"A Prelude to Touba and the Meaning of Night"
Seattle Asian Art Museum
October 7, 2006
Translation by James M. Gustafson
Department of History, University of Washington
In 1978, I was living in Paris. I had more or less fled from Iran around that time. Pressure from the shah’s secret police, called SAVAK for short, was very great. In 1978, I had been in Paris for two years. I was going to the university and majoring in Chinese Language and Civilization. The lessons were very hard and no matter how much I tried, I could not master writing Chinese characters easily. At the same time, I was busy writing a novel which I finished that same year, 1978.
In the summer of this year, a frightening event took place. A cinema caught fire in the city of Abadan and all of the people inside burned in the fire. It was being said that SAVAK agents caused this event, but that explanation seemed unusual because it was absolutely of no benefit to the state. Today, it seems that religious agents had done this. The people of Iran were outraged. At the end of August 1978, suddenly a piece of news shook everyone like a tremor. It was being said that in Jhaleh Square, where a crowd had gathered to hear a cleric speak, soldiers had opened fire and three thousand people were killed. Of course, later on it was clear that the number of casualties was much, much less than this figure, but the public had a tendency to exaggerate everything.
Following this, demonstrations and rallies began. Crowds numbering in the millions poured into the streets and held demonstrations against the Shah. A remarkable portion of this crowd was women in chadors. I used to sit in front of the television astonished seeing these women. Why had Iranian women suddenly returned to Islamic dress? What were they seeking? What was their goal in doing this? I was reminded of my grandmother who, in spite of being an enlightened woman, wore Islamic dress like all the traditional women. My grandmother, who was named Touba, had told me that when she was eighteen years old and had divorced her husband, she was grabbling with a fancy to marry God. She had seen God in the form of a cleric at a prayer gathering. She suddenly became convinced that this man himself was God. Starting the next day, she went from one prayer gathering to another to see this man and tell him “Sir, please, take my hand in marriage!”
Of course, this thought is very Christian. Nuns considered themselves promised to Christ, and Christ, in turn, is the offspring of God. My grandmother also wanted to become the wife of Islam’s God, who as we know is a lonely God with no spouse. So if you consider the idea carefully, marrying God is quite bold. One could consider this the first step of a woman who unwittingly took a step toward freedom.
But in the beginning of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, women had all put on the veil and poured into the streets. Were they just like my grandmother many years ago, pouring into the streets to marry God? I believe it was precisely this. Conservative men who were orchestrating the Islamic Revolution never had any interest in giving women permission to participate in governing, but the participation en masse of women in this revolution was so prevalent that there was no way they could be excluded.
Although this is quite strange, at the heart of a reactionary and traditionalist revolution, women’s freedom took shape. Traditional and very religious Islamic families sent their daughters to schools and universities. Women little by little forged themselves a path to enter Parliament. Revolutionaries removed them from judiciary posts, but these judges, like Shirin ‘Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, became lawyers for the judiciary. Women became involved with learning in all fields. They went to classes in painting and music, and succeeded in various scientific fields. Now a situation has arisen where nearly sixty percent of Iranian university students are women.
In the summer of 1981, I was arrested along with my mother and two brothers. None of us were political so this arrest was unusual. I have written a detailed account of these events in my book The Prison Memoirs. But it was in this same prison that I decided to commit to paper an outline for a novel about the conditions for women. My grandmother was the best gateway for me to present this literary world to my readers. I chose her as a model for all the women of Iran. I tried to show how throughout history, women have been captive of a situation of their own inferiority. The prisons at that time had frightening conditions. Throughout just these few years, ten thousand people were lost to execution squads. Those thousands were among the finest children of Iran. In this uproar of blood and tears, I was writing. I struggled to keep my composure.
I told the warden I’m not a political person, but a writer and asked if he would give me permission to keep to myself and write a book. He agreed, on the condition that I did not show my work to any of the prisoners. I set aside time at night for writing. I slept the greater part of the day and at night when everyone was sleeping I would write. I had compiled ten notebooks one could say that I had written half of the novel, when they changed our cell block. Of course, I was in jail with my mother. One day, they called us both in to transfer us and our belongings to a new prison. They searched all of our possessions and confiscated all my notebooks. This was less the work of the official jailers than of some of the prisoners who collaborated with the prison’s employees. They called these prisoners the “tavab,” a word meaning “extreme repentants.” I imagine they were afraid I was writing about prison life and had exposed them. At this point, I had lost all my notebooks. Tired and upset, I went to a new block. We were under the impression that it had better facilities. But I was much happier at the old corrective block since it housed better prisoners. The new block was full of the “tavab,” or collaborative repentants, and they frustrated everyone. The combination of the repentants with some of the guards made for hellish conditions. Fortunately, I had freed myself from the headache of participating in the various programs that were made obligatory in prison with the excuse that I am not political. But the rest of the inmates had painful lives. I remember one day one of the inmates was speaking non-stop in the prison corridor from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. This was a tradition where prisoners would address the rest of the inmates through closed-circuit television installed in the corridor and tell them that they had repented. But this prisoner was very clever, and with what he said that day for seven or eight hours altogether he didn’t say even two words that were logical and comprehensible. Regardless, the poor prisoners had to listen. By now, it was nearly dinner time. The inmates were in the middle of dinner when the prison guard announced with annoyance and anger that the television was airing a program about one of the Hezbollah martyrs while the unsympathetic prisoners kept eating. So all of the prisoners went back out to the corridor now to watch this. At the end of this program, it was announced that in the prayer room a supplication prayer is being held. This is a special prayer Shi’i Muslims perform for two hours, full of tears and sighing. At midnight, the prisoners, tired with their heads hanging, were going off to go to sleep when the guard announced that at dawn a prayer of mourning would be held. This is also a Shi’i religious ritual. I imagine it is held on Friday mornings because traditional people have the habit of having their love affairs Friday nights. So by holding this prayer in the morning before a god who does not allow them even one evening of joy, they are asking for forgiveness.
