CHENNAI: The war in Syria may not have tugged heartstrings in Chennai but city-based activist, zen-doodler-cum-writer, Kirthi Jayakumar, was affected when she became a UN Online Volunteer in 2012. As a product of ‘grief and silence’ from within, Kirthi has recently authored her third solo book, The Doodler of Dimashq, portraying the war through the eyes of Ameenah, who is displaced unexpectedly as a child bride, navigating out of Damascus and plunging into the ancient city of Aleppo. She talks to us about how ‘Ameenah visited her every night’, telling her story of self-discovery and building a city from rubble with a simple act of resistance — doodling.
“When I began volunteering, I made friends with a group of people who were tweeting from Syria, about the situation,” shares Kirthi. She was heartbroken when a friend from Syria was killed in 2013. “This wasn’t an ordinary conflict. If people were tweeting about it, it meant that they were putting their lives on the line,” says Kirthi who gradually started losing a lot of friends. “They were either missing or had their homes bombed,” she recalls.
But, after the death of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi,Kirthi began responding to tragedies through zen-doodling. “A lot of people shared it and the doodles created a difference, showing art can considerably reduce the trauma of war,” says Kirthi who runs an Instagram-based project ‘Femcyclopaedia’ curating doodles of inspiring women.
In January, Kirthi lost another friend. “That’s when I began writing the story with Ameenah as my protagonist. She told me her story and I wrote about it,” shares Kirthi who began the book with no intention of publishing it. “It was stories that I had heard from my friends. I just had to verify the facts of events that took place during that timeline. And a few friends who were no longer in Syria became the beta-readers and helped validate what I wrote in the book including the use of Arabic words.
They were glad that I was a medium in keeping their voices alive. Ultimately I had the book published.”It’ll soon be seven years, since the day Syria’s civil war started. “The conversations in the book by Ameenah will be a personification of a mix of people I have spoken to, and a character that I will look up to for eternity — Anne Frank,” elucidates Kirthi.
How would she describe her writing? “I write about conflict and human stories of survival. I would call it ‘resilience writing’,” says the two time recipient of the UN Online Volunteer of the Year Award (2012 & 2013).
Chalking the idea for her next book, highlighting the role of women in South India during independence struggle, Kirthi adds, “I am glad that the response has been amazing. But, my next? I have an idea, but my character hasn’t come to see me yet. I am waiting for her.”
The book is priced ` 240 and is available on Amazon