The Clay Marble

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1991

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapter 17-Afterword

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Clay Marble

The clay marble of the novel’s title symbolizes the importance of resilience and hope in overcoming challenges. To comfort Dara after she has been bullied by Chnay, Jantu molds her a special gift: a big marble made out of clay, which she says is “magic.” Later, in the Khao I Dang hospital, she makes her a bigger, “more powerful” one. Dara, like many in her war-torn country, longs for stability, and at times of danger and uncertainty she strokes the perfect sphere with her fingers, with its magic seemingly giving her strength and guidance. A sphere is the strongest of all shapes, and for Dara, it represents a reservoir of strength that she can draw from. It is also important to her as a symbol of Jantu’s affection for her, and of her extraordinary creative powers, which, to Dara, seem nothing less than magical.

The marble is connected to a specifically feminine magic. Jantu creates it to replace the beautiful mobile destroyed by Chnay, which depicted women at one of their traditional tasks: pounding rice for their families. As such, it also symbolizes the strength, hope, and desire to nurture that goes into raising children and families. It marks a bold contrast with the (male) soldiers and their civil war, which as Jantu says is like a brutal game of soccer in which civilians and families are kicked about, instead of balls.

After Jantu is gravely wounded and worries that Dara will have soon have to pursue their shared dream of starting a farm without her, she tells Dara that the marble itself is unimportant—its “magic” is what she puts into the clay, as into life: skill, imagination and, above all, courage and hope. Dara needs to find these things within herself, instead of looking to the marble or Jantu to help her. She reminds Dara of her moments of strength and resourcefulness, and says that it was Dara’s “magic,” not the marble’s, that saved her each time. Dara must believe that she has a “marble” within herself. After Jantu has died and Sarun announces his intention of enlisting in the Khmer Serei rather than help restart the family farm, Dara’s fingers come to life with their own magic: With “a life of their own,” they mold a lump of clay into a perfect sphere (151). This revelation of her own inner strength and abilities gives Dara the willpower to defy her brother and take command of the family’s future.

Rice Seed

The rice seed symbolizes the struggle between peaceful and productive cultivation and the mindless destruction of war. In the kitchen of the Khmer Serei military camp, Dara is at first comforted to see women performing the task of pounding rice so it can be winnowed and cooked. It reminds her of her childhood and Jantu’s handcrafted mobile, and seems “reassuringly familiar” and nurturing (99) in this austere, masculine army camp. Then she notices the markings on the rice sacks, and realizes that this is not ordinary rice being pounded but “rice seed,” which is specially engineered for planting, not eating. A single grain of rice seed can produce as many as fifty grains of ordinary rice, and could save thousands of civilians from starving.

The cook tells her that the rice seed has to be cooked to feed the army’s new recruits. As Dara sees it, this destructive waste typifies the mentality of war and the military in general: The country’s future and the lives of civilians are being thrown away in the name of short-sighted violent conquest. This echoes Chnay’s mindless trampling of Jantu’s toy mobile, and foreshadows Sarun’s seduction by the Khmer Serei militia, which lures him into trading in his hoe for a rifle—and his obligations to his family and fiancée for fantasies of power and violence. Thus, the rice seed also symbolizes young men, who are being taken away from their farms (where they could grow enough rice to feed a nation) and thrown into the grinder of war.

The Stone Crossbeam and the Sickle Moon

The stone crossbeam and the sickle moon are both symbols of stability and endurance. At the Nong Chan refugee camp, Nea shows Dara a big block of stone that appears to be a crossbeam—a beam that supports part of a structure—taken from an ancient building, perhaps one of the magnificent temples of the Angkor Empire. Nea says it could be a thousand years old, and Dara is enchanted by the faint carvings on its surface, which seem to depict the “delicate hand” of a dancing angel. It is in the shade of this stone that Jantu and Dara create the clay model of their future farm, suggesting that they can rebuild their ruined lives through their endurance.

After being separated from her family near the Thai border by a military shelling, Dara returns to the stone, since it is the only landmark she knows of where her family might come looking for her. Waiting for them, she presses her cheek to the beam’s warm surface: Its carved pattern, which has “survived a thousand years,” comforts her (77). This seems to mirror her fantasy a little earlier of climbing up to the crescent moon and falling asleep within its “smooth curve,” as in a hammock, or peering down from it to find her mother. During Dara’s search, she thinks of the moon, which is “sickle-shaped,” evoking her and Jantu’s plans to build a farm together. She clings to these images of strength and permanence to moor herself in a chaotic world fraught with sudden death and destruction, which enable her to ultimately transfer her desire for stability into something tangible by the novel’s end.