Reza Baraheni - Shahrvand - November 22, 2007
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| Reza Baraheni |
I constantly ask myself this question—not because of my own story, or because recent storytelling in Iran has discovered the West as a presence—but more because the West has become a presence in our stories, and in mine as a minor part of that tradition. Any such presence immediately raises the question of "difference" before us, since Iran has had, and has been, an immense narrative presence. We cannot speak merely of simplistic literary influences; instead, we must discuss intertextualities and the influences that have shaped other influences. However, both these phenomena—presences and differences, as well as non-literary influences shaping literary penetrations—have existed in Iranian literature.
My point is that the issue has never been a one-way street, even though the volume of literary commodities moving in opposite directions has differed significantly. Over the past hundred years, these commodities have flowed toward us with greater abundance and power. Even here, there are brilliant exceptions: Borges’ labyrinths and some of his other short pieces would be inconceivable without the forms and structures of Islamic Qisas al-Anbiya (Stories of the Prophets) and Tadhkirat al-Awliya (Memorial of the Saints)—a phenomenon akin to the case of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which would be similarly inconceivable without accounting for the influence of China. But the novel, the long story, is entirely different. A novel must encompass a broad scope of life, along with the complex and prolonged historical conditions involving the presence of classes, revolutions, and the subjective and objective collapse of borders, traditions, and myths. It must also address the urgency of hidden and overt historical and social confrontations, both internal and external.
When it comes to stories in Iran, we must immediately acknowledge that the West has been a significant presence, but it has not written the stories of Iranian storytellers. The West emerged as an inseparable part of what was being written—both in the material being discussed and in the manner of its retelling.
However, as you probably know, this dynamic did not unfold as an abstraction. This is where you, the writer, could be more precise, more personal, and truer to yourself. You could see how others shaped your life and learn how to speak about issues, shaping your own and others' lives in your writing. Consciously, you could return to a time when you sat on the roof of your house with your father and mother, your elder brother, and your grandmother—your father's mother—watching through the poplar trees of the neighboring garden as Soviet tanks rolled into your hometown of Tabriz. You noticed the tall Hungarian horses trailing a long line of military trucks, bearing the large portraits of a grim-faced man with a thick mustache.
That was how the start of your school year was delayed for weeks, and you were enrolled in a school whose backyard had been destroyed by a bomb a few days before the tanks and Soviet horses arrived. Was this a new type of history, or a new kind of story?
A year and a few months later, you would wonder what had changed as trucks of all kinds moved in the opposite direction, carrying a mix of people—English, Indian, and even American soldiers—who threw gum and chocolates from the trucks to the children running alongside them. Sometimes, the people in the trucks tossed down books, which you later learned someone secretly collected to start the first secondhand English bookstore years later. By the time you learned enough English, you wrote a letter to a publisher in England on his behalf, requesting new books for the bookstore.
But before writing that letter, you had bought two strange books from him: a small 1909 edition of Ezra Pound’s works and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. You were never meant to part with or forget these books, which you read after finishing Dostoevsky’s books in censored English translations published by Progress Publishers in Moscow—and before reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in its poorly abridged Persian translation. Despite its terrible translation, Anna Karenina profoundly influenced you, prompting you to abandon all aspirations of becoming a doctor. Instead, you decided to become what you had already begun to be: a storyteller and a poet.
The West was present in more complex forms. You were destined to be hybridized in various ways, and the West played a significant role in shaping this multifaceted hybridity. Born into an illiterate, Turkic-speaking family in a Turkic-speaking city and province, you were forced to learn Persian as the official language of Iran, Arabic as the language of religion, and English and French as your second and third languages. Your mother tongue was not even recognized as a language, nor was the language of religion considered central.
