On Hiva Nebi’s ‘One-size-fits-all Blue Dress’

On Hiva Nebi’s ‘One-size-fits-all Blue Dress’

Introduced and translated by Badar Salem

One-size-fits-all Blue Dress

By Hiva Nebi

Jadal Publishing House, 2022

In her debut novel One-size-fits-all Blue Dress, Syrian-Kurdish writer Hiva Nebi offers us a rare gem: a book that doesn’t simply tell a story, but draws the readers into a raw, intimate exploration of the self. While the novel’s focus is postpartum depression, it also captures the experiences of being a woman, of giving birth, of living in a war zone, and of being married yet unbearably alone. It is a story of loving and hating in the same breath, of grieving and longing for stillness, for escape, and sometimes, for nothing at all.

The narrator (unnamed throughout) spirals into a quiet, terrifying unraveling following the birth of her daughter, Mav. Soon, she develops a fearful, almost ritualistic relationship with the bedroom window. The window—and the view beyond it—becomes metaphor for her dislocation, both from the world and from herself. “Ever since I gave birth to Mav,” she confesses, “I’ve felt like I’m suspended in a balloon in the air. All I want, day and night, is to land.” This image, of a woman hovering above her own life, desperate for gravity, lingers in the heart.

Depression seeps into every corner of the narrator’s existence: her thoughts, her marriage, her body, and her sense of self.  She speaks of a desire for death, of an unrelenting loneliness, and of a life that feels alien—something she inhabits, but no longer recognizes as her own. Her relationship with her husband, Didar, is equally fractured. “She bears the deepest hatred in the universe for him,” Nebi writes. “At the same time, she feels a love so vast it’s as if no one else exists on the face of the earth but him.”

A late-night dialogue between them highlights the story’s emotional weight:

-What do we do with something we don’t understand?
-What?
-What do we do with something we don’t understand?
-We give up trying.
-Or we make it a woman.

This dry, devastating dialogue captures one of the book’s thematic weights: the mystification and marginalization of women’s pain, and the ease with which it’s dismissed when it defies clear categorization.

Nebi’s prose flows with quiet confidence and emotional acuity. The novel is short, but its compactness (and its light blue cover) is deceptive: One-size-fits-all Blue Dress is filled with moments that overwhelm, descriptions so precise they startle. One feels, at times, a kind of fear: how does she know this about me?

The narrator, despite her longing for understanding, challenges the idea of clarity: “In films, things are always clear: the reasons for meeting, the reasons for love, and the reasons for discord. Unlike life, which is supposed to be the film’s inspiration, where nothing is clear.” And yet, the novel itself is anything but muddled. It is a haunting exploration of mental illness, of the contradictions of womanhood, motherhood, and the desire to escape both without apology.

Excerpt from The One-size-fits-all Blue Dress 

By Hiva Nebi

Translated by Badar Salem

A Swamp of Words

Naming what pains us can lighten half our suffering, or that’s the way it feels to me. I’ve always needed to call things by their true names, to strip away their weight and terror. Naming pins the unknown to the known, making it manageable, even approachable. There’s a strange kind of magic in it, a faint echo of explanation. By naming, by pointing or staring, you inch closer to understanding.

Take the turmoil that’s taken hold of me: it might feel gentler, more balanced, if I could only name the disorder within. For weeks, I’ve been trapped in this state: anxiety, sleeplessness, lost appetite, scattered pains, and relentless obsessions. I wake to the sense of an eye watching me, urging me to stare back. I fix my gaze on a single point, even in the dark, compelled to hold it. Circles ignite within that point, rippling like heat on summer asphalt. The eye demands I persist. My eyes water, redden, and burn, but I tell myself salvation lies in seeing it through. “It will end when I hold my gaze,” I whisper, as if staring could unravel the mystery—or seal it, taming its terror.

This isn’t new. I’ve always burned to uncover things to the core, no matter how monstrous or unsettling. It’s not a habit; it’s my way of being. As a child, I never fled the monsters I feared. I faced them. No blanket pulled over my head, no cries for help. I sought them out: crouched under my bed, clinging to the walls. Once, I even vanquished one, staring at it until it dissolved into nothing.

It wasn’t just monsters.

One day, walking home from school, I saw a young woman struck by a car right before my eyes. She was reaching for her front door when the vehicle hit her. She collapsed softly, like a rag flung from a balcony. That softness, stark against the brutality of the impact, stunned me. Fear surged through me, yet I was compelled by the scene’s rawness. My friends fled, but I stepped closer, drawn to her blood-soaked form. I had to look; I had to dismantle my terror by seeing it fully. Her shattered spine, her hands splayed like uprooted branches, pulled my fear outward until it merged with her broken body, sprawled beside the open car door. I held my gaze steady on her corpse until the world blurred, and I, too, collapsed.

Back then, I steadied myself by staring directly at things, by naming them with precision. After studying her body and fainting, the scene lost its horror. I could recount it, coolly, as though it had happened to someone else. But now, my suffering slips out of focus. I cannot see it clearly, cannot name it truthfully.

Things would be more honest if I was the same with others as I am alone. But the truth is, I only seem sane in their presence. Alone, I come undone. I cannot explain this farcical performance with words alone, because my words have grown too worn, too brittle. Unless someone has lived my suffering, seen it with their own eyes, my words land without impact.

That morning, I told Didar “I’m depressed.” The word felt immense, as if I were heaving Sisyphus’s boulder up through my throat. For a moment, its utterance felt like salvation. But just as Sisyphus, upon reaching the summit, finds the act hollow, so too did my spoken word. Once depressed left my mouth, it shed all its weight, drained of gravity. To feel its impact, I would need to repeat it again and again—or else find a sharper word, one that could pierce the silence.

The word—-depressed—-rolled lightly across the floor between Didar and me, landing like nothing at all. He didn’t even look up from his tea, as I had expected. He didn’t flinch, didn’t show shock or tenderness, as I had hoped. He didn’t cry, didn’t reach out to comfort me, didn’t even touch my shoulder. The word shriveled in the space between us, like a dried apple long past its season.

I imagine Death itself arriving, and Didar calling after me in that same even tone: “But it didn’t seem that bad. I would have noticed.” But by then, I’d already be gone. I wouldn’t be able to tell him that words were my only bridge to him, that, without them, I had no way across. If he dismissed them, I would vanish entirely. Because no one can make another feel their pain unless their words are believed.

Words are the sole thread between us—just words. But once they rot from overuse or misuse, they lose their charge. In their failure, I glimpse our shared destitution. The very tools meant to connect us, to deepen understanding, are often too flimsy, too worn to bear the weight. Trying to express what we feel or think through language is like trying to drain a vast swamp with a teaspoon.

Hiva Nebi is a Kurdish-Syrian novelist and academic based in Germany. Find more about her novel on GoodReads.

Badar Salem is a Palestinian writer and editor, ex-VICE, Bloomberg, & Variety. She lives in Montreal.