trans(re)lating house one

by Poupeh Missaghi

  The mother says the denial of the death is an extra burden to carry.

  The mother speaks of the sympathy of the people, of their calling the son a martyr, of how much it all means to them.

  The mother speaks of the burden of seeing the lawyer in charge of their case and other similar ones taken away from her children and imprisoned. The mother wishes she were imprisoned instead. Wants to see the lawyer released and back with her family, her young children.

  The family demands an official copy of the report from the medical examiner’s office.

  They don’t receive one until eight months later. No mention of the kidney failure, of the lung infection. The official cause of death is stated as poisoning.

  The family wants to follow up. The judge rejects their inquiries.

  The case is closed.

  The mother speaks of the pain growing more acute with each day that passes.

  The family fears holding a ceremony for their son’s death anniversary. They ask people to just remember him, light a candle in remembrance.

  They gather at his grave. The police are present. Clashes. Arrests.

  The mother mentions a young woman who was loved by their son. The woman remembers him.

  The woman stays by the family’s side. The woman invokes his name to survive the loss, to pass her university exams. The mother knows her suffering. The family loves the woman.

  The family believes the revenge of their son and of the other young men and women remains in the hands of God.

  What is that unknown force larger than us that encourages us to go on?

  What is that faith?

  Faith in God? What is the role of God in all this?

  “This book is not a book. / It’s not a song. / Or a poem. Or thoughts. / But tears, pain, weeping, despair that cannot yet be stopped or reasoned with. Political fury strong like one’s faith in God. Even stronger than that. More dangerous because it is endless” (Duras 2011).

  Fury? What is the role of fury in all this?

  And love? What is the role of love?

  What happened to the lovers? To the absence in their arms, their bodies, their mouths?

  Where are the lovers? Where are they in these narratives? Are their bodies, their voices, their views censored? By parents, by authorities, by themselves?

  And the land? What is the role of the land in all this? The fatherland, the motherland, the homeland?

  How do the dead redefine the homeland? What about the survivors? Their silences, their screams? How do they redefine the homeland?

  What becomes of the homeland? Does it embrace or reject its traumas?

  What lullabies will it sing to its unborn children?

  What lullabies will it sing to the lovers?

  The text of the dreams is transferred from a handwritten notebook to a Word document. The text is simultaneously translated from Persian to English if necessary. It amounts to 155 dream entries, 35,000 words.

  Some of the dreams are documented with the utmost attention to detail. Others include only a few key words, jotted down first thing in the morning in the hopes that they would conjure the dreams later, when they could be written down in whole. These dreams were usually lost forever before they could be documented.

  Then they are translated anew: the text in a Word document becomes text in a word cloud. The circles of words are the dream world distilled. They decode the themes of the dreams, the struggles of the unconscious in the aftermath of the events, manipulating an unconscious that is already displaced in geography and lifestyle and language, an unconscious that is already altered in the remembrance, documentation, and multiple translations of the dreams.

  In the alley, her friends sit her down on the curb and tell her to wait and breathe while they go to the store around the corner for water and provisions for the gathering later that night. She suddenly remembers the envelope. She digs into her purse and pulls it out, then looks around before opening it. She notices the girl she followed from the bus lingering near the door to the gallery, holding an armful of narcissus, begging visitors to buy just one bouquet, one bouquet, please, or five for a discount, or take them all for your girlfriend, she’ll love you so much, and I’ll be able to go home for the night, please, just one bouquet. The girl sees her on the curb. She walks toward her. Hesitantly. Pauses. Looks around. Walks faster. Looks around. Sits down next to her and puts the flowers on the ground. She digs into her satchel, brings out a folded newspaper, hands it to her. She glances at the paper in her hand. None of the headlines catch her eye. Something falls onto her lap from between the pages.

  An envelope. Exactly like the one she was handed at the gallery, the one she just put back in her purse, unopened, unread. She turns toward the girl. The girl is not there. The flowers are. She looks up and around. The girl has disappeared. She has left her narcissus behind. All of them. She opens the envelope. A handwritten note in the style of a newspaper article: a headline, a column.

  “Bank Manager and Art Dealer Found Dead.” She reads on. The bank’s basement. A corpse. An empty bottle of cyanide pills in his hand. No will. No note left behind for the family. His vomit dried around his mouth. Prayer beads and two cell phones by his side. An electrician went down to fix the wires. He found the body. Several days later. The body disfigured and blown up. The body was buried in silence. No funeral. No ceremonies.

  No investigation followed.

  I want to delay this forever for her, let her go on with her search for the other bodies, but I know she has been safeguarding herself for too long, that it’s not for the best, this illusion of safety, this ignorance, this detachment, this hiding in a merely intellectual endeavor. The hiding only goes so far.

  Even her dreams are dissolving, becoming more and more haunting, trying to tell her something.

