The Colonel

by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

  Dowlatabadi’s first collection of stories appeared in 1969, followed by a novel Safar (The Trip) translated into German as Der Reise. Eight more novels appeared before the revolution in 1979. Dowlatabadi’s 1979 novel Ja-ye Khali-ye Soluch, translated into English as Missing Soluch, treated the decline of Iranian village life in the 1960s. This starkly beautiful novel looks at the trials of an impoverished woman and her children living in a remote village in Iran, after the unexplained disappearance of her husband, Soluch. Lyrical yet unsparing, the novel examines her life as she contends with the local political corruption, authoritarianism, and the poverty of the village. This landmark novel, which pioneered the use of the everyday language of the Iranian people, revolutionised Persian literature in its beautiful and daring portrayal of the life of a marginal woman and her struggle to survive.

  Dowlatabadi’s most ambitious work, completed in 1984, is a 10-volume, 3,000-page epic entitled Kelidar, an account of life in the village of that name in north-eastern Iran in the 1940s. The village people are impoverished Kurds, who were moved there in the 17th century by Shah Abbas to guard the frontier against incursions by the Turkmen raiding from the north. Neither two years in prison under the Shah’s regime, nor the upheavals of the revolution nor the death of his much-loved father could interrupt his tireless work on this magnum opus. Its publication was a sensation and catapulted Dowlatabadi to instant fame. He noted at the time: ‘I was totally exhausted and wanted nothing so much as to take a long rest, but I was compelled to go on writing.’ Kelidar has been translated into German.

  While he was writing Kelidar Dowlatabadi tried to shut himself off from events in the post-revolutionary outside world. His own politics, which evolved over time, could be loosely defined as leftward-leaning liberal nationalism. He became totally disillusioned by the outcome of the revolution that toppled the Shah: ‘I felt a great sense of unease within me, an inner compulsion that drove me to the brink of insanity.’ Then came the fateful night when everything came to a head and The Colonel was born:‘It was a dream, or rather a nightmare. I saw all the various characters, the colonel and his children and sensed the atmosphere before and after the revolution, as the whole recent history of Iran ran like a time-lapse film before my eyes. But when I awoke, the nightmare didn’t go away. I immediately began writing down what I’d seen, if only to relieve the terrible ferment I felt churning inside me.’

  Dowlatabadi now lives in Tehran. His children live in Europe and the USA. He travelled to Europe in 1990 and visited the United States in 1991, lecturing on literature and politics. In 2009 he visited Germany for the launch of the German translation of The Colonel.

  The place

  Readers who think of Iran as a dry country may be surprised by the constant rain in the narrative. The story unfolds in Rasht, the capital of Gilan province on the Caspian, where rice grows on the coastal plain and tea is cultivated on the foothills of the Alborz mountains, which separate the coast from the high, dry central Iranian plateau. The seaward side of the range is covered by heavy rain forest, which for centuries has given cover to bandits, rebels and dissidents. In 1920 Rasht was the base of the short-lived Socialist Republic of Gilan, under Kuchik Khan. Shortly after the revolution of 1979, the mountain forests gave cover to refugee Marxists. The time of the novel is placed towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1980 – 88).

  The historical background

  The Iranian Revolution of 1979 saw the end of the 2,500-year-old Persian monarchy. The hundreds of thousands who poured into the streets expected that the revolution would bring them better times, social justice, freedom and independence from foreign interference. The revolution was more than just a change of regime; it was also an act of revenge, the settling of a number of accounts that had been outstanding since the early years of the 20th century.

  The history of modern Iran begins with the constitutional revolution of 1906, where the fault lines between the royal court, conservative clerics, liberal clerics, western-oriented liberals, nationalists and Leftists first became apparent. In this struggle between progressive and reactionary forces, the royal court emerged as the winner. The Iranian Left was born in the oilfields of Russian Baku, where most of the labourers had come north from the Iranian province of Azerbaijan to find work. These labourers were very much part of the first Russian revolution of 1905.

  After World War I the British, seeing that the Bolsheviks were moving into Iran from Baku, tried to turn Iran into a protectorate, under a triumvirate of two princes and Vosuq ad-Dowleh, the brother of Ahmad Qavam, who were paid enormous sums of money to push a treaty agreeing to this through the Majlis, which never approved it. In 1921 an army colonel, Reza Khan, mounted a coup with Seyyid Zia, who became prime minister. Reza Khan became minister of war and in 1925 he became Shah. Reza Shah was an admirer first of Ataturk and later of Nazi Germany. He dragged the country into the modern age and promoted technological progress. His dictatorial reign stifled all opposition, particularly from the Muslim clergy, whom he saw as the biggest barrier to progress. He made women remove their traditional veils, while mullahs who displeased him had their turbans knocked off in the street and their beards forcibly shaved – acts of public humiliation that left deep scars and a wish for revenge.

