأحزاب والجماهير، عن أن تكون فرداً في جماعة، عن أن تشهد نشئتك في بيئة فقيرة تحمل معها حلمها الوحيد بأن تتخلص من الشقاء للعيش الرغيد، عن أن تولد تحت سلطة أب بمزاج تقليدي، وأم لا حول لها ولا قوة تدفع بها الشر عن أبنائها. كانت القراءة فيه ممتعة ومشوقة مع أنني فقدت تركيزي عند خط النهاية مع تداخل حكايات الحرب والموت بعضها ببعض.

[خالد العزيز]

اولى روايات رشيد الصعيف التى اقرأها
الرواية عبارة عن رسالة طويلة الى كواباتا الروائي اليابانى الشهير… الرواية جيدة ، مرثية لجيل ليس لبناني فقط انما عربي ايضا اضاع عمره في وهم الاشتراكية والتنظيمات السياسية ، مع رصد الخرب الاهلية اللبنانية من منظور تلك التنظيمات ، تحوى الرواية كمية لا بأس بها من الاسى و الحزن ، لكنها اعجبتنى .

[أحمد شاكر]

أحمد كساب، صديقي القارئ النهم، هو الذي دلني علي (رشيد الضعيف). وهو الذي أهداني (عزيزي السيد كواباتا). إنها أول مرة أقرأ لروائي من لبنان. وأول مرة أقرأ شيئا يتكلم عن الحرب الأهلية، التي دارت رحاها هناك. لغة رشيد قوية، وطريقة السرد ممتعة.

كاتب جديد أضيف لقوائم من نويت القراءة لهم كل أعمالهم. كاتب لابد أن يقرأ. شكرا كساب. شكرا رشيد..

[Mhmd]

رواية الأسئلة المُعلّقة

[Sarah Sakr]

ما بين نجمتين أو ثلاث كنت اتأرجح!
أسلوب مرة يشدني و مرة ينفرني.. مرة أقول "هاه بدأت افهم" فأعود خائبة. لم لا تكمل قصة بدأتها!
ما المغزى؟ ماذا تريد أن تقول؟ ما أهمية ما كتبت؟ من حسن و من انت؟ أترى في تجربتك الحزبية فخرا؟! لأن كل ما أراه هو تخبط، صدفة، بدأت صدفة؛ هذا كان اول ما رأيته انت حين خبرت بقراءة الجريدة -كالفلاح الذي انبهر بالأضواء في المدينة-! انقدت وراء شخص و أخيرا اضاعك فعما تكتب؟
أعلم تقريبا لم كواباتا.. هل كنت تقارن بين بلادنا العربية و اليابان؟ إذا كانت الإجابة بلا فحقا لم يصلني اي شئ من هذه الرواية.
اعذرني سيدي، ماذا كنت تريد أن تقول ثانية؟!

لكن ان كنت تتحدث عن خيبتنا كعرب.. فقد نجحت *إلى حد ما*

[Nizar Al mardoud]

نص سردي متمرد عالمألوف يمر بهدوء بالرغم مافيه من امل وحنق وسقوط وموت وخيبة وعدمية وتفاهة الكرة الارضية ومن عليها..... رسالة من ميت لآخر لعل احد الاحياء يسمع بفحواها ويتعلم.

[Rowan Tepper]

Absolutely phenomenal! It would be a grave injustice to even attempt to shoehorn this book into an established literary genre category. The first sentence entrains the reader, and like the flow of a vast river, or better yet, a rip tide, and makes it impossible to put down this book until it's done with you.
The sheer musical genius of current Lebanese cinematic progressive rock artists, such as Amadeus Awad, and Ostura, aroused my interest in exploring their nation's culture and history, and man, did I pick a perfect, shining example or Lebanese literature on the first try.
Read this book, and then, no matter what you think your taste in music is, listen to Ostura's new masterpiece, The Room.

[zack]

it was an interesting read. i don't normally engage in such literature so i felt like i have no idea what i'm doing while reading this and so i don't think i have the right to say much about it (and since i'm also not arab), but what i can say is that it was pleasant to read due to the poetic style and that it's worth reading so as to learn about the modern history of liban through the author's eyes - approached with devastating tenderness for one's own country and the tragedy of its people.

[Nasreenatassi]

It's not just an individual story but a story of a son within his family. Mostly it's about a son and his mother and a son and his father. I'm still part way through the story but I can say that any young person on an adventure to become an adult can enjoy this book. This is a rare book and already I can see myself reading it again.

[Marcella]

I wish I had read this at a different time. I had a lot of trouble staying focused on the book but I blame in on my mental state, not the text. The resolutely nonlinear story felt like a memory, which was good. Some lovely phrasing.

[Maha Ayoub]

C'est beau.
C'est poétique.

أعترف بحبي لمثل هذه النصوص الغير مشذبة.

[Dcbruhbruh]

Religion vs science lol

[Angel]

"It was the masses that made history, not the leader. Every deification of the individual was a negation of the role of the masses. It was the duty of the masses to acquire the necessary experience and to build it up so as to be able to take history by storm." (p.128)

"Among us, places are defined by the similarity of names. This is how one should define the war according to the professors!
Among us, wars happen in order that the names in one place should be alike." (p.158)

[Mostafa]

بغض النظر عن اعجابي الشديد بكواباتا الذي كان السبب في اختياري لهذه الرواية فعرفتني بكاتب رائع اسمه رشيد الضعيف

[Naim Frewat]

Read it in Arabic and I loved it