  I need the story to lead her away from the statues and toward the other bodies. I need her to meet the other woman. Once again. The other woman will help her cross the threshold.

  one body against another

  one body attacked by many

  one body praised by many

  one body beside another

  Nations as bodies. Languages as bodies. I hold on to those of the mother and the father. Adopt others.

  What does the choice of one language over another mean for the translation of these (hi)stories into the space of the book?

  How do these events, narrated in a book in English, compare to those narrated in a Persian one? What does it mean to write them originally in English rather than write them in Persian, then translate them into English? How can they be “originally” written in English when their sources were in Persian, when I experienced them in Persian, when their reality was Persian?

  How can the narratives be faithful?

  Should they be faithful to the original event or to the text of the event? Whose version?

  Shouldn’t they be faithful simply to the world of the story?

  What is faithfulness?

  What is translation?

  How can one translate an original through one’s own body to create a new original that is of the event, of the text, of the self, of the Other?

  What do the multiple layers of translation do to help these lives and these bodies continue to breathe? Can breathing be translated into words, or can it be truly sensed only in the white spaces between and around and within the words?

  one body

  one body

  two bodies

  corpse (58)

  corpse (72)

  corpse (80)

  corpse ( )

  corpse

  corpse

  corpses

  corpses

  corpses

  corpses

  She grabs the other envelope from her purse and opens it. There is a map and a note inside. The note is written in the same handwriting:

  “Meet me tomorrow at noon. The teahouse.”

  Corpse (13)

  Age: 34

  Gender: Female


  Date of Death: 6 Dey 1388 / 27 December 2009

  Place of Death: Vali-e Asr Square, Tehran

  Time of Death: Unknown

  Cause of Death: Run over by a vehicle

  Date of Burial: 23 Dey 1388 / 13 January 2010

  Place of Burial: Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran

  A single mother.

  Goes out to get nazri food for lunch. Like many others in town. On the Day of Ashura.

  Protests are taking place.

  Chaos.

  A police truck hits her, backs up, goes forward again, twice crushing her body under the wheels.

  Her head.

  Blood.

  Green shirt under her manteau.

  Her arms.

  White shoes. Crushed legs.

  A woman screams.

  A man says something about a car. Smashing her.

  A man curses.

  A man says something about a car. That they can use to take her to the hospital.

  A clinic or a hospital. A crowd of people. Shouts.

  God is great. Shouts. Calling on Imam Hussein.

  People gather around the car. People help with her body, film with their cell phones, chant slogans.

  Death to the dictator.

  My martyr sister, we will continue on your path.

  Several people, including a man in a white medical-staff uniform, struggle to move the body.

  A man asks a woman to step back so he can help with the body.

  A woman asks for the sheets to be removed from the face so she can film her.

  A woman cries. A woman screams.

  Blood on her face.

  Her hair disheveled.

  Her eyes closed.

  When she does not return home, a friend asks around. Hears about a woman matching her description being hit. Checks with the neighborhood police station. Learns it was her friend. Goes to the friend’s mother’s to inform her.

  The mother cannot find the daughter in hospitals, anywhere. Seventeen days later. She receives a call. Finds her in the morgue of a detention center.

  The body bloated. Crushed. Bruised. Rotten. Her face disfigured.

  Official cause of death stated as collision with a hard object. Object unidentified.

  The mother wants to know. Hears the eyewitnesses’ accounts.

  The mother goes to the police. Goes to court. Opens a case. Wants to know. She is accused of lying. She is asked to bring in evidence of the killing. She is asked to provide names of the killers.

  She is offered blood money. She rejects the blood money. Says she might have raised her with empty hands, with hard work, that they might have nothing, but that she will not exchange her daughter’s blood for money. She only wants the culprits to be identified.

  Eventually, she stops going to court.

  The mother calls her late daughter a freedom fighter, a nationalist. Says she loved to travel around the country. Says she had just signed up for a carpet weaving class. Says she is a martyr of the people. The mother is thankful for the people, says they have witnessed and will never forget. The mother says her daughter’s revenge is in the hands of God. The mother takes in her daughter’s daughter.

  The daughter is six at the time of her mother’s death. She becomes depressed. She screams. She does not like to go to school. Asks for her mother. Wants her to come back home. Her grandmother tells her that her mother has gone to heaven. She stares at her grandmother with pained eyes, says heaven is far, far away.

  She is survived by her mother and daughter.

  The woman I resurrect, is she the one you resurrect? The one she will resurrect? If they are not one and the same, how will they meet? Where will they meet? Can they?

  of birth

  of death

  of birth

  of death

  of birth

  of birth

  of death

  of death

  of death

  of birth

  Are we worthy of death?

  Are we capable of life?

  the numbers are a mystery

  Dreams belong to a world still immune. A world that the men in power, those who surveil and censor, cannot yet touch, understand, control. A reminder that despite everything, there are still parts of ourselves that they cannot regulate or redact.

