The World Insect Jar
Sivan S.
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I wanted the visceral and the mystical, magnificent beauty tinged with painful empathy, a potent longing expressed through both the limitations of human languages and experiences, yet with an opportunity to widen it. This story just started with a jar—one that contained the universe, yes, but still simply a jar. I did not know what it stood for. Yet, as I started to explore the world outside the jar, and its insides started to gray, I had to ask myself—what do I feel trapped by? What glass confines me? For this is a story of longing, and that craving does not exist without freedom first being ripped away. As a non-binary person stuck in an intrinsically heteronormative society, the answer came quite quickly. Thereafter, the jar became a cage where a mother assists her daughter’s escape from a never-ending cycle of forced femininity and motherhood, hoping for just the smallest taste of it for herself. None of this is truly explicit, and I do not mean it to be. But while the jar may represent many things—to limit a reader to a single interpretation would bring me utmost sadness—the story’s core revolves around entrapment and a yearning for freedom; the narrator knows she will never get it. But maybe her daughter will, and that might be enough.
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Creativity itself is a magnificent manifestation of emotion and imagination, a personal exploration---to share oneself through art, through creation, is an offering of trust, as through my art I sing "this is how to understand me" with the hopes someone will identify with it, and even continue the wondrous cycle.
