IMAGINATION IS MY FAVOURITE MUSCLE
Isabelle Wery
At the age of 8, my parents took me to Andalusia in Spain. It was my first long voyage outside of Belgium. A little girl with very white skin, I experienced the burning of the southern sun, the bite of the salt of the Mediterranean, the music of the Spanish language and the heady perfumes of eccentric flowers. My whole body was assaulted by a multitude of new sensations. It was at once wonderful and painful. But what was most decisive was my meeting many youngsters from all over the world. I discovered skins different from mine - languages, stories and cultures. And all these new elements turned me upside down. They mingled in me and stimulated my brain. I discovered that existence has a fascinating dimension when we are in contact with beings that are different from us. And I cannot stop myself from citing the Chilean-Russian author Alejandro Jodorowsky in his bookMetagenealogy:
When we come into this world, our neuronal potential is that of the future grown human being, but there are as yet few connections. The network is woven bit by bit, through contact with our family members and the knowledge they transmit to us. We are inheritors of experiences. However, these experiences are limited and are translated into “national” (or “mother”) tongues, producing stagnant mental states, an interior world with poor interconnections, a cultural prison from which it is difficult for us to escape.
In short, as a very young girl I promised myself to have a profession that would allow me to travel and to encounter cultures that were foreign to me. A voyage, is the accumulation of information, sensations, stories, images. A voyage, can be as intense as reading a thousand books. And it is one of the most efficient ways of exercising this fabulous muscle – the imagination.
Today, in a world where human beings are invaded by images on screens, I have chosen as a profession to write. I have chosen a visual art that has as its tools words. I see it as an act of resistance. To choose to activate the imagination of the reader using only the strength of words. My work is this: painting images with words.Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, while imagination embraces the whole world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.I have made this citation from Albert Einstein my own and I would add, within the framework of reading, how much imagination is the possibility of a creative space offered by the writer to the reader. A space or a matrix in which mental images emerge that belong only to the reader.
It has been proven that the images a reader develops in his brain while reading a text can have the same strength as his own memories. This shows the power of the writer’s work on the reader’s imagination. Moreover, in our contemporary world where there is a tendency towards standardisation, where cities look more and more alike, where even the same products – cultural or not - are sold everywhere, where the specificities of cultures have a tendency to fade, I often think that one of the roles of literature, and of art in general, could be to propose to readers non-formatted images. Images of unique and inventive universes whichchallenge the reader and give him a sense of vitality. I like it when art has the capacity to re-enforce people’s will to act and their desire for life. Instilling the desire to construct a more conscious and free life.
Literature has taken me five times to China within the space of two and a half years. Five times, that’s a lot for it to be by chance! I participated in the EU-China Festival bringing together Chinese and European authors in Beijing and in Chengdu, I participated in round tables, I met students from the University of Beiwai, I wrote my next novel for entire days in Beijing, I made friends, I visited multiple cultural places, I tried to learn the Chinese language but above all, I discovered authors like Pu Songling, Yan Lianke, Sheng Keyi, Mo Yan… and their stimulating poetic titles such asThe CrystalRadish,The Adulterous Dog,The Animated Cadaver. Thus, I accumulated a unique experience in China. Today I am happy to realize how much China has enriched my work as a writer, and how much the Chinese culture has nourished my favourite muscle,the imagination.
I live in a very small country in Europe, Belgium, divided into three communities that speak three different languages. It is sometimes complex, even Kafkaesque. It is a young country, founded in 1830. It is a country like an intersection crossed by numerous cultural currents. My neighbourhood has a hundred nationalities. It is a slightly blurred country where surrealism and magical realism are part of our imagination. At this time, one of the subjects that concerns Belgian citizens, as everywhere in Europe, is the survival of humans and of life in a world that seems doomed so great are the ecological disasters. I am sometimes completely helpless and hopeless when faced with this catastrophe. How tokeep writing and how todesire to write when the end of humanity has been announced? So, I remember the Spanish garden of my childhood, I think of these young people with whom we exchanged information like rhizome mushrooms at the foot of a tree… We were already a form ofImagining Community. This image gives me strength, it reminds me how much communicating with each other (now with our ultra rapid means of communication)helps us to stay informed, to react and to imagine together other ways of living.
For, as Gabriel García Márquez wrote citing William Faulkner in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982,I decline to accept the end of [humanity].
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