Both Rawi Hage and Madeleine Thien are not exactly recognized for producing “small books,” literally or figuratively. So, imagine my surprise when The Call and The Artisans—hand-sized, slim works penned respectively by Hage and Thien—landed on my desk. They strike me as the literary equivalent of the “Tiny Desk Concerts,” featuring international musicians who perform live, stripped-down but remarkable gigs in close quarters at NPR Music’s head office in Washington D.C. Compact and pithy, these books are part of a series called “Objects Talk Back,” an initiative dating back to 2021 and published by Diaphanes, which annually invites two writers to select an object displayed in the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, or in the museum’s collections and then to riff off the object in personal and imaginative ways. 

Before I evaluate what Thien and Hage have accomplished, allow me to say that this series is itself a gem. Conceptualized and curated by writer Priya Basil in conjunction with the Stiftung Humboldt Forum in Berliner Schloss, it is meant to evoke new questions, offer fresh perspectives, and develop deeper understanding about our past. It is thoughtfully and critically engaged in its approach. Invoking the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation”—that is, the melding of history, theory, and fiction—Basil extrapolates further, developing the idea of “fabulography,” as an “invitation to work creatively with-from-through gaps, facts, and imagination to expand the narrative space around an object.” She invites writers to participate in fabulography, that is, “digging deep” to mine details that may be painful but that also honour elements of our past.

As it happens, digging deep is one of both Thien and Hage’s many gifts. Thien’s The Artisan is a finely crafted short story in response to a mural fragment depicting three Uyghur princes, who contributed to the construction of a sanctuary in the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves along the Northern Silk Road (outside the city of Turfan, in the present-day Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China). The mural fragment, formally referred to as Bezeklik Cave 20, was removed by Albert von Le Coq and brought to the Berlin museum following the Second German Turfan Expedition (1904–5); it was all but destroyed by the Allied bombings. Neither the colonial imperative, nor its relationship to the current political moment are lost on Thien. Her story, set around the eleventh century, during the years of the Uyghur Kingdom of Kocho, is in part about power dynamics but also about spiritual enlightenment. It is told from the perspective of an artist, a judicious choice: the artist’s view, measured against that of the prince, reminds us of the former’s enduring vision, and of the importance of art and artists.

What fascinates me, however, is the way that reading Hage’s own work, The Call, which responds to a fragment of a Manichaean text written in Uighur and Old Turkic, adds further depth and resonance to Thien’s piece (not that it needed any), while standing alone as a provocative consideration of the contemporary moment via polarising belief systems. Using the latter as a lens to read the drive of contemporary capitalism, he suggests that archival objects may be seen as a secular form of iconoclasm: carefully preserved but uprooted from their “home” or country of origin, they are hidden from view in museums, like many tangled histories. They are “buried caves” waiting to be “excavated and revealed.” 

It is impossible, he adds, to display everything in view of how much Europe has amassed—often through exploitation—and so he calls for an “autonomous Republic of Objects,” whereby museums throughout the world would be transformed into places of refuge under the care of an international body of librarians and grant egalitarian public access. Whether this is possible isn’t his point—it is the dream of striving and the promise of return, the very thing that artists, like those represented in Thien’s story, offer us.mRb