October 2007 |
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The Café next to the Sycamore Tree: Where Nostalgia, Memory, and the City Meet
by Krystel Abimeri
Beirut, in many ways, is an “Urbs Incognita,” a city that has been presented only through clichés. The euphoric expressions—“mosaic of communities,” “crossroads of cultures,” “Switzerland of the Middle East”—have been used and abused. Despite all this romanticising, this weary city seems condemned to be destroyed after each reconstruction by a new group of political factions. It has been overwhelmed for more than three decades by every possible form of violence and collective terror—most recently the July 2006 war with Israel and the Summer 2007 debacle involving Fatah al-Islam. The disastrous regional context and the acceleration of the globalisation process have contributed to a weakened and dispersed civil society, vacillating between consolidation and decomposition. Citizens’ relationships with the state are more than ever fashioned through communitarian channels, and the innermost recesses of identity seem more pronounced after the civil war. Some Beirutis, however, resist sectarian divisions, preferring to socialise and meet in places free from any particular affiliation. One such example is Ahwat al-Azaz, a historic café that is vital to maintaining collective past and present.
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Against Longing (non fiction)
Niloufar Talebi
OUTSIDE IRAN:
They say it takes ten years to make a dancer and twenty to settle an immigrant, both of which I have been. I started to dance in my mid-twenties, and after ten years of training, having swum upstream to make an aging instrument into an expressive one, I began to finally acquire that coveted dancer’s “center”, though the moment I danced as a tenured dancer was fleeting—as the absence of a life-long foundation collided head-on with the tenuousness of a newly-trained body.
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An Alternative Genre for Diasporic Memoirs: The Textual-Graphic Reconstruction of Iran in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (non fiction)
Nagihan Haliloglu
FROM THE ACADEMY:
The various mass-displacements that have happened in the 20th century have led to the much popular genre of diasporic memoir. In cases where the author of the memoir is female and Muslim, this genre has converged with that of the female coming of age, or emancipatory novel to produce that very lucrative industry of women’s memoirs which chronicle the trials and tribulations of bright young women oppressed by male figures such as fathers, brothers and husbands. However, recently a group of feminist Iranian scholars have taken the authority and legitimacy of these novels to task in their manifesto entitled “A Genre in the Service of Empire”.
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Book of Fears (27) (poetry)
Jamshid Moshkani. Translated by Niloufar Talebi
OUTSIDE IRAN:
When the salt of your blood gripped my teeth
I understood my buried pain
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from Imagining Persia (non fiction)
Geoffrey P Nash
OUTSIDE IRAN:
Beyond the borders of the native land the exile is forever shaping and re-shaping an imaginary homeland. Left behind early and never to be returned to, that homeland is less a specific place, more a state or a series of states of mind, an open space in continual process of reconstitution under pressure of present exigency, in absence and alienation from the distant goal.
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Gardenia (fiction)
Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Translated by Faridoun Farrokh
INSIDE IRAN:
All those years that my mother forced me to take afternoon naps, I didn’t really sleep. I stayed awake imagining things and going through strands of memories. I would press my fingers on my closed eyelids a while and then open my eyes fast and see a stream of stars rush in through the small window of our room and scatter on the mat where I lay. I would listen to the horsefly buzzing as if challenging me to kill him.
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Kayumars & Hushang - from the "Shahnameh" by Abolqasem Ferdowsi (poetry)
Translated by Richard Jeffrey Newman
INSIDE IRAN:
Kayumars, whose kingdom stretched
across the wide world, who wore
the world’s first crown and called his throne
the seat of law, setting it high
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Mary Jane Song (poetry)
Katayoon Zandvakili
OUTSIDE IRAN:
America
was special boulders with butterflies
hiding behind
peekaboo trails —
boyfriend murderers
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Mohtaram and Narghes (fiction)
Nahid Rachlin
OUTSIDE IRAN:
Even after a week Mohtaram could not believe that her sister, Narghes, was really with her in the living room of her house. But there she was, her polka dot chador wrapped around her, sitting in a patch of the sun on the rug in the living room to warm her legs, although it was late May and the temperature hovered around seventy. The house too had marks of Narghes' presence—the presents she had brought. A cloth with paisley designs covered the kitchen table, a tapestry depicting a caravan hung on a wall. The smell of rose water that Narghes dabbed on her clothes permeated the air.
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My Brother at the Canadian Border (poetry)
Sholeh Wolpe
OUTSIDE IRAN:
On their way to Canada in a red Mazda, my brother and his friend, PhDs and little sense, stopped at the border and the guard leaned forward, asked: Where you boys heading?
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Pawn of the Gods or Independent Man: The Question of Control in The Odyssey and Shahnameh (non fiction)
Antares Alleman and Arash Manzori
FROM THE ACADEMY:
The Odyssey is traditionally considered the founding pillar of Western Literature. We are taught that Odysseus’ heroic deeds are to be emulated, his hubris to be shunned. However, perhaps Odysseus is not the hero he is presented to be. Harold Bloom notes that Odysseus is a “universal figure,” and that “no Western literary character is as incessant as Odysseus,” noting the retelling of his story from Homer to Goethe to Pound. Yet Bloom still points out that Virgil’s characters “identify the hero of The Odyssey with guile and deceit” (80), as well they should. Odysseus is not a hero, but a pawn of the gods and a poster child for Fate.
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Persian, English (non-fiction)
Jasmin Darznik
OUTSIDE IRAN:
When we first came to America in 1979, my mother always dragged me along on her trips to the grocery store and I’d stand by mutely as she struggled to communicate with Americans.
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Talking with a Pioneer of ‘Iranian-American Literature: An Interview with Nahid Rachlin
Persis M. Karim
OUTSIDE IRAN:
Nahid Rachlin came to the United States more than three decades ago as a wide-eyed young woman seeking a college education. Like many early Iranian immigrants, she came at a time when US-Iranian relations were positive and when the United States actively supported Mohammad Reza Shah and his policies.
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the four quarters of the old city (poetry)
Baharak Sedigh
OUTSIDE IRAN:
the desertification of our planet approaches slowly
but like our own death
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Three Ghazals by Rumi (poetry)
Translations © Iraj Anvar & Anne Twitty
INSIDE IRAN:
I won’t leave this light-filled house,
Won’t leave this blessed city.
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