In the new book I’m here! by Joke van Leeuwen we follow Jona. When school is out, she goes to her father’s office. There she does her homework and is ‘pretty quiet’. In the evening they eat together in the Lekker café, because Jona’s mother has passed away. Usually the daily special with mash. You can make beautiful things from puree – here are two pen drawings that illustrate what you can make from puree. Papa’s head, for example, or the Dnieper. It is unmistakably a Joke van Leeuwen book. Associative and full of slight wonder about the world.
‘Did you know that half of us humans are made up of water?’ her father said.
‘Really?’ said Jonah. “Then why don’t I slosh?”
Deep plate
Van Leeuwen has chosen major current themes for this novel, such as rising sea levels and social isolation. Jonah’s father explains: the water is too high and Wolem is too low.
He asks her to think of a deep plate and then says, “Wolem is built on the bottom of such a deep plate. Not a real deep plate, but it looks like it. In a big way then.”’
Jonah then thinks of a deep plate. “It was the first time in her life that someone asked her to think about a deep plate. She thought often enough of steps and bedtime and sums, but not a deep plate.’ It seems that with this dialogue Van Leeuwen also means that childhood should be a carefree time, without all the major problems with which the current generation is saddled. A time when your biggest problem is that you can trip over a step.
I’m here! also draws parallels with the biblical book of Jonah. In it God wants to destroy the city of Nineveh, but he first admonishes Jonah to warn the people. Terrified by the cruel inhabitants, Jonah flees, finds himself in a nasty storm, is swallowed by a fish, spit out and lives on to tell. So God is merciful, but no one escapes Him. It is not entirely clear whether Van Leeuwen also wants to say the latter with this parallel. Or that she wants to tell us that we, humans, can choose to flee or stay. At least Jonah and her father stay in Wolem and when Jonah falls asleep on the roof of her father’s office one day, the water has come and everyone is saved except her. She wanders the corridors and stairwell, wondering if she should wash, looking for food in the cafeteria, trying a phone that no longer works.
Printed Loneliness
There is a depressed loneliness about this narration, which somehow also seems to be a curious mix of corona processing and climate activism, and asks philosophical questions such as: how does a person manage without input from others? What does someone leave behind when he or she is no longer there? What exists and what eventually perishes forever?
Because Van Leeuwen chooses to isolate her main character from the rest of the world for the greater part of the book, we mainly get to see her inner world, which makes the characteristic associative of her style, in which the main character muses from one thing to another, sometimes a little less exciting. The strange interaction between people, which deesje or Elm! central is missing. So few crazy conversations, but luckily there is still the interaction between Jonah and the almost static outside world. And by putting Jonah at the center, without interference from other characters, everything in the novel is about the child and what that child thinks, decides and does.
On the roof, Jonah makes a cry for help from boxes and tea towels, trays and all kinds of things: ‘I’m here!’ The child that has to be seen by the environment in which it threatens to drown.