Why I Became an Iranian Writer
Why did I become an Iranian writer? This is a question that’s more difficult to answer than why I didn’t become a mariachi. I often wish I were a mariachi so that I could offer people the gift of joy.
In any case, I fortunately became an Iranian writer. It’s not easy for me to explain the reasons why, but I can tell you one thousand and one stories to justify becoming a cursed Iranian writer.
This is my first story:
There are people in Iran whose occupation is to read and censor stories. Well, if the likes of me don’t become writers, these people will lose their jobs and won’t be able to provide for their wife and children. Hence, there must be writers to keep them employed.
The second story:
Not only in Iran, but in various countries around the world, there are people whose profession is to assassinate writers, or to arrest them and make them confess to being spies for one of the superpowers, or for a member of the European Union, a G7 country, or specifically for America and Israel, and who in the future will likely become spies for Martians and Aliens …
Well, if there were no writers, who would these agents assassinate or torture into confessing that they are spies? Becoming a writer is, therefore, a humanitarian act of assisting such people.
Furthermore, it is easier to extract some sort of Stalinesque confession from a writer than from other political prisoners. A writer’s creativity can help whip-wielding interrogators contrive a plausible storyline for a confession. How the writer was recruited as a spy and how they channeled information to the enemy. How much they were paid and how they engaged other agents and operatives for future plots …
This is the third story:
If I hadn’t become a writer, by now I would have been a successful businessman. Exactly what my father wanted. He was a successful businessman and expected me to follow the same path and increase the family wealth. Well, if I had become a successful business man, I would now be in Las Vegas losing the family fortune in a poker game.
The fourth story:
Totalitarian and dictatorial regimes corrupt language before they set out to corrupt power and money. Dictators have learned not to speak against the freedom of speech. They all claim that their country is the freest in the world. They all speak eloquently in praise of liberty and even quote writers who have fought for the freedom of speech. Well, if there were no writers in these countries, where would the dictators find inspiration and source material for their speeches before the United Nations? They exploit language, effortlessly lie, and the might of the media helps make their falsehoods believable. What’s remarkable is that some people believe the words of the dictators and cheer them on. At such times, when defenseless language is being abused to fabricate thousands of lies, one must write to prove that the word “tree” means “tree,” that the word “cherry” means “cherry,” and “kiss” means “kiss,” and “freedom” means “being free to not lie and being free to not hypocricise.”
In other words, writing in the dark of dictatorship, when language is being mired in corruption, is an art. A personal resistance-art. You become a writer to write and reveal that the world is not black and white as ideologies and religions preach. You write to say that the dictator is lying (or the dictator has no clothes). It’s not important what you write about. What is important is that you write literature, not the muck and manure that government sponsored writers are adding to our world and words in the name of God or in the guise of literature. It is not important that you write a political story. What is important is that you write a story and write it beautifully. It is then that you will feel stronger than the dictator, stronger than the lie. You will know that you are struggling to save your motherland’s language from traitors who betray language, and this is a beautiful feeling.
My next story is this:
I became a writer because I always feel lonesome, despite the wonderful people who care for me and for whom I care. This sense of aloneness (not isolation) is not bad. It is beautiful and I hope you, too, feel it. It is in this lonesomeness that you can perceive things in people and the world as epiphanies. For instance, when you walk alone down a street and you come across an old building, your vision enters through a window and you imagine the lives of those who have long lived there. You can sense when they have fallen in love, when they have faced infidelity, when they have celebrated their child’s birthday, when they have felt lonely, and when they have grown old and looked out that window at the same spot where you are standing looking in.
It may not be bad to see the world the way it was and is, instead of the way it has been built up in our mind, the way Big Brothers have built it up in our thoughts. It is in this sense of lonesomeness that we can suddenly discover our own home. It’s a simple discovery, but it is very human. The discovery of the salt shaker we have used and ignored for years. And suddenly the discovery of mother’s face that has grown old …
I don’t know why other writers became writers. I wish they had become businessmen so that I would be more famous and lonesome. I, for one, became a writer so that I can say there are emotions in this world that cannot be expressed with ordinary sentences. I write stories to express these emotions. And after each story, I realize that I have not managed to convey one particular emotion, so I write another story.
The sixth story:
If you ask writers why they became writers, they will offer you a bunch of lies, because a writer’s job is to write lies. But these lies are different from the lies politicians tell. These lies create fantasies about the world and human beings that exist, and the world and human beings that should exist. They do not create fantasies about a world that doesn’t exist, fantasies that deceive human beings.
My seventh story is this:
I became a writer because I was born in Iran. Becoming a writer in Iran is very different than becoming a writer in America or Western Europe. Becoming a writer in Iran is wonderful. Sometimes it’s like walking in a minefield. I served my military service during the long and absurd Iran-Iraq war. Occasionally, we had to cross minefields by night and move close to the Iraqi lines to determine a plan of attack. When you walk in a minefield, you hate the weight of your own body. You wish you were as light as a dandelion. Every step you take can be your step of death. It is then that you feel the existence of your feet. The same feet that on ordinary days, while walking, while running, you completely ignore. It’s in a minefield that you feel your existence in the present tense. Taking a walk or perhaps dancing across a minefield … That’s where I learned to write about my feet. I learned to write about taking one step forward.
