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NY imes July 1, 2012
An Iranian Storyteller’s Personal Revolution
By LARRY ROHTER
After being arrested in 1974 by the Savak, the shah’s secret police, the
Iranian writer Mahmoud Dowlatabadi asked his interrogators just what
crime he had committed. “None,” he recalled them responding, “but
everyone we arrest seems to have copies of your novels, so that makes
you provocative to revolutionaries.”
Since then Iran has, of course, experienced an Islamic revolution and
three decades of theocratic rule, and Mr. Dowlatabadi, now 71, has gone
on to write numerous other books, including “The Colonel,” which has
just been published in the United States. But one thing remains
unchanged: Those in power in Iran continue to regard him and his work as
subversive.
“As a writer I embarked on a path of creating epic narratives of my
country, which necessarily contain a lot of history which has not been
written,” Mr. Dowlatabadi said, weighing his words carefully in an
interview during a visit to New York this spring for the PEN World
Voices Festival of international literature. “But in doing that I have
been required to have lots of patience, perseverance and very few
expectations from life.”
“The Colonel,” a novel about the 1979 revolution and its violent
aftermath, is a case in point. The five children of the title character,
an officer in the shah’s army, have all taken different political paths
and paid a heavy price. The story unfolds on one rainy night as the
colonel is trying to retrieve and bury the body of his youngest
daughter, who has been tortured to death for handing out leaflets
criticizing the new regime.
“It’s about time everyone even remotely interested in Iran read this
novel,” The Independent of London said in a review when “The Colonel”
was published in Britain last fall, describing it as a powerful
portrayal of “a society ravaged by a warped morality.”
The novel was written in the early 1980s, around the time of the events
it describes, when prominent intellectuals were being executed, and Mr.
Dowlatabadi was called in for questioning. “I hid it in a drawer when I
finished,” said Mr. Dowlatabadi (pronounced dow-LOT-a-body), fearing it
would lead to his being blacklisted, which would have interfered with
other projects he had in mind, including what became a much-praised
three-volume work called “Bygone Days of the Elderly.”
“I did not want even to have this on their radar,” he said, referring to
“The Colonel.” “Either they would take me to prison or prevent me from
working. They would have their ways. After I wrote this, but when they
still didn’t know I had written it, they gave me a warning that I
shouldn’t teach at the university anymore, that I should just sit at
home and keep quiet. That was fine with me because I could start to
write the other book, the three volumes.”
As a result “The Colonel,” though available in English and German, does
not yet exist in an authorized Persian-language version. Mr. Dowlatabadi
said he finally submitted the manuscript three years ago to censors at
the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which must approve all
books before publication in Iran, but received no response until Iranian
readers heard about the book and began clamoring for access to it.
“Finally the vice chairman of books in the ministry read it,” Mr.
Dowlatabadi said, “and under pressure responded: ‘Yes, it’s a good book.
But it’s a different account of the revolution.’ He said, ‘This is not
our understanding of how the revolution occurred.’ So I said, ‘But it is
my understanding of what occurred.’ In the meantime they didn’t say yes,
and they didn’t say no. So it’s still stuck.”
Among Iranians Mr. Dowlatabadi is probably best known for “Kelidar,” a
10-book, 3,000-page saga about a nomadic Kurdish family. The
authoritative Encyclopaedia Iranica has praised “Kelidar” for its
“heroic, lyrical and sensual language” and attributed its “immense
popularity” to Mr. Dowlatabadi’s detailed portrayal of political and
social upheaval, his trademark as a novelist.
“Mahmoud has always had a commitment to social issues, but couldn’t
accept the simplistic moralistic framework predominant in socialist
realism,” said Kamran Rastegar, a professor of Middle Eastern languages
and cultures at Tufts University who has translated some of Mr.
Dowlatabadi’s work. “Instead he tried to examine the complexities and
moral ambiguities of the experience of the poor and forgotten, mixing
the brutality of that world with the lyricism of the Persian language.”
Despite Mr. Dowlatabadi’s renown at home “The Colonel” is only the
second of his novels to appear in the United States. The first, “Missing
Soluch,” conceived during the nearly three years he spent in prison
under the shah and then written in a feverish 70-day burst after his
release in 1976, was published in 2007. Like the bulk of his work before
“The Colonel,” it is about country life — in this case a poor peasant
woman in an isolated village who struggles to hold her family together
after her husband mysteriously disappears.
That rural realm is one that Mr. Dowlatabadi, who has a steely gaze, a
smoker’s cough and a prominent white mustache, knows intimately. He was
born into a family of farmers in Khorasan, an arid northeastern province
bordering Afghanistan, and as a youngster worked in the fields alongside
his father, also chopping wood and hauling melons to market.
Even then he was an avid reader, curious about the outside world. “I
would read on the roof of the house with a lamp,” he recalled. “I read
‘War and Peace’ that way.” At 14, with his father’s encouragement, he
left for his province’s capital and ultimately for Tehran, working as a
shoemaker, barber, bicycle repairman, street barker, cotton picker and
cinema ticket taker before falling in with a theater troupe and becoming
an actor.
Asked if he took menial jobs to gather material for the books he hoped
to write, he said, “No, I was trying to earn a living.” In the end it
was the theater work, along with some incursions into journalism, that
pushed him into writing novels and screenplays. That experience also
brought him to the attention of the secret police, since the troupe’s
repertory included works by Brecht and Arthur Miller.
“He has an incredible memory of folklore, which might come from his days
as an actor or might come from his origins, as somebody who didn’t have
a formal education, who learned things by memorizing the local poetry
and hearing the local stories,” said Nahid Mozaffari, who is an editor
of “Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian
Literature” and has taught at New York University. “That’s an unusual
trajectory for a writer in Iran, where most writers are middle-class
urban educated people. He’s really different.”
To have “The Colonel” published in Persian, Mr. Dowlatabadi could
theoretically turn to one of the émigré presses that flourish in Europe
and California, or even, if he were so disposed, authorize a kind of
samizdat edition for circulation in Iran. But he said he did not want to
do that, preferring to adhere to legal channels, frustrating though that
may be.
“My philosophy, my way of working, is not by confrontation,” he said. “I
want to keep writing and keep being an Iranian novelist in Iran, so
therefore I do not have confrontations.”
Yes, he continued, “I have written things that if you read them they
create questions in your head,” but he added: “I did not do it
confrontationally, against the state. In fact it’s a good thing for the
regime — past, present and future — to have the experience of writers
who work within the system. This has to be an established norm or
practice in our country: that people who have different opinions can
rationally disagree. It shouldn’t be that I want to kill you, I want to
confront you or I want to leave.”
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