Praise for trans(re)lating house one
“Poupeh Missaghi is so keenly attuned to the frequencies of city life that reading her novel of Tehran felt like a revelation. In fragments layered over one another, moments are extended, lives are resurrected, lovers meet, and many questions are asked. Which of the dead do we honor and why? Whose stories do we listen to, and why do we listen to them, and are we ever really listening? trans(re)lating house one is a searching, brilliant novel completely unlike anything I’ve ever read.”
—Shuchi Saraswat, Brookline Booksmith
“In a series of pieces that constitute a haunting, harrowing whole, Poupeh Missaghi gives us one of the more close, contemporary glimpses of Iran to reach readers’ eyes here. Coming out of Iran’s tumultuous 2009 election, this book looks at disappearance, witness, perseverance, voice, loss, presence, absence, and longing in the hearts, souls, and lives of people there. The narratives here shatter one moment, shimmer another, narrating as stories will, yet also interrogating the nature of the narration. What language is this? Why this language? Why these stories, for whose eyes and what purpose? These and other questions cast, the stories told here make for a compelling chronicle of telling power, of necessary testimony. What a book this is.”
—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company
trans(re)lating house one
Poupeh Missaghi
Copyright © 2020 by Poupeh Missaghi
Cover art © Sara Dolatabadi
Cover design by Carlos Esparza
Interior illustrations by Sara Dolatabadi
Book design by Rachel Holscher
Author photograph © H. Romero
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Missaghi, Poupeh, author.
Title: Trans(re)lating house one / Poupeh Missaghi.
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019015717 (print) | LCCN 2019016843 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895736 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895651 (trade pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Iranians—Fiction. | Tehran (Iran)—Social conditions—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3613.I84475 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.I84475 T73 2020 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015717
PRINTED IN THE UNITES STATES OF AMERICA
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Parts of this work are based on true (hi)stories, but I make no claim about the factual accuracy of my trans(re)lations of the events, places, individuals, and peoples.
trans(re)lating house one
I want to start in the after: the aftershock, the aftermath, the afterworld. I want to start with the slippery, the intangible. I want to start with the impenetrable, the incomprehensible.
I want to start with the world of dreams.
But I will not reveal it all now. I will not tell the whole now, because the whole only becomes the whole in parts, in conversation with the parts, dispersed in time, in space, arrived at only through passage.
Suffice it to say for now that dreams matter, that they are the heart of the matter translated from one plane to another, one language to another, from the conscious to the unconscious back to the conscious. They remain illegible. They carry the secret.
She does not remember how it all began, why and when.
Perhaps it was during one of the weekly gallery hops or as she followed the news of the statues or on her bus ride the day she went to meet one of the sculptors.
Perhaps it all began long before, on a day her memory doesn’t even hold on to.
I do remember how it all began, why and when, though vaguely. The way I remember the origins of all stories, all books. It always begins with a search. A search, in this case, for the meanings of what came before the dreams.
It also started with an obsession with Roberto Bolaño and “The Part about the Crimes” in 2666. It started in Selah Saterstrom’s hermeneutics class in the winter of 2012, in which I drew a tarot card, a Ten of Wands, which served as a prompt for writing. I remember that image not as a man holding sprouting sticks and reaping his rewards, but as a man carrying pointed burdens on his back.
Outside the window the city moves. She is on a bus. In the women-only section. She knows the city, and she doesn’t know the city. She sees the city outside the bus windows, and she reads the city in the newspaper on her lap. The city is disappearing. Dying. The city is resisting. Being born. It dies every second. It comes back to life every second after. The city keeps reappearing. The city is gaining more presence. Inside her. A very loud silence. The city is disintegrating. Outside her. Noises. A map. Create a map before the city falls apart. She hears a ghostly voice and turns around. Nobody is saying anything.
I desire for her to create a map that can reinvent itself every time the city does. A secret map, a personal map, an internal map, a map in words, a map in tongues. Today the city is not what it was yesterday. Tomorrow it won’t be what it is today. The map needs to be continuously rebirthed. New places. New names. New roads. New lines. Like cells. Like veins. Of her body. Of my body. Of the bodies of the women and men on the bus. Of the bodies of the women and men outside the bus. Of the bodies in the city, making the text. The map of the city is to be drawn with words. The map is the text. The text is the map. The text is the city. But even that will not remain stable. Even that will be forever changing. The text breathes. The text grows. The text decomposes. The city grows and dies and dies and grows. The city decomposes. The city breathes.