  The Second World War brought a change. Allied forces from Great Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran, forced Reza Shah to abdicate and banished him to Mauritius. There were two reasons for this: the Allies felt that, although Iran was officially neutral, Reza Shah was too close to the Axis and secondly, Iran was needed as a transit route to send war material to Russia, to prevent the Nazi occupation of the oilfields in the Caucasus, and their possible advance into Iran and her oilfields. The old dictator, who had made great play of national independence, was succeeded by his young, inexperienced, largely apolitical and malleable son. For a short spell, there ensued a power vacuum, which gave various nationalist and leftist movements the chance to make their reappearance on the political stage.

  During this brief phase of Iranian history at the height of the cold war, liberals and democrats were able to operate freely. Under the prime ministership of Mohammad Mossadeq, the British-owned oilfields were nationalised, the British were forced to leave the country and the British dominance over Iran came to an end. The new Shah also decided to leave. Believing that Mossadeq was now under communist influence, in 1953 the CIA orchestrated a coup, which toppled his government and brought back the young Shah. This gave the United States the opportunity to fill the vacuum left by the British departure. The Americans, with the help of the Israelis, built up SAVAK, the highly efficient secret service, which devoted itself to the suppression of all opposition, particularly of the communist Tudeh party, which was supported by Moscow.

  The popular uprising that broke out in 1978 was initially inspired by the various leftist movements, but it was not long before the Islamic clergy under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini managed to position themselves at the forefront of the opposition movement and seize power after the overthrow of the Shah. Having been in the game much longer, and being far closer to the people than the European-educated student leftists, they were far more experienced in the art of crowd manipulation. Bridging the divide between Islam and secular socialism had been the preaching of Ali Shariati, who concocted a synthesis of the two in order to make socialism palatable to the traditionally-minded masses. He was killed in England in 1975. Some say that SAVAK killed him, while others say that it was the work of the Islamic hard-liners.

  Their aim was the complete Islamization of Iranian society and the dismantling of all the democratic-liberal reforms that had been enacted in the country in the last few months of the Shah’s reign. For the Islamists, this was the time to settle old scores: not only did they ruthlessly stamp out all other political movements and liquidate their representatives, they also instigated a thorough-going ‘cultural genocide,’ designed to expunge from Iran every last trace of the modern world and its institutions. The revo
lution was to be Islamic, not Iranian. The old, secular, nationalists compared this to the Arab invasion of Persia in the 7th century, which was so lamented in the Shahnameh, the great Persian epic written in the 11th century.

  Iran had never been a formal colony, but it had been caught between the Russian empire and the British empire in India until 1917. After the collapse of the Tsarist regime Iran had been run de facto by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). Even after the oil industry had been nationalised in the 1950s, foreign control continued in the form of US influence. American ‘advisers’ occupied positions of power in the administration and dictated the country’s political direction. The most telling taunt of Khomeini was that a junior American corporal who committed a crime in the street was, by virtue of being American, immune from prosecution. The wounds caused by the daily humiliations that the Iranian people had had to endure for almost a century at the hands of their foreign overlords ran deep. The one thing that united all the different factions during the revolution, aside from their opposition to the Shah’s régime, was their utter rejection of hated foreign rule. Soviet propaganda, which whitewashed out the history of the pre-1917 Russian domination of Iran, was able to play heavily on these emotions. It is one of the great tragedies of Iran’s history that the agenda of liberation, clearly expressed in the revolutionaries’ demands for freedom and independence, was later co-opted and twisted by the Islamists to legitimize their ideology. So it was that the revolution, far from sweeping away ossified and outmoded ideas, actually succeeded in breathing new life into them. The biggest tragedy of the Iranian left was that their final achievement after fifty years – the removal of the Shah – served only to clear the way for the Islamists, who in 1988 duly slaughtered them, something that the Shah had never managed to do. The Colonel is Dowlatabadi’s lament for this disaster, this living example of the law of unintended consequences. ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

  The Colonel

  The protagonist, the unnamed colonel, was an officer in the last Shah’s army. He was a soldier with principles, a patriot who had remained true to his oath to serve only the interests of his country, modelling himself on a historical figure, Colonel Mohammad Taqi Khan Pesyan, a legendary patriot, who resisted the corrupt central government in the period immediately after the First World War. His story is in the Glossary.

  The Persian title of the book is Kolonel. Pesyan, who received his military training in Europe, was always referred to as Kolonel, rather than the Persian Sarhang. the colonel of the title has been given the affectionate nickname of Kolonel, since everyone knows how much he admires, and has almost become, Pesyan.

  The principal characters

  the colonel’s five children represent the divergent political tendencies of the revolution. During the 1979 revolution and in the years that followed, almost every family in Iran was riven by such ideological disagreements.

  Amir, the eldest, represents the orthodox communist Tudeh party, which toed the Moscow politburo line and, for a few years after the revolution, collaborated closely with the new regime. Until, that is, its support was no longer needed and it had outlived its usefulness, whereupon they were executed in droves. Amir’s shortcomings not only reflect the demise of the Tudeh, but also the terminal decline of Iran’s intellectuals, who for the most part supported this movement. Their opportunistic collaboration to the new régime in the early days was a wholesale betrayal of their own ideals. Ever after, most of them were sunk in semi-catatonic nihilism.

  the colonel’s second son, Mohammad Taqi, is a member of the communist-leaning People’s Fedayan. Killed during the uprising, he is at first fêted as a fighter but later condemned as a ‘dissident,’ as were many thousands of non-Islamist anti-Shah resistance fighters who were liquidated by the new régime.

