Friday 29 March 2024

A way with words

Josanne Cassar interviews young writer Manuel Zarb

If you had to give most teenagers the titles The Accident and Mission to the Moon, and ask them to write two short stories, they would probably come up with a predictable narrative.

But Manuel Zarb is not your typical 14-year-old. In his hands, these titles became little gems as his imagination took flight and he came up with stories which once again confirm his literary talent.

I first met Manuel four years ago when, at the age of ten, he won first prize in an international writing competition organised by www.youngwriters.toowrite.com.

Since then he has continued to write short stories at an impressive rate, and submitting them for online competitions. This year he won first and second prize in his age group with his two stories which he submitted for an international Children’s Story Competition organised by Chapter One Promotions based in England(http://www.chapteronepromotions.com/kids-korner/writing-competition.htm).  Last year he received an honourable mention and his story was included in a book which was published by the organizers.

Manuel explains that those taking part are given certain guidelines but can basically submit as many stories as they wish under each title.  Short story writing is his favourite genre and he has managed to master the art of crafting a tale within the limitations of a specific word count.

Like a lot of writers, he writes according to his mood and never knows quite when the muse will strike.

“I’m inspired by books I read, and influenced by different styles. I think I’m still trying to find my own style, and I keep experimenting each time I write a story. Sometimes when I get home, I rush in and head straight to my computer because I’ve come up with an idea and I just have to write it down.”

His parents, George and Anna Zarb, who are both teachers, often gaze at their son and wonder where he gets his incredible imagination from. They are understandably proud, as is his younger brother Aaron who is just as bright and inquisitive as his older sibling.  Of course, this is a family of readers and books are everywhere, which goes a long way to explain Manuel’s way with words. They laugh as they describe family holidays during which their sightseeing includes the obligatory search for quaint bookshops tucked away in the heart of  the various European capitals they’ve visited.

Manuel says that when he sat down to write the stories under the rather innocuous titles of The Accident and Mission to the Moon, he knew right away that he had to come up with innovative plots if his stories were going to get noticed among all the other entries.

“I deliberately went in an opposite direction in order to grab the attention of the judges.  With Mission to the Moon, for example, rather than coming up with a traditional science fiction story, I started thinking of different ways I could use the concept of the moon. In the end I used the moon in the sense of how it is depicted on the Islamic flag, and set the story against the backdrop of what was happening in Libya at the time when Gaddafi was being toppled.”

As Manuel describes his thought process it is clear that his avid reading has helped immensely in his creative writing as he utilizes references from current events as well as literature. His knowledge of the craft is startling in someone so young and it is easy to see why he won these prizes.

“With The Accident I used the second person, addressing the reader, who in this case is a mercenary being told how to plan a murder to make it look like an accident. Right now I’m experimenting with the film noir style of writing and that’s the style I used in this story.”

Using short, staccato sentences, The Accident reads like a voiceover from the beginning of a film and is quite dark, detached and mechanical coming from someone so young.

A Mission to the Moon on the other hand, has the heart of real pain and suffering behind it – and again, the depth of feeling is unexpected from the pen of a young teenager.

It won’t surprise me if one day we hear more about this gifted young man who I am sure will continue to hone his writing skills as he gets older.

The two stories are reproduced here for you to read.

 

THE ACCIDENT

You step out onto the street and the sun’s glare makes you look down. All of a sudden, the smallest details and senses are much more acute and delicate. Through your shoes, you can clearly sense the pebbles underfoot. When you open your mouth to breathe, you can clearly detect the smell of charcoal with your tongue. Your heart is beating so quickly and urgently you are sure everyone in the street can hear it.

Congratulations, that’s the fight or flight reaction.

Today, you get to do both. Nobody is looking at you. You are an insignificant statistic. You are not a unique snowflake. You are the same puddle of water as everyone else.

You may be standing in Washington, Beijing, or Moscow. You could be in Rio or Delhi, or Paris or Cape Town. It doesn’t matter. You have been sent to kill a man – rarely a woman – and to make it look like an accident.

That’s why they wanted you and not some dime-a-dozen mercenary. This will spark no international incident. This will not be a scandal, but a tragedy. When your work is done, the international hypocrites will stand over the coffin and see if you did your work well. They will be serious on the outside and smiling on the inside. Because of the accident.

Because of you.

Don’t get too excited. The plan is essential. You can not make a mistake. Take whatever helps you – maybe a cup of coffee, maybe a good meal, maybe an empty stomach – and focus on nothing but the accident. The one you have arranged.

Maybe you put a streak of oil in the middle of the road and a bomb in the prime minister’s car. Maybe you’re watching from some rooftop in Turkey, waiting to blow up the bomb as soon as the car crashes. That’s one technique. There are many techniques.

