درباره ی بیگانه

وقتی که از محدوده‌ی تغییرات استاندارد نرمال جامعه خارج می شوی و به سمت حاشیه های منحنی می روی جامعه تحملت نمی کند. یا تبعیدت می کند یا حذفت. سعی تو برای ارتباط برقرار کردن با محدوده‌ی نرمال بیهوده است، آنها تو را نمی خواهند چون به آنها باور نداری. برای آنها تفاوت تو به این معنی است که تو غریبه ای و بیگانه و همین کافی است که جامعه را با تو دشمن کند. آنها تفاوت های تو را نه تنها ارزش نمی دانند بلکه ضد ارزشی می دانند که می خواهد ساختار آن را به هم بزند. ساختار عرفی که برایش نرمال است و همین نرمال بودن آن را مقدس کرده است.  

مهم نیست که غیرطبیعی بودن تو یک ارزش نامیده شود یا نه. مهم این است که غیر طبیعی است و چیزی که غیر طبیعی است، محکوم است. زمانی که بخواهد ارزش های جامعه را تهدید کند غیر طبیعی می شود و محکوم.  

دروغ نگفتن، اندیشیدن و عشق ورزیدن دو نمونه اند.

Don't get out too soon!

این رو امروز از یه مصاحبه با یه نویسنده افغانی کانادایی از رادیو شنیدم و بعد روی نت تونستم پیداش کنم. زیباست و واقعی.

One day I asked him why he hadn’t left; why he had stuck it through. He said something I ended up quoting in Wanting Mor. He said that when you want to make a clay pot strong, you put it in the fire. You cannot take the pot out of the fire too soon, or the pot will crack and be useless. He said that God made Adam out of clay, and we are the children of Adam. When we go through our hard times, that is like our firing. We have to endure it, and not take ourselves out of the fire too soon, or we will crack. We have to trust in God that He will take us out when the time is right. 

Source -Interview with author Rukhsana Khan 

درباره‌ی گلشیری!

این رو باید ببینی، باید بشنوی!

How to read a novel?

  Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked on to it. Let's pick a scene to demonstrate this point. Please turn to page 125. You will remember Gatsby is visiting Daisy and Tom Buchanan's house for the first time. Mr. Bahri, could you please read the few lines beginning with "Who wants to..."? "Who wants to go to town?" demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby's eyes floated toward her. "Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."
    Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.
    "You always look so cool," she repeated.
    She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago.
    On one level, Daisy is simply telling Gatsby he looks cool and Fitzgerald is telling us that she still loves him, but he doesn't want to just say so. He wants to put us there in the room. Let's look at what he's done to give this scene the texture of a real experience. First he creates a tension between Gatsby and Daisy, and then he complicates it with Tom's sudden insight into their relationship. This moment, suspended in mid-air, is far more effective than if Nick had simply reported that Daisy tried to tell Gatsby that she loved him.
    "Yes," cut in Mr. Farzan, "because he is in love with the money and not with Daisy. She is only a symbol."
    No, she is Daisy, and he is in love with her. There is money too, but that is not all; that is not even the point. Fitzgerald does not tell you-he takes you inside the room and re-creates the sensual experience of that hot summer day so many decades ago, and we, the readers, draw our breath along with Tom as we realize what has just happened between Gatsby and Daisy.
    "But what use is love in this world we live in?" said a voice from the back of the room.
    "What kind of a world do you think is suitable for love?" I asked.
    Mr. Nyazi's hand darted up. "We don't have time for love right now," he said. "We are committed to a higher, more sacred love."
    Zarrin turned around and said sardonically, "Why else do you fight a revolution?"
    Mr. Nyazi turned very red, bowed his head and after a short pause took up his pen and started to write furiously.
    In retrospect it appears strange to me only now, as I write about it, that as I was standing there in that classroom talking about the American dream, we could hear from outside, beneath the window, the loudspeakers broadcasting songs whose refrain was "Marg bar Amrika!"-"Death to America!"
    A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

American Dream

I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past-we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.    I told them that although the novel was specifically about Gatsby and the American dream, its author wanted it to transcend its own time and place. I read to them Fitzgerald's favorite passage from Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," about how the artist "appeals to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain... and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity-the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
    I tried to explain to my students that Mike Gold and F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about the same subject: dreams or, more specifically, the American dream. What Gold had only dreamed of had been realized in this faraway country, now with an alien name, the Islamic Republic of Iran. "The old ideals must die..." he wrote. "Let us fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution. For out of our death shall arise glories." Such sentences could have come out of any newspaper in Iran. The revolution Gold desired was a Marxist one and ours was Islamic, but they had a great deal in common, in that they were both ideological and totalitarian. The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.