  The youngest son, Masoud, is a Khomeini supporter. He volunteers for the Iran – Iraq War (1980 – 88) and upon his death is celebrated as a ‘martyr.’

  Parvaneh, still just a child, is a member or at least a fellow-traveller of the People’s Mujahedin, an organisation whose roots were in the Islamist camp, but which was markedly more left-wing than the conservative clergy. During the Iran-Iraq war they took the Iraqi side and established themselves in a military base at Camp Ashraf across the border. Condemned as traitors to their country by many, and in deep trouble with the new Iraqi government, they are today busy reinventing themselves as friends of the west.

  The People’s Mujahedin and the People’s Fedayan, the two underground groups that took up arms against the Shah’s regime and also played a leading part in the revolution, were among the first organisations to be targeted and eradicated by the new theocracy. They kept up resistance for a while, but the régime had the masses on its side. In 1988 huge numbers of leftists were rounded up and executed, something that the Shah, even when SAVAK was at its most savage, never did. The revolution ate its own children as, in Persian legend, Rostam killed his son Sohrab.

  Farzaneh, the colonel’s elder daughter, is married to Qorbani Hajjaj, who encapsulates the world of deceit and specious dogma. the colonel’s son-in-law is one of those people who always manage to come out on top, whichever way the wind is blowing. Such hirelings will shamelessly cheerlead for whoever happens to be in power, and will do whatever is required to keep themselves in favour. Farzaneh has submitted to this line, even though it is now beginning to frighten her.

  Equally adaptable and lacking in principles is the secret policeman, Khezr Javid, whose personal inadequacies drove him into the arms of SAVAK. He was happy to interrogate and torture any number of dissidents under the Shah, and yet had no scruples about throwing in his lot with the new régime to keep his job. Nobody knows for certain how many Savakis, and informers, there were under the Shah, but there were thousands of them, with agents in every government organisation and in private companies. They created an atmosphere of fear and distrust, even within families. The senior ones were educated and urbane, while the torturers were recruited from the unwanted children born in the official brothels.

  What makes this novel unique in modern Persian literature is its directness. The author spares nothing and no-one, and flies in the face of all kinds of literary, moral and social taboos, even those that are deemed sacrosanct in Islamic culture. By doing so, he highlights the deep-seated contradictions that have condemned a whole society to failure.

  the colonel is a liberal who has taught his children to think for themselves and go their own way, with the result that they end up killed. At the same time, hidebound by conventional morality, he murders his wife because she has impugned his honour by having affairs. This contradiction between the old and new values is the essential Iranian tension today. Iran is a society based on family loyalties yet, after the Islamists seized power, they tried to turn the whole country into a nation of spies: the Supreme Leader demanded that everyone should keep a close eye out among their family and neighbours for anyone who stepped out of line or transgressed against the precepts of shari’a law. On television, he publicly proclaimed a woman who had betrayed her own child as ‘Mother of the Year.’ The methods of Stalin had been visited upon the leftists who had brought about the revolution.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted for help with the translation and with the historical references to a number of Iranian and British friends and colleagues. I am also indebted to Peter Lewis for his tireless collaboration and editing. By the nature of the language, much has inevitably been lost in translation, but I hope that sufficient poetry remains to do justice to the power and feeling of the original.

  Tom Patterdale

  1 Jangal [jungle] means ‘forest’. Kuchik means ‘little’. There is an allusion here to Kuchik Khan, a famous leader of a revolutionary movement based in the forests of the Caspian coast after WWI, known as the Jangali movement.

  2 These ‘hejlehs’ – bridal chambers – are garishly illuminated shrines, erected for forty days at street corners to honour young men who have die
d unmarried and unfulfilled. During the Iran-Iraq war almost every street in the poorer parts of town had a hejleh.

  3 There is a play on words with the name of Parvaneh’s husband. Qorbani also means ‘sacrificial sheep’. Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusef was a draconian 8th century Arab governor, responsible for many deaths, particularly of thousands of pilgrims to Mecca. Written in Persian, Hajjaj can also be read as Hojjaj, pilgrims to Mecca. ‘Qorbani Hajjaj’ can be read as a sheep tied up for sacrifice by a returning pilgrim. Such a sheep would naturally be worried by what is about to happen to it.

  4 Like the poisoned shirt given to Hercules unwittingly by his wife, which killed him.

  5 Heroes of the Shahnameh: Iradj, Salm and Tur are sons of King Fereydoun, who divides up the known world between them. Incited by Salm, Tur kills Iradj. Manuchehr, the son of Iradj, then kills Salm and Tur in revenge.

  6 The great reformer and educator in the reign of Naser ud-Din Shah, assassinated by the Shah’s order in 1852.

  7 The prophet Khezr appears in various forms to intervene to rescue those in distress. He drank from the fountain of life to attain immortality. Here, he represents the universal secret policeman, needed by all governments of whatever hue, who survives all political changes. Javid – immortal – is also a name in Persian.