With its title taken from a refrain in Ahmad Shamlu's poem “In This Blind Alley,” Strange Times, My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, edited by Nahid Mozaffari and Ahmad Karimi Hakkak (Arcade), is a timely collection, as evidenced by the pronounced interest on the part of readers looking to upgrade their knowledge of the Middle East. (Certainly, the recent success of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books helped underscore this phenomenon and spotlight Iran as a country with a passionate literati that's willing to risk government censure.) Divided into sections of prose and poetry, with the emphasis tilted heavily toward prose, this anthology raises such basic concerns as accessibility and usefulness.
Though it's widely known that the Iranian government maintains a tight grip on the press, the behind-the-scenes wrangling that preceded the publication of this book reveals political obstacles, in this country, to the circulation of literature. As Nahid Mozaffari writes in the book's introduction:
Recent rulings by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury Department of the United States of America designated the commissioning, editing, or marketing of material written in Iran, Cuba, and Sudan as “prohibited exports of services” to enemy nations, unless a license was obtained from that department in advance. “Collaborative interaction” between a U.S. publisher and a writer from these countries was prohibited. … In these days of the ascendance of transnationalism throughout the world, it certainly seems bizarre, if not downright shortsighted and irresponsible, to further limit the already meager lines of communication and understanding between peoples with differing perspectives.
While a “general license” was granted to the publisher to “freely engage in the most ordinary publishing activities” with nations on America's “enemies list,” it's vexing to note that such a license was required at all. Not to mention that it was only granted after a lawsuit had been filed against the U.S. government by Arcade, PEN American Center, the Association of American University Presses, and the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. Besides the question of whether or not literature has a right to proceed without political regulation, Mozaffari's comments touch upon one of the key reasons why people turn to it in the first place. Apart from delectating in the pleasures of language, literature is read for the intimate conversation -- between strangers -- that it affords. In all probability, this would seem obvious to readers in an era predating television; however, one suspects that it's a point easily missed in our own time. Now that the primordial desire to snoop on one's neighbors is satiated by an excessive variety of means, what deference ought literature to command?
A reply to this question may be found in M.R. Shafi'i Kadkani's poem, “Poetry -- II”:
…Where then is poetryIf one substituted the word “literature” for “poetry” in the above poem, these remarks would lose none of their insightfulness. The history of tense elations between Iran and the United States, exacerbated, no doubt, by the selective output of inflammatory images purveyed by the news media of both countries, intensifies the need for an exchange of ideas uncorrupted by the needs of political and journalistic expediency.
     if it is not
where a handful of living words with a soul
     meet a human being
who needs them in life? ...And what is poetry -- what, if not
that moment of cleaning dust
from the mirror in certainty's chamber,
that moment of seeing
in the blossoming of a rose
the liberation of the entire earth?
Although Strange Times, My Dear is not wholly free of the blemishes usually found in anthologies, it succeeds on the primary level of hastening one to delve deeper into its chosen subject area. And, on a civic level, it heroically assists to demystify a people seldom viewed in the United States outside the lens of geopolitics. Yes, there are excerpts that feel like excerpts, such as Esmail Fassih's “Sorraya in a Coma.” This story allows the reader to overly empathize with the protagonist's position of waiting in the intersection between where one is and where one is headed. While other entries feel too slight, for example Ghazaleh Alizadeh's tale of bureaucratic blitheness, “The Trial” or Manuchehr Atashi's poem “Visitations”:
What a beautiful day!In contrast with these samples, which make up a negligible part of the book's contents, the greater portion is composed of selections that advance like a vanguard of hypnotists contracted by the original works. Hushang Golshiri's “The Victory Chronicle of the Magi,” which describes the hypocrisy that bedevils people and revolutionary movements, provides one of the many “aha!” moments in the book. Or, in variance with the tendentious reversal of connotations in “Visitations,” there are exquisite lines of poetry that make all the more tired the bemoaning of poetry in translation. It's too bad more space wasn't given to a poet like Yadollah Royai. Here is “Labial Verse 67”:
How thin the shadow next to the boulder!I long for the droplets of your fingertips,
I long for your black eyes --
How shy their flowing waters!I long for the privacy of my fancies --
what an exhausting peak! …What ruthless days!
How crushed the silhouette under the boulder!I long for your absent fingertips
for the distant memory of you black eyes.
How woeful their flowing waters!
As I flee the din of voices,Royai's poem makes acute, as do many of the great books, a life other than one's own. While it's not hard to entertain the idea of other forms of media accomplishing this (cinema leaps to mind), any humanizing endeavor that dispels prejudice and makes palpable the suffering of others merits attention; that said, it's impossible to ignore that a lot of the suffering in this collection is meted out to women and exiles.
ropes stretched in the wind
leave me baffled between help and helplessness.The throat of help and helplessness,
a passageway for the wind to flee
remains the path for remembering you
when stretched ropes move next door to the throat.
Literature can be created on a relatively small budget. As an art form, it's practical for the exploration of controversy or for penniless exiles with empty hours. With the restrictions placed on women in Iranian public life, literature hosts and soothes gales of female aggrievement, which pass through stories like Simin Daneshvar's spectral “Ask the Migrating Birds,” about a young woman's wretched treatment by her teacher, and Moniru Ravanipur's “Satan's Stones,” a (literally) ravishing critique of village mores that does not scrimp on sketching out the humanity of the bumpkins.
Though they languish in isolation of one kind or another, exiles get some of the funniest moments in the book. Advised by a dubious smuggler to dispose of his passport, the unnamed narrator in Hadi Khorsandi's “The Eyes Won't Take It” has a spell of surrealism when he tries to rid himself of the traveler's lifeline. In Iraj Pezeshkzad's “Delayed Consequences of the Revolution,” a man admits to a disability that he does not have in order to ingratiate himself with other exiles who are barometers of disappointment.
Humor, so many times a harbinger of hope, hints at a possibility for the exile: maybe, immersion in a foreign culture will result in some form of fluency. Meanwhile, the tourist is left with mental notes of sights to revisit. Places one would prefer to dwell in rather than pass through. There are many talents in this book worth adding to the lists of tourists everywhere.
