“In the human body: trillions of cells, 78 organs, five senses. Though sight was neither the first nor the last to evolve, it is the pinnacle sense in my mind. The eye is the eminent organ. Next to it, the hidden organs quiver, the minor senses falter.” So begins the forthcoming book, Small Pieces, a collaborative work by writer Micheline Aharonian Marcom and visual artist Fowzia Karimi. Featuring 25 of Marcom’s short texts—or miniatures, as she refers to them—paired with Karimi’s watercolor illuminations, Small Pieces seeks to engage the reader through their eyes, exploring the uniquely human duality of looking outward and inward.
“Both of us [are] influenced by and interested in the medieval Armenian, Afghan, Persian miniatures found in illuminated books,” says Marcom. “And we’d already worked together on an illuminated book I wrote called The Brick House. But this, as we envisioned, would be different: the paintings and art in a dialogue themselves, set side by side.”
“We first spoke about the project over a decade ago,” recalls Marcom. “As early as 2007, I began dabbling with the small form. … By the time we came to putting the book together, I had written almost a hundred—so it became a question of sorting through … and then working together to decide which of those ought to be in this book.”
“For me, as the designer of the book, I organized the varying tones of the written pieces and their accompanying images so that moving through and amongst them, beauty, wonder, horror, and humor were in balance as well as in conversation,” says Karimi.
The resulting works range widely and the collection touches on diverse topics, from plastic pollution or a certain quality of light, to Beirut and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The writing is at times diaristic—exploring dreams as well as the ambiguity of reality—and other times imbued with a quantifying perspective, geared toward precision. The illuminations are colorful and lush, offering simple gestures, weighty meditations, or clever nods to the text.
“One of the things I love about working in the small is that it also makes space in my writing for things I think about, notice, worry over, admire—that may not need to find a place in a novel,” says Marcom. “And I also hoped, wanted, some things to stand alone—like the whale that washed ashore in Indonesia years ago, dying of malnutrition caused by the plastics filling his belly. That seemed to me like a stand-alone piece.” Indeed, this piece, titled “Bottles (4), Hard Plastics (19), Flip-Flops (2), Plastic Bags (25), Drinking Cups (115), String Tied Up in a Nylon Sack (3.26kg),” is unforgettable in its singularity.
Another piece, titled “Misericordia Is a Virtue Provided It Is Not Mere Passive Sentiment or Sentimentality,” explores similar themes and features Marcom’s meditation: “I stopped for a moment to admire what I might eat at some future hour and I noticed the colorful rubber-bands, the massive hobbled front claws, the strata of light-brown bodies, the jerky movement of two walkers as they pitched toward the glass and away, each animal an unholy merchandise available at the supermarket from 7 in the morning until 11 at night three miles from where I live one hundred and eighty-seven miles from the coast.”
The accompanying illustration of a bound lobster claw is one of Karimi’s favorites. Reflecting on it, she says, “The thought of the beautiful living creature imprisoned in a barren glass aquarium in a sterile supermarket is a heartbreaking one, and I found myself wanting to give the animal a small restoration of its dignity by painting it with as much love and sensitivity as possible.”
Small Pieces concludes with a “Dialogos” section between writer and artist, where they discuss creative practices, muses, and symbologies as well as truth and various relationships to it, and which Karimi describes as, “a long and unhurried written conversation we had over a few months after finishing the book.”
This concluding creative dialogue offers a density of expression and emotion where the earlier works in the book seek clarity in their sparseness, honed through devotion. Here, Marcom writes that, “the many years of adding, adjusting, leaving the piece for months … untouched, revising again, thinking it was done, thinking it was not done, until finally on a particular day at a specific hour determining it was finished so that it might presently be published. Of course ‘the present’ might be many years from now for some readers and some readers (if we are lucky) might not yet be born! In this and other ways literature speaks from the dead. Dialogues with the future.”
