I hadn’t imagined that I would ever write about Indonesian dragons. Yet here I was writing about Mochtar Lubis, a writer imprisoned several times for words that Indonesian dictators tried to suppress. My fifty words on this writer for the 26:50 project with International PEN went like this:
I imagine you
an Indonesian dragon:
your words the dragon’s
teeth that sprang fully
armed from the writer’s
mouth.
Your dragon’s eye
saw things your keepers
preferred to keep
hidden.
They blinked first but
dragons don’t blink:
you spat words, like
teeth, through prison
bars.
The cage kept springing
open.
The beauty of this kind of project is that the tightness of the constraint takes you to unexpected places. You could argue, and some have, that the brief might have been ‘write no more than 50 words’. Still tight, but a little bit more flexible than ‘exactly 50’. But I really think that it would not have worked nearly as well. I know from my own fifty words how I had to keep coming back to them, almost like one of those puzzles where you move little plastic squares inside a bigger square tray. New thoughts, better ideas, different words kept popping up as a result of trying to get to the exact fifty.
As an editor of some of the other writers in the project I saw this happening with them too. One writer sent me a beautiful piece (in two languages). But it was only 49 words. I asked for another word. The writer went back to her research and discovered that she’d slightly misquoted ‘official’ words in bureaucratic English. The real, and now revised, version was much more chilling and powerful in this context, and it magically brought the word count up to 50.
Another writer sent through a piece that was written in the form of a job ad – for an impossible job, carried out by one of the world’s most famous political prisoners. It was only 48 words. The resolution was easy and brought about an improvement – two words were added that provided the call to action the ad had previously lacked. You can read these and other 26:50 pieces over the coming week. Check daily on http://26-50.tumblr.com/
The power of serendipity. It works, like the cat with the magical hat. You go to places you never thought you’d go. My daughter Jessie quoted these lines to me this week from Dr Seuss’s Oh the places you’ll go:
“Today is your day.
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way.”
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