Secret Calligraphy
Rafik Schami believes everyone is an artist
“The crucial question was not one of courage or cowardice, but of might and power in the state,” says the narrator of Rafik Schami’s novel The Calligrapher’s Secret.
Schami (b. 1946) is a Damascus-born German-Syrian writer who migrated to Germany in the 1980s. His storytelling method is heavily influenced by the Arabic narratives in 1,001 Nights and his novels demonstrate a deep knowledge of Islamic history and an inventive approach to the past.
The narrator who warns of the power of the state in The Calligrapher’s Secret is channeling Rami Arabi, father-in-law of Hamid Farsi, master calligrapher of mid-twentieth century Damascus.
To the novel’s end, Farsi is a mystery. The master calligrapher sacrifices himself and everyone he knows for the sake of craft, leaving the reader guessing whether his sacrifices are noble or in vain. The difficulty of judging Hamid Farsi brings us to the novel core mystery: the relation between art and life and the debt these two spheres of experience owe each other.
