trans(re)lating house one

by Poupeh Missaghi

  “Storytelling settings can provide a different kind of truth than a mere recitation of facts…. These settings can reveal the truth about what oppression did to people—not just the recitation of events, but what the oppression felt like, how it changed and destroyed lives, even lives not touched by a specific crime. Because so many stories can be told, a larger picture emerges in which individual victims can see their place in a community of survivors” (Teresa Godwin Phelps, quoted in Stauffer 2015).

  Does storytelling keep events of the past contained there, or is it hoping to transform them into something that can accompany us into the future? Are these two opposing impulses or are they one and the same?

  Does the storyteller want to remember or forget? To hang on to or let go of?

  Does storytelling aim to create a utopia, to erase a dystopia, or simply to mirror one or the other?

  Does the utopia come to life on the page or in the interactions between writer, reader, and text?

  Is the failed attempt to tell an all-encompassing story the dystopia we want to escape? Isn’t that dystopia the very essence of utopia?

  What becomes of these stories in the face of the world’s continuing brutalities? In the face of the monsters forever reinventing themselves?

  How to stop the telling of these stories from becoming yet another piece of propaganda in the hands of this or that regime? In this or that corner of the world?

  How can these stories restore our faith in our ability to rise beyond the oppressor, in our ability to create different realities?

  Can they even aspire to that? Can they at least restore our faith in our imaginations, remind us that they’re our best tool for survivance?

  And the friend buzzes them in through the sound of music and laughter, and they open the door to a landscape woven together from newly planted shrubs and roses and thick, tall trees whose trunks have determined the shape and design of the walls, and the sound of water flowing in the narrow brook made with turquoise tiles guides them toward the entrance, the still-unfinished lobby, the elevator, the door to the friend’s apartment.

  The friend takes the dessert and unwraps the gift right there and loves the bowls and kisses her and the lover, welcoming them inside, and as they walk into the house, she immediately falls in love with the way it’s decorated, the subtle light of candles set along the hallway, the family pictures mounted on the wall, some black and white, some in color, the vulnerable artworks, the old wooden mirror with colorful glass tiles forming its frame, the drawings, the calligraphies, the paintings, the old chest, the vase filled with white lilies, the magazines stacked by the TV stand, the carpet, the chandelier, the drapes, the china, the booze and sodas on the kitchen counter, the food spread over the dining table.

  They are greeted by faces that are familiar from weekly gatherings, faces from long ago that have changed but not really, and new faces, and they join them in recounting memories of the past week or month or year while sipping their drinks and picking at vegetable trays and eyeing the men and women who move to house music and wonder about prospects for conversation or sex, and then someone calls out for the music to be changed to Persian pop, a request booed by some and applauded by others, and they dance to a Persian song or two and then sit down at the table for the main dishes the friend herself has cooked, and they busy themselves trying everything but she reminds the lover not to fill up because she knows there will be dessert and a homemade cake too.

  As she gets up to carry some dishes away to the kitchen, a woman she does not know and he does not know asks the lover about his work, and he begins to tell her about it and then asks her about hers, and she begins to tell him about it and moves her chair closer to his so she can hear better, and when she comes back from the kitchen, the lover calls her over and sits her on his lap, and the woman pauses and excuses herself to go fill her drink, and he kisses her behind the ear and moves his hand on her bare thigh, and she grabs his hand and pulls him to the entryway, away from the eyes of the others, and he slips his hand under her dress, and she places a kiss on his neck, staining his white collar with her red lipstick, and he grabs her hand and pulls her toward the room on their right, which they find is the friend’s bedroom, clean and organized the way rooms in new homes are clean and organized, perfumes, foundations, eye shadows, lipsticks, blushes, hair clips decorating the vanity, a book lying half-open on the duvet, a few frames waiting to be hung up, a sliding door opening onto a small balcony, and she pushes him to the wall and slips her hand under his shirt, into his jeans, and he tries to throw her on the bed, but they hear voices approaching from the hallway, and instead they open the door to the balcony and step outside for a cigarette in the fresh night air.

  And beyond the balcony and the patinated bistro set and the black ashtray that is the naked body of a woman reclining and the adobe-colored flower boxes filled with pink and purple and red ice plants, she and the lover notice, in the not-so-distant distance, the prison gate and the barbed wire and the watchtowers and the hills hiding cells underneath and the faint lights and the silent winds and the highways and the overpasses and the underpasses and the lights of the cars passing through, passing through, passing through, and they decide to go back inside, to rejoin the party, but right then they notice another couple stumbling into the room, their bodies entwined, their voices morphed into hushed laughter, and the two of them choose to stay outside for a while, to sit down and smoke the hash the lover digs out from his pack of cigarettes, to be voyeurs squeezed between what’s inside and what’s beyond.

