In the silent parts of our lives where words are nothing and all is silence there is a truth so deep that words cannot describe it. This is the soil I was trotting about on when I wrote my debut book, "Unsaid" - a harvest that was not the result of the simple effort to say something, but the wonderfully hard task of saying what is so obstinately dumb in us.
Then there are times in our life that we go through moments and stories so great we cannot talk about them nor write about them that very moment. These are the impressions that put themselves in the very marrow of our bones, the recollections that shimmer at the fringes of our minds like heat waves on a summer highway - perceivable, but impossible to understand. They are the stories that we bear in our bodies and the burden of which we can feel in our chests after the time has gone.
To write Unsaid was to do an archaeological dig, not of archaeological archaism, but of the buried emotional facts about which we are all agreed to leave no trace. It happens that even though one can say everything, there is something unspoken. Something yet remains unwritten even after having written it all down. This contradiction was my most serious problem and my sincerest method of story-telling.
The book was the fruit of those very quiet periods of my life and the stories that I have strolled through. Every single page is an effort to fill the gap between experience and expression, to give expression to what cannot be expressed, to find that which may be heard by another human heart. I was challenged by the fact that I was now faced with the boundaries of words themselves, and what to do with oceans of emotion in the little boats of words.
The thing that I found in the process is that the writing about the unsaid takes a different form of courage which is not a courage to speak but a courage to recognize that the speech is inadequate. It requires of us the sitting down with our own weaknesses, the acknowledgment of the essential solitude of some of our experiences and yet the effort to bridge the gap, to establish contact.
I know, there will be numerous flaws. It is possible that I have not done complete justice to this book. But as far as I could, I have preserved my words, my feelings untainted and sincere. This authenticity meant not giving in to the temptation to smooth the ugly edges, to make the stories more digestible or to make the emotions socially acceptable. It implied letting the ugliness of the actual experience to be present on the page.
His defect lies not in the doing but in the endeavouring, that is, in the attempt to seize lightning in a bottle, to retain a feeling so long as to subject it to the test of the microscope of language. But it is this impossibility which makes the attempt worthwhile. When we cannot express ourselves wholly we tend to tell most about our being human.
What I have gained in this process is that the unsaid does not only mean that which we do not want to say aloud. It is also the unspoken, the unspoken that is prior to language taking its toll on it, the pure experience. It is the point of knowing each other of the same agony, the knowing that goes between lovers, needing no elaboration, the burden of history that comes to be seated in some rooms.
I hope you will have one page in this book, also, which will address your heart, and stick to you like glue. This is not humility, but the purest desire that any author can have, not to transform the world, not to make something that will live forever, but to make an instant of acknowledgment, a fleeting glimpse of insight between two human minds who may never see each other.
Finally, I do not actually consider Unsaid my book. It is inherent in every one whose tongue has ever been at a loss before the presence of beauty or of a loss, in every one who has ever left an interview knowing that he has somehow left something behind him that he has not succeeded in swallowing. It is part of those silences we all share, words that we all swallow, the truths we all acknowledge in one another eyes but we do not say.
This book has taught me that the greatest accomplishment of literature is not in the perfection of saying everything, but in making space that allows the readers to bring their own unsaid vision to the page. The best narratives are not those which inform us of something new, but of those which grant us authorisation to accept what we had always known, but were unable to name.
By so doing, the unsaid is not a failure of communication but the purest of communications - the understanding that there are things too big to be conveyed by any single voice, and that only the voices of many thousands singing the same wordless song will do.
From
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