To see the meeting in print of Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Fowzia Karimi feels like destiny fulfilling itself. True, Karimi has previously illustrated Marcom’s The Brick House (2017), but in Small Pieces (2023) they have engaged in a dialogue over twenty-five short texts and an equal number paintings. The nearest to it I can think of is Timothy O’Grady’s 1997 novel, I Could Read the Sky, where the accompanying photographs by Steve Pyke reflect the novel’s ideas without looking to portray the story outright.
The prose is contributed by Marcom, an American writer of Armenian heritage and, to my reckoning, a literary descendent of the Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. Normally her work allows ideas to grow, adapt layers, and abstract, but here we have highly polished nuggets that capture moments or thoughts, no greater than a few paragraphs, on subjects like nature and the environment, as well as more intimate instants, such as discovering love or giving birth. These ideas, so naked on the page, bring a different lens to Marcom’s work and, like all things literature, some resonate more than others and, for me, the most terse pieces, making me think of the shortest of Guatemalan writer, Augusto Monterroso’s stories, worked best. Some pieces – Marcom calls them ‘miniatures’ like Beauty evoke a whole world in three lines while others, notably Old Man’s Eyes, captures light-hearted epiphany; the sort of thing that makes us smile to ourselves.
Karimi, born in Afghanistan and raised in the US, brings the paintings to Small Pieces. Here they sit starkly on accompanying pages, an isolated subject on a sea of white. The concept is that Marcom’s miniatures should inspire Karimi’s artwork and so the images provided sometimes capture the subject direct, such as a spider or some seeds, and at other times reach laterally, such as the colourful whirl of dots in There Are So Many describing a path to entropy at the thought of a shop stocked for Christmas. In a way these dots are reminiscent of the confetti in Karimi’s 2020 memoir, Above Us the Milky Way: An Illuminated Alphabet. In that book the paintings, similar in tone, are more detailed and have permission to break up the page and interact with the text (e.g. on one page a pair of bloody footprints walk across the words). Perhaps the memoir, being a more personal work allows for greater license than collaboration, where the artists work together without treading on each other’s toes, offers.
Although the words and images form the bulk of this dialogue between the writers, there’s also an enjoyable conversation that closes the book where they interview each other on art, influences, and legacy. Longer in form than the pieces before it’s full of quotable lines (“Literature is our inheritance and our bequeathal.”; “Our brief, small age will pass, and art will abide.”) that ring with truth. But overall, while in literature Marcom suggests we are looking for an ”an aesthetic shock: a recognition on the level of soul“, Small Pieces feels more like an exercise in finding the sublime than truly capturing it.
