Dance in the storm
In 2019, Stanford University invited me to talk about my novel The Drowned. During the preparation for my lecture, I asked myself, Why did I write this novel in that dark and terrifying time of revolution? A story about a group living in a remote village, their love and life, the mythology they believe in, and their struggle to survive? Like a chess player, did I pit beauty and light against ugliness and darkness? As Rumi says, Did I dance in the storm? I think art is the dance of artists in the universe. I believe writing is dancing. As a writer, with your story, you connect to the world and show you are alive and grateful, you are fighting, and you are not giving up; you are resilient.
As I explained in my newsletter last Sunday, I lived in the village until the age of ten, and then my family moved to the small city of Bushehr. Mother was very ambitious. She loved to live in the town and wanted all of her kids to study and have a higher education. In the city, we had a lot in common culturally with the other residents but were still different. People called us wild and strange because:
1 We, as kids, knew where babies came from: Our parents were making life in the summer on the roof, close to the sky. We told each other when we heard the voice of love that "they are making life." Or, in the winter, close to our bed, they hugged and kissed each other and had sex.
We knew no bird came from the sky and put a kid on the windowsill. They didn't fool us. We learned many things that other children didn't know.
2) We had an accent and spoke like the Jewish when they spoke Farsi; we were drawing the words. Besides this, we spoke nakedly. For example, we used to say the names of the genitals without censorship, just as we talk about hands and feet. We said vagina and penis, two words that are forbidden in our culture. We didn't censor any comments.
3) Our women had more power than men, and when we wanted to protest in the city, we danced and sang, and women were at the front of the line.
They called us wild people, but in the end, they respected me as a straight-A student. I changed bullying to respect. Found a lot of friends there. I was not only a straight-A student but also could sing, dance, and act. I made myself famous in those days.
So moving from one place to a new land and working hard to learn new things is not strange for me.
I moved to Shiraz (a bigger city than Bushehr) at age 17 and to America at 24. I was traveling and learning at the same time. I was in America for six months and then returned to Iran. It was 1978, and people were in the streets.
I didn't know that I would be a writer soon. I was witnessing a historical era. Revolution didn't bring freedom, happiness, or equality; instead, they started taking from us whatever we had. They forbade almost all our rituals and even told us what to wear, drink, and do. They changed the names of cities and streets. They didn't let newborn babies have Iranian names. They tried to remove all of the colors from our life. They wanted us to forget our past and beliefs and history. The most horrible thing in our personal and cultural life was happening.
Confronting misery with dancing and singing helped me cope with the sorrow and suffering that was ahead, but it was not enough; I had to find a powerful tool. Unconsciously I was looking for a way to get rid of storms. Life was not easy but still beautiful. In this situation, I started writing. I was a swimmer that began in a stormy ocean. I had to fight huge waves that came from the horizon every other second and tried to drown me. They wanted to invade us with their culture, and I couldn't be numb.
I put a special ritual before a political disaster: writing a story!
That was my resilience against the invasion, and I did it unconsciously. I was not wholly aware of what I wanted to do.
It was during the Iran-Iraq war. There was no hope of publishing my story, and everything pushed me to write. I traveled around the country, went to many villages, and recorded their stories and fairy tales. I didn't have a place to write. I didn't have a desk. I wrote my first story, Kanizu” in 12 places. Whenever I found a desk, I would start writing. I never had the luxury to write in a calm, stable, peaceful situation.
Eventually, the war that was supposed to end sedition in the world ended, and the government allowed us to publish our books.
Like a hungry cat suddenly seeing a piece of meat, I quickly started publishing the books I had written. Eventually, after eight years of waiting, they let my publisher publish my first short story collection, and the following year the novels The Drowned, The Devil's Stones, and The Heart of Steel. My books were welcomed by the people and attracted the jealousy of some of my colleagues. (I will write a separate post about their behavior because I was shocked by their brutality.)
My overnight fame made those still anonymous furious, but they didn't know that I had been working and writing for at least nine years.
Very soon, a lawsuit was filed against the third edition of The Devil Stones. The private plaintiff was from Qom. They had seen traces of the Baha'i Faith in the stories.
Later, the same pattern continued: They would let me publish a book, and when it reached the third or fourth edition, they would confiscate it.
They wanted to show me their power and make me desperate. They wanted me to be helpless. But I did not stop writing, and the government did not leave me alone. They wanted me to learn to be vulnerable and hopeless.
As a child, I had known something else. I had learned that the stormy sea would finally calm down. So I continued writing and publishing. I became an established writer, which was not acceptable to the government. Eventually, all of my books were confiscated, and they banned them with various excuses. When my publisher asked the Ministry of Art and Islamic Guidance, "Which story is the problem?"
They answered: "Her name is the problem."
To be continued…
Source: Substack