Maybe it’s something as simple as a slow acting poison. Maybe you’re seated comfortably in a banquet in Havana, watching as some dignitary or another tips a glass of wine down his throat. That is much easier. And no less rewarding. This job is not a rewarding one, after all. You should be ashamed of yourself.

But you’re not, and that’s something you have to exploit. Maybe you can feel some pride, knowing you’re not some common assassin. Maybe you feel like a coward, knowing you didn’t even look into the eyes of the person you killed. Feelings aren’t important anyway. They’re the first thing you have to smother if you want to make a living in this line of work.

You’re standing, or crouched, or seated, and you have a weapon in your hands. The smell of burning tyres is thick and heavy, or maybe it’s the smell of the musks and perfumes of the dignitaries in the room.

You shoot a tyre as the target’s car passes along. You stab him in the back quickly with a dart, and vanish into the crowd. You tamper with the engine of his private jet.

Then you step back and watch the accident.

Whatever your methods, you have been successful, and it’s a tragedy, not a homicide. The news vultures swoop in and lap up the blood, and they say it’s been a terrible misfortune.

And as you walk away from the burning wreckage, and the gathered crowd, and watch the aeroplane erupt into a ball of fire, you may feel something – not physically, but more abstract and hard to define. An emotion. Kill it.

It’s easier that way.

 

MISSION TO THE MOON

As far as my eight year old brother was concerned, the crescent represented Libya’s mission to the moon.

I had tried to explain to him, time and time again, that the crescent was symbolic of Islamic identity, not of the moon. But he rarely listened. As far as he was concerned, the crescent and the green flag of Libya represented Colonel Gaddafi’s top secret moon mission – that Libya should put the first African on the moon.

We were supporters of Gaddafi in those days. When the trouble started, both my parents were alarmed and worried, and they stopped me and my brother from going to school. In the first days of uncertainty, the green flag my mother so loved to drape over the balcony was confined indoors, away from the eyes of the rebels. My father, previously a very active participant in politics, turned into a politically passive hermit. We were scared. Well, with the exception of my brother.

On the first day of the protests, while my parents and I sat around looking stunned, my brother took apart three cardboard boxes with a kitchen knife, slicing away and then sticking pieces back together with tape. It was a fine specimen, even in its initial stages of construction. On that dismal day, my brother stuck a little green flag on one side, and on the other he carved with the knife: MUAMMAR’S MISSION TO THE MOON.

I’m sure moon missions were the last thing on the colonel’s mind back then, but that was what my brother wrote; and despite his obvious apathy to politics of any sort, he believed that space was number one on our leader’s to-do list. My brother was raised in a house that firmly supported Gaddafi, and I suppose he had a strange love for the person whose name he couldn’t properly pronounce.

After the initial panic and all that, we started going outside with the Gaddafi supporters, waving the green flag jovially and shouting slogans. My brother found these marches terribly boring, and he and I would frequently escape from our parents to go continue working on our spaceship. He had all kinds of theories that would astonish any conspiracy theorist. For example, the rebels were actually Martians working to take over the world who were scared Gaddafi would uncover their home planet. Or that the rebels were hired by the CIA because the Americans were jealous of Gaddafi’s space program. Or the KGB. Or the YMCA (I don’t know where he got that from).

On one splendid March day, we finished the spaceship. While the atmosphere in Tripoli was, to say the least, uneasy, my brother feared nothing. He was positively buoyant as he stuck that last morsel of tape to our creation. The NATO affair had begun by then, but my brother believed the bombs to be fallout from ‘Libya’s nuclear spaceship’ and that the end justified the means. So due to this, he wasn’t really fearful. His whole world was built on imagination, and I didn’t try to explain anything. The truth would only have frightened him. My mother and father, and even myself, we had changed so much, and I didn’t want him to change. He was my one stable source of laughter back then.

On one April day my source of laughter went missing. We were all scared witless, but I was comforted slightly when I found that the Libyan moon mission project had vanished from our house.

I found him not too far away, sitting atop the spaceship looking up at the stars. The last thing I saw him do was grin at me and point towards the moon, which was full that night. Then, out of nowhere, the air turned to fire and pellets of lead and in pure human selfishness I threw myself to the ground. I was hit in the shoulder and knee, but they were flesh wounds.

My brother’s moon mission was in tatters, and so was he.

I do not know who was blamed to this day. The funeral was a small thing in which I didn’t give a speech because I could not speak for weeks after. As I lay some days ago cowering on my bed, listening to the bombs and the gunfire, I came to a conclusion which brought me peace. I thought it was Allah’s will that while we common men fought and cowered in fear; my brother was up among the stars, leading his very own mission to the moon.

 

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