You were the target of countless arrows shot from the quivers of distant lands and unfamiliar languages, with the hidden breath of their structures shaping your every action, every book you read, taught, or wrote. Caught in the whirlwind of a linguistic onslaught, you were lifted from the ground and had to channel this overwhelming hybridity into literature—a space where one hybridity gave way to another. You engaged with the various forms of one language, Persian, which you loved for its literary richness, despite its imposition by the racist Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979).
If the Soviet Union had not withdrawn after World War II, if the democratic government in Iranian Azerbaijan—established in the last year of the war during the Soviet occupation—had not first been supported by Stalin and then betrayed by him, if the Iranian government, supported by the West, had not sent troops to the region following the Soviet withdrawal, and if education in the mother tongue had not been entirely banned by the Pahlavi regime, I would have become a writer—if at all—in Azerbaijani Turkish, my mother tongue. Persian or Russian would have become my second language. I am, quite simply, a child of history’s tyranny. Both East and West, both Western, have descended upon my back.
The influence of the West set me adrift in a different direction, blending Persian, English, Arabic, and French. Thus, the West, along with the beginnings of the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and the West, completely transformed my life. In 1966, I wrote my first poem in Azerbaijani Turkish. However, when the central government banned reading and writing in my mother tongue, I stopped writing poetry because I believed it would be impossible for me to compose poetry in the native language of others. Yet, that thunderous onslaught turned into a continuous and internal radiance within me, splitting me in two: I hated the government that had banned my mother tongue, but I did not hate the languages and cultures imposed on me by that same government, despite my resentment toward the imposition. This dual nature of my identity translated into various forms in my writing, and later, these forms—especially in the realm of novels—manifested in the fragmentation and dissection seen in 1966, when I began writing The Infernal Days of Mr. Ayaz (Amir Kabir, 1970; Fayard, Paris, 2000), a style that has characterized my literary work over the past four decades. Where does the West fit in this phenomenon?
The first modern short story I read was by Sadeq Hedayat, titled "The Woman Who Lost Her Man." Hedayat had spent several years in France and was influenced by French and European literature. A famous line from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "When you go to women, take your whip with you," was immediately quoted after the story's title. I completely misunderstood Nietzsche's meaning, as, apparently, Hedayat himself had before me, interpreting it literally in relation to events occurring daily in the homes of neighbors in Tabriz. At the time, I had never heard Nietzsche's name. The story dealt with a rural family in the outskirts of Tehran and later shifted to the Caspian Sea's northern shore. I had never seen either place, yet I envisioned my parents in those settings. The language of the story was so different from the Persian taught in school that I sought similar examples elsewhere.
The second story I encountered was a Persian translation of Dostoevsky's White Nights, given to me by Azadeh Khanum, the bride of my paternal stepsister—essentially, my aunt's daughter-in-law. Later, I mentioned her name and a couple of events connected to her in my work Azadeh Khanum and Her Author (Baran, Sweden, 1996; Fayard, Paris, 2002). She was the only person in our circle who could read and write in Persian. The exceptions were my older brother, Mohammad Naqi, and me. The third piece, comparable in length to White Nights, was a simple translation of The Silence of the Sea by French writer Vercors. It offered me a bittersweet image of war and its aftermath, along with a picture of resistance, creating a new literary horizon that preoccupied Iranian writing for years.
Around that time, among the books thrown from Allied trucks passing through Tabriz, I stumbled upon a peculiar volume that initially left me completely confused but later illuminated my mind like nothing I had experienced before—a small collection of short poems by Ezra Pound. Perhaps, at the same time this book was tossed from a truck, Pound himself was being transported to America in a cage. Who was this officer or soldier reading Pound while passing through Iran during World War II? And this was before my acquaintance with the works of Nima Yushij.
When I discovered more of Hedayat's works, I realized that the defining trait of all these authors—and the only modern poet I had read up to that point—was their absolute uniqueness, whether in how they expressed themselves or in what they conveyed despite their style. This was years before I encountered works by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Tolstoy, and later James Joyce, Hölderlin, Rilke, Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Proust, Beckett, and many others. Immediately after reading Hedayat's works, I turned to pre-Hedayat Persian storytelling.