A year passed and the atmosphere of the prison changed. Ayatollah Montazeri, a more liberal ayatollah, was put in charge of the prisons. Some changes took place. They returned my notebooks to me. I read them and noticed they had torn out some of the pages, mostly where I had talked about the killing of a fourteen year old girl. It dawned on me that writing in a prison atmosphere was not a good idea, because regardless of how free of a soul you have, there is nonetheless the possibility that you’ll censor yourself. For this reason, I burnt all of these notebooks.
On the last day of winter 1986, I was released from prison. I had to work to make a living. I started working on some translations and then opened a book store with an acquaintance. This person left and I was alone and penniless. It was at this bookstore that I wrote the book again. At this time, I had to register with the revolutionary court every month. Six months passed. At one of my interrogations, they asked me what I was doing for work. I said I am a bookseller. The court official wrote to solicit my collaboration, asking me to tell them who was coming in to this bookstore. I was infuriated. I suddenly was made aware that if I became successful as a bookseller, I would be forced to cooperate with these people. For ten frightening days, I closed the bookstore and returned all of the books to the distributors. In these ten days, I aged ten years. I wrote the rest of the book Touba at home. But it took three years for the book to be published. In these three years I was under such emotional pressure that in the end, I had developed serious psychological symptoms and problems.
The book was published just one week after the passing of Ayatollah Khomeini. Three days earlier, I was in front of Tehran University which is home to various bookstores. I was looking over a newsstand. Not even one periodical was on the stand. Merely a few small books of crossword puzzles were to be seen. The atmosphere of censorship was incredible. But the publication of Touba was huge cultural news that exploded like a bomb and excited everyone. In the first ten days, the first prints sold out and the book was reprinted three times in a span of three and a half months. It sold a great number. I was feeling now there was more room to breathe. it seemed to be that people were rediscovering themselves reflected in this book. In fact, Touba, the character, is the average Iranian. She is somewhere between the aristocracy and the working class. For the past five thousand years, the people of Iran have increasingly spent each day more in bondage than the day before. Sumerian myths, that formed in our region, are rooted in the very remote past, thousands of years ago. In Sumerian myths we can read how people have been sinking deeper every day into slavery and servitude. Sumerian myths cover this ground. I must confess that in this book I have made extensive use of three Sumerian myths. The creation myth in the Sumerian narrative, which is the killings of Apsu and Tiyamat, the pre-existent male- and femaleness, was the basis for the formation of some of the characters of this book. The Epic of Gilgamesh has had such an impact on me that the character Prince Gil took his name from him. Of course, in the Sumerian myth, Gilgamesh does not attain immortality. In my book, he has become eternal, but not because of my attitude towards metempsychosis, which I do not believe in, but rather because this myth is eternal and is as though it was written just yesterday. I have taken Leila from the myth Lalita, which is also a myth from the region. The story of the journey of the Sumerian goddess Inanna into the underground world, which was reflected later in the Babylonian and Assyrian myth of the goddess Ishtar, is another basis for the formation of the characters Leila and Touba. In truth, I love mythology. I think that whatever we write, the myths have said before us, because in the realm of mythology, people have recounted their first experiences in a simple way that is difficult to imitate. We know that the airplane has matured and developed much technically, but it has been said that the pilots who created all the air maneuvers that were later adopted flew those single engine planes. Myths are of the same nature. People have created myths to express all of their sexual, emotional, economic and ecological needs. These myths recount all aspects of their character. Therefore, I as a writer am always concerned that I must use myths. It is also necessary to mention that I have made use of The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, a great writer from Iran. This book is a work of mythology in its own right. This book is available in English translation, and I invite you to read it. Every time one reads this book, they discover something new in it.
I should also add another point about the term “Touba.” In the Iranian mystical tradition, Touba is a tree in heaven whose name also appears in the Qu’ran. According to popular belief, the fruit of all trees and all flowers are on this tree, and all kinds of birds live on its branches. The convention is that this tree has many breasts, and when fetuses and very small children die they go straight to the lower boughs of the tree and feed on the milk of the breasts.
I am of the opinion that, as the author, I have said all I needed to say about the book. So that’s Touba and the Meaning of Night.