  He takes a puff, and she takes a puff, and he gets up and begins to walk restlessly around the confined space of the balcony, and he grows more restless and stops and looks down below and then motions for her to come over to the railing, and she straightens her dress and walks to his side, careful not to make noise with her heels, and he points down below to the neighboring lot, and she looks but notices nothing in the darkness enfolding the land, and he tells her to look more closely and points to a certain spot, and she notices something moving, things moving, creatures moving, and he looks, and she looks, and they notice horses, two horses moving slowly in a circle, and she looks, and he looks, and they notice a cement millstone defining the horses’ movement, slow and circular, slow and circular, as if they can’t and will never stop, as if they will never reach an end, and she looks, and he looks, and surrounding the millstone and the horses, they notice an orchard and a well and a small track, perhaps for the horses to exercise their muscles, and then a junkyard of car skeletons, tires, barrels, couches, tables, cabinets, trunks, rusted frames, tattered canvases, and the two horses keep moving, and she and the lover choose to stare at the two horses instead of everything else around them, and they finish their hash holding on to one another, gasping for breath, for air, while the couple inside laughs loudly and finds their way out of the room and back to the party, where by now, everyone must be busy with dessert, with the cake the friend made, and the last tea of the night.

  “Authoritarian regimes may be able to suppress organized movements or silence collective resistance. But they are limited when it comes to stifling an entire society, the mass of ordinary citizens in their daily lives” (Bayat 2010). Under such circumstances, Bayat believes everyday life and the tiniest attempts to carry on with it become “ways in which people resist, express agency, and instigate change,” a form of social-political activism opposing the status quo. Bayat calls this “courage and creativity” the “art of presence.”

  corpse (45)

  hands are fists

  Corpse (7) and Corpse (8)

  Age: 38 and 58

  Gender: Both female

  Occupation: Daycare employees

  Date of Death: 25 Khordad 1388 / 15 June 2009

  Place of Death: Daycare center, Tehran

  Time of Death: Around 8:00 p.m.

  Cause of Death: Bullets

  Date of Burial: 27 Khordad 1388 / 17 June 2009

  Place of Burial: Behesht-
e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran

  When the protests in the square end, people head to nearby streets.

  Clashes break out between protesters and police and paramilitary forces in front of a Basij base.

  According to some reports, the daughter and mother were headed to the Music of the Rain daycare opposite the base to do some cleaning while the school was closed and the kids weren’t around.

  According to other reports, the two women were members of the Basij force and were on their way home when the clashes broke out, and they went to the daycare only to take shelter there.

  Once on the property, they hide behind the closed front gate.

  A barrage. From above. At the walls. Through the door. They are shot.

  Daughter and mother are shot in the torso and in the neck.

  One side claims people were shot by forces on the roof of the base and by plainclothes agents in the crowd.

  The other side claims the forces primarily used blank cartridges to disperse the crowd and replaced them with real bullets only when protesters attacked the base and set it on fire.

  The head of the Tehran Basij declares that the shootings were carried out by the rioters. He refers to experts’ reports and the angles of the bullet paths as evidence.

  Eyewitnesses claim the people around the base were unarmed.

  No official reports are provided of the specifics of the bullets found in the bodies of the daughter and the mother.

  One report says the father/husband headed to the daycare after he failed to reach his daughter and wife by phone.

  One witness says that after the barrage stopped, people brought a ladder, entered the property, and broke the locks on the doors. The father/husband was among them.

  One report says the father/husband found the bodies of his daughter and wife together in the daycare front yard, found them covered in blood.

  One report quotes another daughter saying that the three of them worked at the daycare together, that they were open that day, that they sent the last kid home around 6:15 p.m., that she decided to go home, that her sister and mother decided to stay there overnight or head home later if the clashes calmed down. She is quoted blaming the leaders of the movement for their deaths. She speaks of her sister’s care for the poor, of her wish for martyrdom. She says one was shot in the head and back. The other in the head and throat.

  In a picture of the daughter’s head, to the right side of her neck, just under the chin, is a large hole filled with crimson tissue. Her forehead is streaked with blood.

  Her head is in another woman’s left hand. The woman has her hand behind her left ear. The woman wears red nail polish on her left thumb, the same red as the blood, but sparkling.

  Her hair all smeared with the stickiness of insides excavated by bullets.

  Over time all the color remaining in her disappears.

  What’s left are the overwhelming streaks of blood, which continue to flow.

  One witness says when the barrage stopped, faint voices could still be heard from behind the gate. Says the women were alive but died on the way to the hospital.

  The father/husband is told by medical examiners that both women died immediately after the bullets hit them.

  According to the brother, the sister and mother were just passing by when the attacks to the Basij base began. They took shelter in the daycare but were gunned down by the rioters. He asks, “My question to these people is: What crime did my mother and sister commit to be killed?” He demands the responsible rioters be severely punished.

  Daughter and mother are buried in a two-story grave.

