She takes one last gulp of her tea.
I have to leave now.
Who are you?
She takes a bite of the halva, reaches into her purse, tucks several bills under the fresh teapot, and rises from her chair.
You should have some halva, say a prayer.
She grabs her bags, rearranges her scarf, begins to walk away.
Your newspapers.
She turns around, half sits down again.
When I was born, I was given the birth certificate of an older sister who had died a few months before. Perhaps my parents had decided I was to replace her, or perhaps it was just the easier, cheaper solution. With the borrowed birth certificate came a borrowed official name. I don’t know if I became a vessel for the life of the one who had died, so she could continue to live through me, or if I imposed my own life on her name, her identity, her being, she says in a low voice, then pauses and takes a deep breath before putting her right hand on the papers and pushing them toward her.
And then she gets up without saying a word, in a rush, as if she has to be somewhere, has to leave before it’s too late, nodding good-bye to her, chatting with the waiter for a second, waving to the manager, and walking out, leaving her there by herself, with the newspapers.
“I am leaving—says death without adding that he’s taking me along” (Lispector 2012).
What will happen to her when she turns the page and faces what she has known all along, has been living all along, but has struggled to keep at a distance? What will happen when she feels the weight of her life and the lives and deaths of others in the weight of the words on the page entering her like never before? The way it has entered you and me? What will happen when she becomes the reader of these pages she has been a part of all along?
Can I, can anyone, go on protecting her?
What will become of her, of me, of us, of them, of you?
She pulls the newspapers toward her. There’s something hard between the pages. She leafs through them and comes to a dossier hidden inside. There is a note on the cover in a handwriting that she’s come to know. It reads, “You’ve been following the wrong bodies. The bodies you want are in here.”
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Borzutzky, Daniel. The Book of Interfering Bodies. New York: Nightboat, 2011.
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Permissions
“Between Hole-Word and Word-Word” and “The Book of Prayers” by Daniel Borzutzky are in the collection The Book of Interfering Bodies, copyright © 2011 by Daniel Borzutzky. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books.
“Godzilla in Mexico” by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy, is from Romantic Dogs, copyright © 2006 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño, translation copyright © 2008 by Laura Healy. Excerpt reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Pan Macmillan.
“If a Nation Wants to Change Its Destiny …,” an interview with Rahnavard, Zahra, was first published in the United States in The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future, copyright © 2010 by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel. Exc
erpts reprinted by permission of Melville House Publishing.
“The Immigrant, Vanishing Sun” by Daniel Borzutzky is in In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, copyright © 2015 by Daniel Borzutzky. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books.
Excerpt from Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson, copyright © 2005 by Maggie Nelson, is reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.
“Placement” by Natalie Scenters-Zapico is in The Verging Cities, copyright © 2015 by Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Excerpt reprinted by permission of the Center for Literary Publishing.
Acknowledgments
The women and men whose (hi)stories are detailed in this book, in order of appearance:
Alireza Sabouri Miandehi
Behnam Ganji
Nahal Sahabi
Maryam Soudbar Atbatan
Seyed Ali Habibi Mousavi Khameneh
Sattar Beheshti
Fatemeh Rajabpour Chokami and Sorour Boroumand Chokami
Parisa Keli
Kasra Sharafi
Abdoulreza Soudbakhsh
Ahmad Nejati Kargar
Shabnam Sohrabi
The information on their deaths has been compiled from the following sources: Aleph.org; BBC Persian; Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery website; Center for Human Rights in Iran (persian.iranhumanrights.org), including the radio program 5 in the Afternoon; Daily Mail; DW Persian; Exile Activist blog on WordPress (exilesactivist.wordpress.com); Facebook; Fars News; Free Index blog on Blogspot; Google Images; Gooya News; the Guardian; Hamshahri Online; Human Rights Activists News Agency (hra-news.org/fa); Irangreenvoice.com; the Iranian (iranian.com); Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA); IranianUK (iranianuk.com); Islamic Revolution Document Center (irdc.ir); Jaras website (rahesabz.net); Kaleme.com; kanoon-jb.blogsky.com; Khabar Online; Mashregh News; Nahal Sahabi’s blog on Blogfa (nahal53.blogfa.com); Omid Memorial by Boroumand Center website (iranrights.org/fa/memorial); Persianblog.ir, including images; PersianReflection blog on Blogfa; Peykeiran.com; Pink Sado blog on Blogspot; Radio Farda website, including Victims of 88 series; Radio Zamaneh website; Raja News; Rooz Online; Serat News; Soundcloud, including audio files of interviews with survivors; Tabnak News Agency; Tehran University of Medical Sciences, public relations page (pr.tums.ac.ir); Victims of 88 documentary film on Manoto TV; VOA Persian; Wikipedia; and YouTube audio files and videos.
Working through these sources, one, unfortunately, notices many gaps, inconsistencies, and—more often than not—even contradictory information. Some sources are more reliable than others, and in some cases, webpages used to gather information may have even ceased to exist. The premise of this work, however, has been to live within this very chaos, trying to make sense of what one has experienced and inherited.
The narrative of the city of Tehran owes its existence to the many sources of inspiration within it: its public and private spaces, as well as its residents: strangers, acquaintances, family, and friends who became characters in the novel. Most artworks appearing in this layer are also real artworks or fictionalized versions of real artworks, whose titles and artists I’ve decided to not name for safety reasons. I am indebted to all for giving life to this world. The dream circles are hand drawn by Sara Dolatabadi, based on software-generated word clouds.
I am grateful for the intellectual and psychological support of many people, living and dead, who were by my side, physically or spiritually, through the long years of writing this book. Since I feel it’s best to refrain from naming the Iranian ones, I’ve decided to not name the others either. You know who you are. Thank you for being there. I couldn’t have done it without you.
I want to end by invoking Mir-Hossein Mousavi. He has honored his pledge to the people and their rights since 2009, and has, with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, and Mehdi Karroubi, been under house arrest since 2011. As Mousavi once said, “Hope is the seed of our identity.” This book is my share of a collective attempt to care for that seed, the seed that keeps growing in and with the body of Iran, even if I am far away from it.
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Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, a translator both into and out of Persian, Asymptote’s Iran editor-at-large, and an educator. She holds a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Denver, a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, and a master’s degree in translation studies from Azad University, Tehran. Her nonfiction, fiction, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, and she has several books of translation published in Iran. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.
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