Children of the Jacaranda Tree and Three Kinds of Feeling
When you put on a play, you get to build the sets ahead of time. But in fiction the world must be constructed as the reader watches, sentence by sentence, line by line. And usually that has to happen even as the characters are doing things. It’s a lot! It’s a miracle that we manage it at all.
I often think that a reader will be the most patient to watch the world take form if we give them something solid to stand on right away—or maybe an object to hold in their hot little hand. This something works best when it is concrete, and when it evokes the senses.
Children of the Jacaranda Tree, by Sahar Delijani, is about Iranian political prisoners and their families in the 1980s. It’s not a world I knew much about before starting the book, but Delijani puts me immediately inside the body of a character, and thus grounds me as she builds the rest of the world. Look at the opening:
Azar sat on the corrugated iron floor of a van, huddled against the wall. The undulating street made the car sway from side to side, swinging her this way and that. With her free hand, she clasped on to something that felt like a railing. The other hand lay on her hard, bulging belly, which contracted and strained, making her breathing choppy, irregular. A heat wave of pain spouted from somewhere in her backbone and burst through her body. Azar gasped, seizing the chador wrapped around her, gripping so hard that her knuckles turned white. With every turn, she was thrashed against the walls. With every bump and pothole, her body was sent flying toward the ceiling, the child in her belly rigid, cringing. The blindfold over her eyes was damp with sweat.
First, the choice to open with the character in a confined space helps to ground us by focusing our sensory experience inside that space. We trust that we’ll later learn the geography, the political circumstances, how the character got into this situation, and what will happen next—but first, we align with a single body.
I love the focus on texture here, because touch is a more intimate sense than some of the others. I don’t have to be all that close to see or hear a thing. Perhaps more important, I can stand far from a character and still experience what they see and hear, in more or less the same way that they experience it. But to feel texture, I must be very close. I must physically touch the object in question. And so details like the corrugated iron floor, the sway of the car, the feel of a railing bring me at least shoulder-to-shoulder with Azar.
But that’s just what we feel of Azar’s surroundings. A few sentences later, we get the sensations that occur inside her body: the heat wave of pain in her backbone, contractions, labor. Shoulder-to-shoulder, maybe I can feel the vibrations of the vehicle with her, maybe I can feel the shaking of her body. But it pulls me all the way inside Azar’s body to know her specific waves of pain.
I’m impressed by the transition from outside sensations to inside ones. “The other hand lay on her hard, bulging belly, which contracted and strained, making her breathing choppy, irregular.” Her hand is feeling the outside of her belly—that’s external touch—but through the hand we move to feel inside her belly, then further to the air in her lungs. It’s so smooth.
And I admit I’m a sucker for breath. As I read, I find myself breathing with the rhythm of sentences. An outright description of a character’s breathing will make me try it out, and thus go even deeper into the experience of the characters’ body, as mine moves in time with theirs.
I’ve so far talked about two ways of feeling and how they are different and how they ground us in the bodily experiences of a character. First there is touch, meaning the texture, temperature, and pressure of what rubs against the outside of your skin. Maybe you choose to reach your fingers to stroke an object, or maybe someone else covers your eyes so the sweaty dampness of the cloth rubs your skin. Second are the sensations that occur more internally—pain, breath, bodily functions that happen beyond our control.
Now I want to suggest that action can be another category of feeling. I mean that there is sensation associated with muscles stretching and contracting, and so it is kind of like each of these other ways of feeling. But it is different in a significant way because it is necessarily more active, and more alive.
“Azar gasped, seizing the chador wrapped around her, gripping so hard that her knuckles turned white.” I hear the gasp, of course, but since I’m already inside Azar’s body, I also feel the air in my throat. More than that, I feel the tightening of the muscles that push the air through my throat. And I feel the tension in my fingers at Azar’s seizing and gripping. Though the whitening of her knuckles might technically count as a visual detail, I feel the stretch of skin and the force of her hand that pulls it so tight.
And so these sensations, these intimate textural details, are not static, but dynamic. They bring a charge to the scene, a brightness, an energy.
Even more important, this way of feeling is not passive, but active. Things aren’t simply happening to Azar—she is happening back.
This matters. Azar is a prisoner who is being forcibly taken from one spot to another and she has no say in that at all. She is not allowed to decide where she goes, who she sees, what she eats, or how—or even whether—her basic bodily needs are met, but is at the complete mercy of her captors.
And yet her muscles strain. She is active—and agented—despite captivity. Making us feel the gasping, seizing, and grasping muscles—even if it’s painful—is a way the writer reminds us of Azar’s agency and her full human dignity, despite her circumstances.
Check out Allison’s upcoming classes: The Craft of Fiction: Tell, Don't Show on June 20, The Craft of Fiction: Subtext and Subversion on June 27, and The Craft of Fiction: Sense(s) and Sensibility on July 11.