  The grave is covered with a rug. Flowers on top. A plate of halva, decorated with pistachio. A spoon lying on the left corner.

  Men and women stand around.

  Men and women squat around.

  Men in a semicircle at two sides of the grave.

  Women in a semicircle at the other two.

  They say their prayers.

  The gravestone carries the mother’s name on top, the daughter’s name below hers.

  The walls of the daycare center are soon painted over to cover the bullet holes. The door to the daycare is replaced.

  The two women are survived by the father/husband and at least one brother and one sister.

  “Dreams are as black as death” (Adorno 2007). “Certain dream experiences lead me to believe that the individual experiences his own death as a cosmic catastrophe…. Our dreams are linked with each other not just because they are ‘ours,’ but because they form a continuum, they belong to a unified world, just as, for example, all Kafka’s stories inhabit ‘the same world.’ The more dreams hang together or are repeated, the greater the danger that we shall be unable to distinguish between them and reality” (Adorno, quoted in Cogdde and Lonitz 2007).

  Corpse (9)

  Age: 25

  Gender: Female

  Occupation: University student majoring in literature

  Date of Death: 31 Khordad 1388 / 21 June 2009

  Place of Death: Keshavarz Boulevard, Tehran

  Time of Death: Unknown

  Cause of Death: Bullet to the neck

  Date of Burial: 2 Tir 1388 / 23 June 2009

  Place of Burial: Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran

  No further information available.

  The information I choose to include in the narratives, is it the truth? Is it the whole truth? How do we choose? Which of the objects, the people, the voices find their way into the stories?

  Why do we pick one injustice over the other?

  Is having lived through this era, in this place, in this injustice justification enough for choosing to tell this story and not those of other moments and sites of oppression and repression?

  Is being of this people reason enough for telling their stories and not other people’s stories?

  Is death the highest injustice of all?

  Aren’t the struggles of everyday life as important to think about and voice as these singled-out moments in history are?

  Can a book aim for the stories of all, not the stories of only a few?

  What is the use of the book when the dead are not coming back to life?

  What can a book do for the void that has filled the life of the lover, the brother, the sister, the parents, the stranger who saw the blood bursting, who heard the sounds of the execution, who didn’t see or hear directly but saw or heard in the virtual world, who didn’t see or hear at all but inherited the void, dreamt the nightmare of the void?

  How can the book translate the narrative of death into a narrative of life?

  How can it use the language of life to translate the experience of death?

  What is its use if it tells the stories of these deaths in a language other than theirs, in a context other than theirs?

  What is the use of any of this while the bodies continue to decompose in plots that, in thirty years, might be shared with other, newer corpses?

  How can we, as translators of these events and their narratives, find the proper language to voice them? What might the proper language be? Is there just one? Who decides what it is? Reality? Media? Politicians? Family? Friends? Restrictions? Love? Memory?

  How can we translate them into the closed frame of a book, of an art form, of a report, of a memorial while celebrating the life in them? How can we accommodate a reading that constantly reopens itself, rereads itself, retranslates itself based on our distance from the event, physical and emotional, spatial and temporal, based on our relationship with the event, with the world around it, with ourselves?

  How can we, within the frame of a book, keep these bodies and their voices alive, audible, relatable?

  Do the wounds of their bodies and ours heal within the frame of a book that promises to hold on to the scars?

  Does our healing result from the conversation coming to an end or continuing on?

  How can we, within the frame of a book, anticipate and allow for all our future wounds, for the wounds of the future
readers who will touch the book and be touched by it?

  How can the book remain a book of journey not destination?

  corpse (46)

  greenness

  corpse (47)

  whiteness

  corpse (48)

  redness

  corpse (49)

  greenness

  What is a count without a story?

  What is a story without a count?

  Is the count an acknowledgment?

  Is the count a story in and of itself?

  Who weeps for them? Who weeps for us?

  corpse (53)

  corpse (54)

  How many deaths?

  How many are enough?

  Should the list include everyone? Can it?

  How can a list be complete when it cannot account for the ones who disappeared without a trace, whose bodies were never turned over to the families, who have no cemetery plots or sites of memorial?

  Should there even be a list if it can’t be comprehensive?

  How does an incomplete list make the families of the ones it has not counted feel? Do they feel betrayed?

  In the small space of the gallery there are hundreds of works, hundreds of paintings, photographs, calligraphies, and sculptures, there are the voices and scents of the visitors mingling, murmuring, looking at prices or not bothering to, looking instead at other faces and bodies moving among the artworks. The water in the street gutter speeds by. The leaves are beginning to feel fall lurking. She and her friend wait for the thinking angel statue to be wrapped up. The three men wait for them outside. Soon they’ll continue with the rest of their weekly gallery hopping. Someone from another group of friends repeats rumors of a soirée, another place, another event. They head to the car.