The Book They Will Never See

By Theresa Rézeau This month, two artists connected to my book, The Divine Disrupted: Sacred Art in a Fractured World, died: Sliman Mansour, the Palestinian painter of humanity, memory and hope, and Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist who became one of the most recognisable figures in contemporary art. Mansour died in Jerusalem on 24 August, aged 79. His Camel of Hardship remains one of the most powerful images of Palestinian displacement, carrying the weight of a people and generations of history. His work held pain, resilience and memory together. I was deeply saddened by his death, and by the fact that he died without seeing peace in Palestine. Mansour was already confirmed for The Divine Disrupted. Kusama died in Tokyo on 14 August, aged 97. She lived long enough to see the extraordinary distance between the young Japanese artist who fought for recognition in New York and the global icon her work would become — from her dots and pumpkins to the Infinity Rooms. Her representative had told me last year that permission to use her image would only be considered once a publisher was confirmed. I had hoped both artists would live to see The Divine Disrupted. They will not. There is a particular kind of pain in having a finished manuscript sitting in front of you, knowing that the work is done, while the artists whose voices and work are inside it have trusted you to see it through. Global artists have trusted me with their stories, their work and their time. The manuscript exists. The conversations have happened. The book is real. And yet the one thing standing between it and the world is still finding a publisher. This month has made that distance feel much heavier. I keep thinking about the people who will never see the book they helped make possible. I can only hope that The Divine Disrupted eventually reaches the world in a way that honours why it was written in the first place. The painting above, Hope, painted in 1886 by the English artist George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), captures something I have been struggling to hold onto. A blindfolded figure sits alone, surrounded by darkness, with almost everything lost and only a single string remaining. Looking at it now, it feels less like an image of certainty and more like an image of what it means to keep going when you are no longer sure what will happen. And I would be lying if I said I am not scared. Hope has carried me through much of this process, but hope becomes painful when the thing you are hoping for remains just beyond your reach. I am scared that this finished manuscript will remain unseen for too long; scared that more of the artists connected to it will leave this world before they ever hold it in their hands. I have fought so hard to bring The Divine Disrupted into existence. Now I am asking myself how much longer I can keep believing that the final door will open. Their work remains.

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