  Voluntarily sharing this last private space, allowing entry into the mystery that is still inaccessible even to scientists, even to myself, makes me vulnerable; but could it also, paradoxically, make me powerful? Am I, with this gesture, showing that I am not afraid to bare what is most intimate, what is most private, what even I myself fail to understand?

  Dreams must be spoken and included in these (hi)stories—of mine, of ours, of hers, of theirs—because they are our most autonomous creation. A reminder that no matter how hard they try, and no matter how hard we try, we will continue to translate and write our lives, in languages neither they nor we can fully understand. This is our power. Our dreams are “a theatre in which the dreamer himself is the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic” (Jung 2010). It is I, not even the conscious I, but the ancient, unknowable, unconscious one, who, in conversation with the totality of my being, is the sole creator of my dreams. Whatever happens out there, she is still directing the dreams, dreams that do not just recite pasts but also prophesize futures. Dreams are maps that forever write and translate themselves, guiding us into and away from ourselves.

  She arrives early to the meeting. She walks around the square. Eyes once again looking her up and down. The same ones. Different ones. She lingers for a while by the same newsstand, buying a magazine and two of the day’s newspapers. The salesman is not the one from the previous time, but he looks at her as though he recognizes her. Instead of her change, he gives her a pack of tissues. She looks at her watch and walks to the teahouse. The doors and windows are all open. She calls out to the waiter, who is at the door rinsing tea glasses with boiling water and pouring the water out on the pavement. She asks him for a table. Unsure. In a low voice. He looks at her, looks inside, looks back at her. Looking. As if she were out of her mind. Not saying a word.

  She peeks inside. The customers are all men, sitting around the white plastic tables, drinking tea, smoking hookahs, laughing out loud or holding discussions in hushed voices. Men who look like truck drivers taking a break from the road, like hardworking day laborers, like rogues or dealers, men with the tanned, rough faces of men of the street, their two-day beards making them look older, more tired, their mustaches, short or long, defining them, ensuring they belong to this place, this time. Pinned to the peeling walls are old, faded posters of landscapes, and in the middle, a large image of a religious figure she can’t recognize.

  She looks back at the waiter and notices two empty tables. She is hesitant but asks again for one. He looks at her, murmuring something she doesn’t catch under his breath, walks out, and begins giving her directions to a proper-for-a-woman café around the corner on the main street. She looks back at him and repeats her request, this time in a louder voice. She looks around and says she wants to see the manager.

  He is stunned. His mouth hangs open. His eyes search inside the teahouse. His cleaning cloth is suspended between his fingers. Looking offended, he walks inside, toward a man busy solving a puzzle while sipping tea and puffing at his hookah. The two talk, and the man glances at her and says something to the waiter, and the waiter nods and goes to a corner table by the window, farthest from the crowd, and starts cleaning it up. He glances at her every few seconds while he rubs the table clean, rubbing hard as if he wants to skin it. Finally, he comes back out and calls her in. There is no malice or even disapproval in his eyes or his voice.

  Just questions. He ushers her to the table. As she sits and orders tea, he can no longer stop himself and reminds her again that there is a more proper place with better tea and food just around the corner. She looks at him and instead of answering she asks him whether he would
serve her a hookah. He doesn’t even bother to answer and walks away. She watches him as he works at the big samovar in a corner by the manager’s desk, piles of glasses and saucers sitting to one side, and listens to the bubbling sound of the water in the hookahs. He comes back with a tea glass on a saucer and a little tin of sugar cubes. He leaves them on the table, and as he walks away, he explains to her that the tea will take awhile to brew, as if he wants her to know she’ll be sitting there, waiting, all by herself in their crowd when she could have just walked around the corner to the more proper place for a woman. She puts her magazine and newspapers on the table and begins to read. She can’t really concentrate, even though the men don’t really seem to mind her after the initial shock of her presence. It’s as if she has become invisible, sitting at the corner table by the window, pretending to read as she waits for the woman who sent her the map and the message.

  “It is the feeling of secret we become acquainted with when we dream, that is what makes us both enjoy and at the same time fear dreaming. When you are possessed by a dream, … you possess the unknown secret. It is this, not the possibility of knowing the secret, that makes you both dream and write: the beating presence of it, its feeling” (Cixous 1993).

  wounds

  scars

  She arrives late. Before she even settles in her seat, she has waved the waiter over. Instead of the ragged veil, she wears a short manteau and a colorful cotton scarf, but her eyes have the same strange, familiar sparkle. She looks younger and yet older than the woman she followed the other day, if such a thing is possible. Approaching with a fresh teapot and a plate of halva, the waiter greets her warmly, as if he knows her, as if she belongs and is welcomed. She pours tea for the two of them, reaches into one of the shopping bags she has put on the chair next to hers, brings out newspapers, and sets them on the table. They sip their tea. Neither speaks.