The eighth story is another war story:
I was once stationed at a dangerous front where the Iraqi army had a clear view of our location and we had to try and stay in our trenches while the sun was up. During the long, hot summer days, being confined in a narrow dugout where your hair brushes against the ceiling (even when you’re sitting down) is not easy. Time passes slowly, tediously, like the grinding of a stone. I decided to write a story. No, don’t be mistaken, I didn’t want to write a war story, because when you are in the heart of an event, you cannot write about it well. Instead, I started to write a love story. It was the first love story I wanted to write.
In the violent setting of a war fraught with blood and dust, thinking of a love affair is comforting. It helps you forget. So, I started to write. Back then, Western governments all supported Saddam Hussein and his army. They ignored the fact that the Iranian freedom fighters were fighting two wars—one against the rising fundamentalist dictatorship behind them, and the other against the foreign invaders facing them. Therefore, the Iraqi army had no shortage of mortars and cannons, and they fired at us liberally. Writing in my trench, I could hear the Iraqi shells being discharged. It took three seconds for a 120mm mortar shell to reach our lines. If it landed on a trench, everyone inside would turn into chopped meat. I had three seconds to add one more word to my story. One word in the distance between life and death, one word that could be my last word on a piece of paper. In those few seconds, I grasped the weight and value of words. Which word? Which adjective? Which adverb best suits this scene? One word that can be the entirety of life, one word that can make a story beautiful when a stupid shell is on its way and the slightest change in the wind can land it on your trench or send it to the bottom of the gorge.
This is how my flesh came to understand the value of a single word. And I wrote and read with greater determination to become a writer. To write that writers write lies, they write magical realism or surrealist stories to remind us that reality is what is inside the window of that old building. I have struggled to add something small to the world. This small thing could be a beautiful sentence about a window, about a child that has fallen for the first time and is exploring the scratch on his knee, or about a woman who is wiping away the black mascara that her tears have streamed down her face. It could be about a man who, while playing hide-and-seek with his young daughter in a small, modest apartment, hides behind the curtain and forever vanishes …
My ninth story is my most important story:
I remember the first time I sat down to write. It was a fall morning. I was in fourth grade and I had decided that this time I would write my composition myself, instead of my mother writing it for me. Out in the yard, sitting on a carpet spread on the ground next to a flower patch, under the gentle Shiraz sun I started to write Describe Autumn … The wonder and even the fear of discovering my ability to write and to come up with words that I never thought would come to me remain in my heart to this day. To go along with what teachers liked, with impassioned words I wrote about yellow and orange leaves that danced in the air as they fell from the trees, I wrote about the melody of the shepherd’s flute and the sheep that happily grazed. In the same tone, I wrote about the beauty of the wheat field under the golden sun, the way it waved with the wind, and how it was forgivingly prepared to be harvested …
I was certain that for the first time I would get an excellent grade, and I bravely volunteered to read my composition in class. As soon as I read the sentence about the golden wheat field, the teacher snapped, “Boy! Wheat does not turn yellow in the fall!” I continued, and the instant I read that the field was ready to be harvested, the teacher shouted, “Stupid boy! Wheat fields are not harvested in the fall!” … And he scribbled a low grade at the bottom of the composition of my hope and pride and sent me to my chair with a lump in my throat. A long time has passed since that day and many wheat fields have been harvested before the fall and many wheat fields have gone toward the spring, but I continue to write about that pleasant autumn day so that I can bring my own small wheat field to harvest in the fall. Golden or not, infested or healthy, whatever it is, it is a wheat field that I have created.
And this is my final story:
If I were in Iran, I could talk for hours about why I became an Iranian writer. But here in the US, as I write this text, I realize that I don’t really know why I am an Iranian writer, because being a writer has nothing to do with your homeland. You either are or are not a writer. Being Iranian or Afghan or French or American is irrelevant. You belong to the Democratic Republic of Literature.
At the end of the day, what is important is that you are a writer. Because without writers, painters, poets, musicians, and lovers, what else is there in this world other than bombs, mass graves, exile, melancholy, loneliness, and chain destruction …
Translated from the Persian by Sara Khalili
Shahriar Mandanipour (Mondanipour), one of the most accomplished writers of contemporary Iranian literature, has held fellowships at Brown University, Harvard University, Boston College, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He has been a visiting professorship at Brown University, where he taught courses in Persian literature and cinema. He also has taught creative writing at Tufts University. Mandanipour’s creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time and space, and his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers. His honors include the Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children’s novel of 2004, the 1998 Golden Tablet Award for best fiction in Iran during the previous two decades, and Best Film Critique at the 1994 Press Festival in Tehran. Mandanipour is the author of nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than 100 essays in literary theory, literature and art criticism, creative writing, censorship, and social commentary. From 1999 until 2007, he was Editor-in-Chief of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal published in Shiraz that after 9 years of publishing was banned. Some of his short stories and essays have been published in anthologies such as Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Fiction and Sohrab’s Wars: Counter Discourses of Contemporary Persian Fiction: A Collection of Short Stories and a Film Script; and in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Short works have been published in France, Germany, Denmark, and in languages such Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish. Mandanipour’s first novel to appear in English, Censoring an Iranian Love Story (translated by Sara Khalili and published by Knopf in 2009) was very well received (Los Angeles Times, Guardian, New York Times, etc.). Censoring an Iranian Love Story was named by the New Yorker one of the reviewers’ favorites of 2009, by the Cornell Daily Sun as Best Book of the Year for 2009, and by NPR as one of the best debut novels of the year; it was awarded (Greek ed.) the Athens Prize for Literature for 2011. The novel has been translated and published in 11 other languages and in 13 countries throughout the world.