She turns around. Everyone is looking outside. Everyone is looking inside. Nobody is saying anything.
The city is losing its statues. I read about this online. It feels surreal, as if nonfiction is already fiction. I want her to map the city, to follow the trail of the lost statues. The statues disappear. The public spaces once dedicated to their bodies remain void. The city has more space, less space. I want her to find the bronze bodies. Find the bodies. But no one can find the bodies. Once they disappear, they are gone. No matter how fast I search, she searches, no matter how hard, the city will remain one step ahead.
But what if we’re looking in the wrong city? On the wrong map? I desire for her to draw a map of the city that is a womb, that is a breath, that is a world, that is nothing, that is everything: a map not to show us the path but to lead us away from the path, a map of the city that is a body, a body sexing, defecating, coughing, biting, spitting, suffocating, caressing, listening, hearing, speaking, a map of the city that is, the city that is not.
What if we’re looking for the monuments on the wrong map? What if we looked for the lost bodies on a different map instead? I want us to draw the map that … draw the map that … the map that …
Traffic has come to a halt. The bus is stuck. Not moving. Idling. Outside, people have gathered. Are waiting. She looks out to see. Other women too. Someone calls out to the bus driver to open the doors. He does. Some leave. Out the front door. Out the back door. She cranes her neck.
A cow is slaughtered in the middle of the square. She sees a big banner covering several store signs. “We welcome a new police mission for social order,” it says. We are the store owners. We are they. They we
lcome the new mission. They welcome the order. They have the cow killed. They have the cow sacrificed. A sacrifice for gratitude, for thankfulness. The city will be cleansed of addicts, vagrants, beggars, peddlers, of the vicious and immoral. Traffic laws will be better implemented. The new mission will improve the lives of the citizens and the city. Better days will come. The city will become pure.
Sacrifice for purity.
Sacrifice of one body for another. One of flesh. The other of brick and cement and asphalt and glass, of gray and gray and green and red and orange and green and gray and gray and black.
Sacrifice as ritual.
Rituals need to be carried out in open spaces. Rituals define public identities. Rituals need to have witnesses. They are symbolic, deliver a message. To the gods. To the people.
What does it mean to sacrifice bodies for a greater cause? To perform rituals to create meaning? To symbolize life? Or death?
The cow is sacrificed in the middle of the day, in the middle of the square. The cars and human beings come to a halt to watch the cow die, to welcome a new era of social order. Bus passengers stare. People gather on the green patch in the middle of the square and stare. The cow lies in the middle of the road. The cow bleeds. The cow breathes. The cow is a corpse. The corpse is too heavy. Shopkeepers cannot move it into a van. Onlookers join to help. Shopkeepers and onlookers cannot move the cow that is now the corpse into a van. They gather. They touch, each a corner of the body. They try. They hold on to. They hold their breath. They push. The corpse remains on the road. In the middle of the square, a fountain continues to breathe water into the air. Water rises up and drops down. A tow truck is called. Life comes to a halt before the corpse of the cow. The sacrifice. The ritual. The cow. The people. The cars. Together. Entangled. The narrow path around the body, kept open to traffic, is now a knot of cars and buses and motorbikes and people.
The sound of horns. The murmurs and shouts of humans. The silence of the animal. The silence of the trees and the crows standing watch. The knot cannot be untied until the corpse is moved away. The passersby pause for a moment then move on, or they pause for a moment and stay for another, or they move to the center to see, to understand, and then try to find a way out or decide to stay a bit longer before moving on. The cow corpse begins to rot on the asphalt in the square.
An hour later the tow truck arrives, and the driver and the shopkeepers and the men get together and, with the help of a metal chain, move the corpse from the pavement up behind the truck. Traffic officers open a path through the crowd. The truck moves slowly away. The water continues to flow from the fountain. The cow is gone. The blood of the cow dries on the asphalt under the sun. The crows sing and fly away. The trees continue to stand still.
Missing Statue (13): The Calf
Location: The calf, along with the parent cow, had lived in front of the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Tehran since the day the school opened.
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
The cow remains standing.
“Works of public art involve preparation, realisation, potential evaluation and the everyday reality thereof. Apart from public space, it is therefore important to acknowledge that public art also involves public time. Both the artwork and the space are [moreover] in interplay with the art engager (i.e. the subject), and hence there is a subject-object-space-time nexus. This nexus implies that elements of subject, object, space and time exist by the grace of each other. Such a nexus is thus more-than-just-human, although it rests in the eye of the art engager” (Zebracki 2015).
