Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
People have strong images of Iran as a totalitarian country where women can still be stoned for adultery. What are some of the most common misconceptions about Iran?
There is an overwhelming preoccupation with Islam – or more particularly with Islamic fundamentalism – in Western media coverage of Iran. Islam is portrayed as the single defining feature of life there. Of course the Islamic regime constitutes a dominant framework for people’s lives, but they manage nonetheless to lead fully complex lives within that framework. Moreover, many of the problems average Iranians face relate less to Islam than to the economy. A succession of occupations, wars and, more recently, economic sanctions, have crippled Iran and made life quite hard for people there. These financial realities and so much else about the country do not get translated to a western audience.
We will be exploring those realities with your book choices. But before we start, what kind of images spring to mind when you think about your country?
The condition of women comes to mind at once. But the images you mentioned earlier of women being stoned are very extreme and rare incidents. When I think of Iran, I think of the grittiness and the vitality of its women. They endure what are sometimes horrific circumstances, and yet I feel that the intelligence and strength of Iranian women is so much more representative of their lives.
Your first book, Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski, is about the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran.
Kapuscinski is widely regarded as the greatest travel writer of the 20th century. Polish by birth, he witnessed some 40 revolutions and wars during his time as a journalist. He had already built a long and illustrious career when he found his way to Iran on the eve of the 1979 revolution. At that moment it was still a populist revolution rather than an Islamic one – the contours of the revolution were as yet undefined. So it is an interesting moment for him to have found himself on the streets of Tehran.
Like so many of his books, Shah of Shahs completely defies journalistic standards and generic classifications. Rather, it presents an impressionistic portrait of the country at those critical moments before the revolution gelled. With poetic virtuosity, Kapuscinski captures the confusion, the despair and also the flashes of hope that gripped Iran at that moment.
Accounts by so-called outsiders can, I think, sometimes be particularly rich and revealing. Kapuscinski had seen chaos in endless guises, and he offered up uncanny insights into the machinations of tyranny – and not just in the Iranian context. In Shah of Shahs, as in his many other books, he writes of how tyranny seeps into the psyche of a people. And yet there is a purposeful distance he cultivates about his subject. The Iranian characters in the book are held almost at a remove. I believe that that remove signals a concession to the limits of what he can know from his vantage point as an outsider looking in on the revolution.
Your next book is also a travel book written by an outsider – Mirrors of the Unseen by Jason Elliot.
Given the history between the countries, it may be a bit of a travesty that I have picked an Englishman to tell us about Iran! The word “orientalist” has such unsavoury connotations these days. But I think of Elliot as an orientalist in the best sense of the word – an outsider guided by a deep curiosity about the Middle East, and devoted to understanding it better. He has also written an account about Afghanistan, An Unexpected Light. Mirrors of the Unseen finds him travelling through Iran over a period of three years.
What did he discover?
Ordinary Iranian lives set against a richly detailed history. As I mentioned earlier, an overwhelming number of books published about Iran tend to focus on the revolution and the Islamic Republic. Most of them offer scant insight into what brought the country to those moments. There is likewise little written about how people actually live under the regime. What I admire about Elliot is that he sets his timely journalistic dispatches on a broader canvas of Iranian history. He also inserts himself, minimally, into the stories he tells. There is just enough of him there to make a good companion for the reader, yet his story doesn’t overwhelm the greater story he is telling.
Elliot has also studied Iran carefully, and is particularly adept at writing about its poetic, architectural and mystical traditions. The book is beautifully written. He manages to transmit his knowledge in an engaging, seemingly effortless manner. Elliot also moves his book away from Tehran, the capital, and writes to us from such places as Isfahan, Shiraz and Persepolis – sites rich with history. So for me the book offers a tremendous sense of immediacy, but also a far greater historical sweep than we ordinarily see in accounts about Iran.
Your third choice is a book of poems, Forugh Farrokhzad’s Sin: Selected Poems.
Farrokhzad wrote five poetry books, and a sixth book of hers was published posthumously. There have been other translations into English, but this one by the Iranian-American poet Sholeh Wolpe is the best I have encountered. The translations are precise, but also fluid and quite beautiful. She pulls poems from all of Forugh’s work. The volume is a fantastic introduction to her work for a non-Iranian reader.
Forugh is an iconic figure in Iranian culture.
Absolutely. I would say she is probably the ultimate icon for Iranian women in the 20th century. In her poems, women’s experiences of love, sensuality and sexuality are explored with daring and with beauty. Notorious in her lifetime, when she died at the age of 32 in a car accident she became a legend. Many people of her generation saw her as a symbol for all the possibilities and limitations under the Pahlavi dynasty, and she’s remained a singularly inspirational figure for successive generations of Iranians. And not just for women, but for many Iranian men too.
Jasmin Darznik was born in Tehran and studied at Princeton University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Washington and Lee University, and has also taught Iranian literature at the University of Virginia. She has won honours from Zoetrope: All-Story, The Iowa Review, and The San Francisco Foundation. Her first book, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, was a New York Times bestseller
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