Hedayat's work was utterly strange, almost exiled, for obvious reasons. Although he came from a wealthy family, he consistently wrote about the underprivileged, people not unlike my family members. This was the first layer of my duality. The second layer lay in his almost entirely European, nearly French, persona, which he fully internalized within his distinctly Iranian individuality and his profoundly inventive and colloquial Persian language. Later, I learned that, like me, Hedayat traced his roots to a Turkish tribe, adding another layer to his complex identity. Like me, he was both captivated by Western culture and civilization and deeply averse to colonialism and the Western powers’ support for Iran’s ruling class—a class to which his family belonged but from which he had completely distanced himself.
Edward Said once remarked that British novels—from Daniel Defoe to E.M. Forster and Joseph Conrad—could not have become what they were without the phenomenon of colonialism. I frame this idea within another category: literary hybridity was born from the encounters that led to colonialism and the struggle against it, a struggle against the West that continues in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to this day. However, this issue is not merely a matter of content. Literature does not become literature until what happens to the writer individually and historically—the content of their life—turns into the material of literature.
This is such a complex linguistic, intellectual, and psychological process that sometimes the best works seem to betray the very causes that gave rise to them. And it is this that transforms a writer—whether Eastern or Western, Northern or Southern—into a unique phenomenon. Literary influence should generally enter the scene not as a mother or even a father but perhaps as a midwife. Yet in my case, it was far too complex to be categorized so neatly and geometrically.
History, whose construction was beyond my control, had already prescribed my linguistic future, and I was almost destined to become what I became. However, there is a difference between a living human being and a machine, and there is no pre-constructed formula for beginning and writing a novel. For this reason, the novel, by its very nature, acts against fate, determinism, and destiny. A novel, as you write it, essentially writes itself, as though neither you nor the writing can control the final product. If a novel doesn’t surprise the writer during its creation, the writer will not write it, and if they do, the reader will not read it.
This idea may seem like exaggerated naivety. A serious novel not only employs language and technique in a specific way, but to be truly serious, it must go beyond being merely a story. Through its language and technique, it must establish a new definition of the art of the novel. To accomplish this, it must simultaneously overturn and reconstruct both the old and new histories of the novel.
A serious novel pushes the phenomenon of the novel to the brink of destruction, with the result that either the novel reaches its final historical conclusion, or it is forced to take a leap and construct a bridge over the abyss beneath it, transforming itself into both the bridge and the leap. It doesn’t matter where the novel is written or in what language. This process must occur.
Although the two greatest stories in the world, One Thousand and One Nights and the Old Testament, belong to the historical and geographical domain of my origins, and though I had heard many of their stories before ever reading them myself, the phenomenon of the novel was something entirely different. It came from a place that did not belong to my immediate history, geography, or context. This is where the West steps in and intervenes.
The novel—not the art of storytelling—emerged in the West. It was a Western phenomenon that traversed the entire world and became an inseparable part of all national literatures. Any attempt to problematize the structure and language of the novel initially required internalizing the Western novel and then responding to it by challenging it through another history, another language, and another narrative tradition—something non-Western, something other. By placing this imported phenomenon into crisis through indigenous narrative forms and national literatures, and by placing those forms and literatures into crisis through their interaction with the foreign phenomenon, a new narrative form, a true hybrid, and a new definition of that hybrid are propelled into the world.
As a global form, the novel is no longer a Western phenomenon. Its contemporary globality is based on principles other than those of the West or the East, the North, or the South. When the Americans selected the 100 greatest novels of the world at the end of the second millennium, they entirely overlooked this global nature of the novel, imposing the narrow-minded limitations of political goals, all remnants of empire as the only history, on their literary choices. From its inception, the novel has offered an alternative history and a different form of globality beyond the dominance of the West.