Missing Statue (12): The Foal
Location: The foal, along with the parent horse, had lived in front of the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Tehran.
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
The horse remains standing.
Missing Statue (11): The Wagtail Gives Life to Seven Babies, One Is a Nightingale
Abstract
Location: Esteghlal Park
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
“Public art may be seen as an intermediating agency in social culture and thus as a powerful yet elusive player in spatial politics (Deutsche 1996; Kester 1998). Its existence is often linked to institutional and policy contexts” (Zebracki 2015).
What holds true about the existence of public art holds true for its annihilation as well.
Missing Statue (10): Bust
Abstract
Location: Artists Park
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
Missing Statue (9): Life
Abstract
Location: Artists Park
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
“The work, the ideal, dreamt work, does not exist without its stage, its support, its subjectile, its earth. The ‘stage’ of the visual work of art is double: 1) the work (painting, photo, installation, sculpture, etc.) is born in a genealogy, in a vast time, a sort of library-landscape which remembers-and-forgets, which keeps and brings back to life all the previous works. 2) The other stage is its genetic geography, its spatial context, its urban, political site” (Cixous 2006).
Missing Statue (8): Avicenna
World-famous Persian polymath
Date of Birth: 980
Date of Death: 1037
Location: Behjat Abad Park
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
Missing Statue (7): Sattar Khan
Also known as the National Commander, one of the two leaders of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution
Date of Birth: 1866
Date of Death: 1914
Location: Sattar Khan Street
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
Missing Statue (6): Bagher Khan
Also known as the National Chief, one of the two leaders of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution
Date of Birth: 1861
Date of Death: 1916
Location: Shahr Ara Street
Date Gone Missing: Around the same time as Sattar Khan, spring 2010
What are the ethical implications of raising monuments for a movement’s dead? Of creating celebrities of them?
Who decides who should become a celebrity in death?
Isn’t it disrespectful even to use the word “celebrity” for the dead of a movement?
Missing Statue (5): Mohammad Sanie Khatam
Master inlay artist
Date of Birth: 1891
Date of Death: Unknown
Location: Mellat Park
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
Missing Statue (4): Shahriar
Poet who wrote poems in Persian and Azeri. The date of his death is commemorated as the National Day of Persian Poetry and Literature in Iran.
Date of Birth: 1906
Date of Death: 1988
Location: The statue had primarily lived in front of Vahdat Hall, on Shahriar Boulevard, but was moved to its location in front of Shahr Theater a year before its disappearance.
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
Missing Statue (3): Mohammad Mo’in
Professor of Persian literature and compiler of the Mo’in Encyclopedia
Date of Birth: 1918
Date of Death: 1971
Location: Ostad Mo’in Boulevard
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
Missing Statue (2): Ali Shariati
Sociologist, historian, theologist, political activist, and author
Date of Birth: 1933
Date of Death: 1977
Location: Shariati Park
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
Why this persistence in commemorating? In remembering? In fighting forgetfulness?
Is selectivity the enemy of remembrance or is it the very definition of remembrance?
Can we remember what we once forgot?
Can we forget what we once remembered? What we once memorized? What we once knew? What we once experienced? How much can we forget?
How much is enough?
When should we stop? Comm
emorating? Remembering? Reminding? Blaming? Missing? Mourning? Forgetting? Inviting to forget? Inviting to forgive? Forgiving?
Who should decide?
How can we free ourselves from the past while honoring it?
Missing Statue (1): Mother and Child
Location: San’at Square
Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010
The statues went missing from public spaces in Tehran in the spring of 2010, in the aftermath of the events.
The visibility of the statues—in plain sight—suggests the existence of witnesses: ordinary citizens, police officers, cameras. The size and weight of the statues suggest intricate planning and use of heavy machinery for their removal.
The media covered the news. Only at the beginning. That’s why I was able to read about them on the other side of the world.
Authorities promised investigations. Only at the beginning. No investigative journalism was carried out. Or very little. Perhaps it was not allowed. Or it was but remained unpublished. No further police investigation was carried out. Or it was. No results were ever reported to the public.
I imagine her on a search for the statues.
Where to search? How to search?
Traffic moves. Little by little. She checks her watch. She is late for her meeting with one of the sculptors. The light turns red. The bus driver opens the door, though the bus has not yet reached the stop. Some people get in. The women’s section in the back gets busier than the men’s in the front. The new passengers ask the others to push farther toward the back. Her head on the not-so-clean glass of the bus, she shifts her gaze from the cars outside to the women inside to the ads and handwritten notices on the walls.
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