Abstract
I should say at the outset that I write this review as someone who participated in the war that is the topic of this volume. My perspective is necessarily filtered by that experience. Some might say my experience allows me to be objective. Others might see it differently. I shall do my best to do justice to the work before me and, by extension, to the readers and to this professional obligation.
Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) was one of the most devastating and bloodiest conflicts in recent history. Moments of Silence is an edited collection on this subject based on papers presented at a conference entitled, “Moments of Silence: The Authentic Literary and Artistic Narratives of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988),” held at New York University in Abu Dhabi in March 2011. The book is divided into four sections, addressing various topics under the following section titles: (i) transnational contexts—interconnected histories, geographies, and languages; (ii) theorizing cultural expressions of war; (iii) war through visual representations; and (iv) literary narratives of war. To a large extent, the book is an attempt to address the discourse of “the sacred defense,” which is the name given to the discourse of the state on this war, propagated through various political venues and state-sponsored cultural productions.
Chapter 1 discusses narratives of borders by focusing on two films, The Night Bus and the widely examined Bashu, the Little Stranger. Although the discussion is brief, the larger point the chapter makes is that such narratives reveal that the internal borders within a nation (e.g., linguistic, ethnic, identities) are just as important as the borders along which the two countries are engaged in a war. Chapter 2, titled “Lost Homelands, Imaginary Returns: The Exilic Literature of Iranian and Iraqi Jews,” is a theoretically informed and engaging discussion of books written by authors whose perspective on war is grounded in their exilic geographies (e.g., Nissim Rejvan, Shimon Ballas, Roya Hakakian, Marjan Satrapi). Written by always-insightful Ella Shohat, this chapter shows how these books by authors in exile function as a return vehicle to a lost homeland in complicated ways. More important, she meticulously examines what it means for these authors to write in a language that is not their first (French, Hebrew, and English), and how by communicating “a sense of fragmentation and dislocation, the linguistic medium itself becomes both metonym and metaphor for a highly fraught relation to national and regional belonging” (p. 21).
Chapter 3 is a conceptually rich examination of a shift in the discourse on sacred defense cinema and the films that go beyond its mantle. Focusing on Bashu, the Little Stranger, the author demonstrates the extent to which the film is subversive to the sacred defense projects: While the narratives of the sacred defense cinema seek to purge the trauma of war (or its “traumatic irresolution”) by valorizing the sacrifice of the father/husband figure, in Bashu, “this redemption instead comes from a reconstitution of the family in terms that radically rethink the boundaries of this institution” (p. 83). The film overall engages in what the author characterizes as “indirect contestation of traumatic memory as defined by the sacred defense field” (p. 71). While Chapter 4 is basically a description of some of the narratives of war (poetry, novels, and films) that fit comfortably within the parameters of the sacred defense field, written by Iranian veterans of that war, Chapter 5 offers an analysis of narratives of Iraqi prisoners of war captured during the war, based on the examination of testimonies and depositions taken by Ba‘th party interrogators of returnees after the war. As the author argues, the complex relationships and hierarchies among these soldiers and their disposition toward their captors, reflected in their narratives, paint a picture that goes beyond depicting a simple dichotomy of betrayal or heroic resistance and shows how postwar domestic political dynamics of Iraq absorbed these narratives.
Chapter 6 attempts to construct a comparative framework between Persian and Arabic war narratives of “home front.” After discussing “war cultures” (state’s discourses of war) in Iran and Iraq, the author discusses a few examples of postwar fiction in both countries. Although the works of the war years are not examined, some of them laid the groundwork, the author argues, for fiction that challenges the official narratives of the war. In both Iran and Iraq, “from writers who ignore the official narrative to those who have chosen to contest it, fiction has clearly emerged as a field that seeks to put forth various counternarratives of the conflict” (p. 125). Chapter 7 is a musing on language, writing and violence in general, aesthetics and war in general, and on the fraught relationship between these. Except for brief references to memoires of Iranian writers in the West (Shirin Ebadi and Marjan Satrapi), the chapter makes its statements without references to Iran-Iraq war.
Chapters 8 and 9 address visual representations of the war, though only from Iran. While the former is devoted to the interesting but well-covered ground of graphic arts during the war (e.g., posters, commemorative art, murals) examining themes of martyrdom, sacrifice, and other elements said to be particular to Shiite culture in Iran, the latter is devoted to a descriptive overview of Iranian war films made during the war. Although Chapter 9 sets out to address the aesthetic developments of the cinema of the sacred defense, it doesn’t really address aesthetics in any meaningful way. However, it is an informative chapter with rich details on the institutional formations and formalization of state intervention in the cinematic activities in the 1980s (e.g., festivals) as well as the role of policymakers (e.g., Mohammad Khatami) and notable filmmakers who had their start in this context (e.g., Ebrahim Hatamikia).
The last three chapters cover literary narratives of war. Chapter 10 deals with the complex topic of war in the Kurdish literature, especially as it relates to the issues of nationalism, struggle for independence, statehood, and glorification of resistance and associated themes. Chapter 11, which was previously published as a journal article, is a short but insightful analysis of concerns about translation, language, and national identity in the 1980s. Any relationship this analysis might have to the war or narratives of war is tenuous at best. In fact, the only time the phrase “Iran-Iraq war” is mentioned in the article is when the author states, in an endnote, that the order of the countries in that phrase is ideologically determined. A more accurate characterization of the context of this interesting linguistic and translational discussion is postrevolution Iran, of which Iraq-Iran war (to use an alternative ordering of the countries in the phrase!) is a part. The last chapter is a reflection on Persian fiction on the topic of the war and the problems associated with state-sponsored literary productions. It seeks to show how a certain strand of modernist Persian fiction outside the government-sponsored narratives offers an alternative engagement with the topic of war by deploying silence as a strategic and aesthetic choice. The volume ends with five short translated literary texts (poetry, prose, and short stories) read at the conference, published as appendices to the book.
Given the scope of the everlasting trauma and devastation this war brought upon so many, any new scholarship that addresses the topic is a welcome development. This book has much to offer, some of which I have already mentioned. As stated previously, one of the book’s major preoccupation is the discourse of “the sacred defense.” By not including that phrase in the title for the book, the editors may have missed an opportunity to give the (potential) readers a more appropriate orientation to the book. Instead, they chose to frame the materials in terms of the “authenticity” of that discourse and how it may have led some writers to place the war in the background or leave it out altogether, which creates what they call “moments of silence.” I do not find this framing convincing and the editors seem to have reservations about “authenticity” when they say, “[t]he subtitle of this volume, and the conference that preceded it, may be read as an implication that these narratives—these and not those narratives of governmental and partisan agenda—are, unequivocally, the authentic ones.” The contributors, the editors claim, “question the notion of authenticity” (p. 3). I am not sure they do, and, fortunately, it is not their project. Subjecting a discourse to critical scrutiny is not necessarily a project in questioning “authenticity,” how ever that is defined. What seems to me to be the overall logic of these essays is to deny the state’s propaganda (narratives) and unearth other narratives and representations. How is authenticity useful when we are talking about representation insofar as “truth” itself is a representation?
There is no denying the state has produced its own narratives and has engaged in efforts to exclude other voices. However, the danger here is bestowing exceptionalism on the Islamic Republic, a tendency of much scholarship in English about the Iranian state. All states, especially the ones that are not fully democratic, attempt to establish their own dominant narratives. But is the state successful in controlling all narratives? Judging from the insights of this volume, evidently not. This is a problem of focusing on the state at the expense of cultural practices and how individuals live with these restrictions, how they may circumvent them, and how they “make do” with what they have. Focusing on texts and textual analysis is fine, but leaving out the lived experience, or reading strategies or what people do with these narratives is not. Literary scholars know that better than anybody else. The counternarratives this volume points to are but one example of what I have in mind. If I were to pick on the issue of “authenticity,” I would interrogate it for its role in giving us Iranian expats or immigrants (“native informants”), a voice that is viewed as authentic “cultural translators” of Iranian culture, implicating us in geopolitics of Iran and appealing to the sensibility of Western readers and policymakers.
My space is limited, so I will finish with one observation on an anecdote I have seen in writings about this war, implicating the type of authority invested in us as we write about Iran. I have for long seen this reference to officials allegedly placing in combat zone “glowing men” on “white horses” (drawing from religious iconography) or giving the young volunteers a “plastic key” to heaven in order to encourage or deceive them to fight. It is repeated in this volume in several places. I will address it based on my own experience. I was invited to write this review by one of my colleagues who is an Executive Editor of this journal, and I did want not turn him down.
I was drafted after high school and served in the conscript army of Iran for two years (1982-1984). I was in training for 3 months and then sent to combat. I was an infantryman and served in the remnants of what used to be, I was told, the Shah’s most prized military units, Gard-e Javidan (which was reconstituted as lashkar 21 hamzeh after the revolution). This is how I saw it up close.
I saw no glowing men. I saw no one on a horseback, I didn’t see one damn horse the entire time I was there. No one gave me keys to heaven (plastic, gold, or whatever). No one issued any copies of Quran to me. I saw no one wearing a “green shawl” or someone driving around in batmobile. No one. I was given, however, plenty of free cheap Iranian cigarettes (Bahman and Azadi, they were Iranian brands). Despite what you may have read (p. 123), when I was handed my dog tag, no one encouraged me to die. I was told, instead, “don’t get dead.” When and where I served, if someone were to tell us that we were going to go to heaven or meet up with “72 virgins” later if we die, or some such, we would have laughed at them or told them to fuck off. No one person around me in any capacity seemed capable of saying or taking such lines seriously. In fact, I never heard of such things until I read about them when I moved to the United States to attend college.
Now, you might say, but this is the army and not the volunteer forces such as Revolutionary Guard or the Basiji units. I did run into them too, quite often. We paired up with them during some offensives (amalyeeyat). I hitched rides with them several times and got help from them when I was in a ditch here or there. They probably saved my life more than once. I interacted with some of them, but I cannot speak for them, or all of them. Not one of them seemed eager to die. Not one of them seemed stupid enough to be deceived by a glowing man, a white horse, or a plastic key. Not even one. If anyone’s voice is silenced, it is theirs. I am not talking about Basijis of today, I am talking about the ones who volunteered to fight at that time, the ones who have become a cliché in any writings about that war or postrevolution Iran. I know these young men not from the narratives of journalists, or policymakers or Iranian expats. In my experience and fading memory, they were far more intelligent and aware of what they were doing than what we read about them. The reality is always far more complicated and interesting than the narratives others offer themselves or their publics. Their story, much like the story of this war from the grunt’s point of view, is yet to be told.