Raeding Lolita in Tehran

Fairy Tale

After our first discussion of Lolita, I went to bed excited, thinking about Mitra's question. Why did Lolita or Madame Bovary fill us with so much joy? Was there something wrong with these novels, or with us?-were Flaubert and Nabokov unfeeling brutes? By the next Thursday, I had formulated my thoughts and could not wait to share them with the class.
    Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it. Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Illegal Dream

Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away. In one, perhaps my own, the dreamer wanted to run but she couldn't: she was rooted to the ground, right outside her front door. She could not turn around, open the door and hide inside. The only one among us who claimed she had never experienced such fear was Nassrin. "I was always afraid of having to lie. You know what they say: to thine own self be true and all that. I believed in that sort of thing," she said with a shrug. "But I have improved," she added as an afterthought. Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.
    In Invitation to a Beheading, on the wall of Cincinnatus C.'s jail, which is decorated like a third-rate hotel, there are certain instructions for the prisoners, such as: "A prisoner's meekness is a prison's pride." Rule number six, one that lies at the heart of the novel, is: "It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape." .

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Invitation to a Beheading

   

    Invitation to a Beheading begins with the announcement that its fragile hero, Cincinnatus C., has been sentenced to death for the crime of "gnostic turpitude": in a place where all citizens are required to be transparent, he is opaque. The principal characteristic of this world is its arbitrariness; the condemned man's only privilege is to know the time of his death-but the executioners keep even this from him, turning every day into a day of execution. As the story unfolds, the reader discovers with increasing discomfort the artificial texture of this strange place. The moon from the window is fake; so is the spider in the corner, which, according to convention, must become the prisoner's faithful companion. The director of the jail, the jailer and the defense lawyer are all the same man, and keep changing places. The most important character, the executioner, is first introduced to the prisoner under another name and as a fellow prisoner: M'sieur Pierre. The executioner and the condemned man must learn to love each other and cooperate in the act of execution, which will be celebrated in a gaudy feast. In this staged world, Cincinnatus's only window to another universe is his writing.
    The world of the novel is one of empty rituals. Every act is bereft of substance and significance, and even death becomes a spectacle for which the good citizens buy tickets. It is only through these empty rituals that brutality becomes possible. In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality. Nabokov had a special Russian term for this: poshlust.
    Poshlust, Nabokov explains, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." Yes, there are many examples you can bring from everyday life, from the politicians' sugary speeches to certain writers' proclamations to chickens. Chickens? You know, the ones the street vendors sell nowadays-if you lived in Tehran, you couldn't possibly miss them. The ones they dip in paint-shocking pink, brilliant red or turquoise blue-in order to make them more attractive. Or the plastic flowers, the bright pink-and-blue artificial gladiolas carted out at the university both for mourning and for celebration.
    What Nabokov creates for us in Invitation to a Beheading is not the actual physical pain and torture of a totalitarian regime but the nightmarish quality of living in an atmosphere of perpetual dread. Cincinnatus C. is frail, he is passive, he is a hero without knowing or acknowledging it: he fights with his instincts, and his acts of writing are his means of escape. He is a hero because he refuses to become like all the rest.
    Unlike in other utopian novels, the forces of evil here are not omnipotent; Nabokov shows us their frailty as well. They are ridiculous and they can be defeated, and this does not lessen the tragedy-the waste. Invitation to a Beheading is written from the point of view of the victim, one who ultimately sees the absurd sham of his persecutors and who must retreat into himself in order to survive.
    Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the cruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive. We also instinctively recognized poshlust-not just in others, but in ourselves. This was one reason that art and literature became so essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity. What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.
    We formed a special bond with Nabokov despite the difficulty of his prose. This went deeper than our identification with his themes. His novels are shaped around invisible trapdoors, sudden gaps that constantly pull the carpet from under the reader's feet. They are filled with mistrust of what we call everyday reality, an acute sense of that reality's fickleness and frailty. There was something, both in his fiction and in his life, that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away. I think that was what drove me to create the class. My main link with the outside world had been the university, and now that I had severed that link, there on the brink of the void, I could invent the violin or be devoured by the void.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

An unfinished miniature

Nassirn came in next. She had brought two boxes of nougats: presented from Isfahan, she declared. She was dresses in her unusual uniform- navy robe, navy scarf and black heelless shoes. When I had last seen her in class, she was wearing a huge black chador, revealing only the oval of her face and two restless hands, which, when she was not writing or doodling, were constantly in motion, as if trying to escape the confines of the thick black cloth. More recently, she had exchanged the chador for long, shapeless robes in navy, black or dark brown, with thick matching scarves that hid her hair and framed her face. She had a small, pale face, skin so transparent you could count the veins, full eyebrows, long ashes, lively eyes (brown), a small straight nose and an angry mouth: an unfinished miniature by some master who had suddenly been called away from his job and left the meticulously drawn face imprisoned in a careless splash of dark color.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

کار صواب

صبح‏ است ساقیا قدحی پر شراب کن

دور فلک درنگ ندارد شتاب کن

زان پیشتر که عالم فانی شود خراب

ما را ز جام باده‌ی گلگون خراب کن

خورشید می ز مشرق ساغر طلوع کرد

گر برگ عیش می‌طلبی ترک خواب کن

روزی که چرخ از گل ما کوزه‌ها کند

زنهار کاسه‌ی سر ما پر شراب کن

ما مرد زهد و توبه و طامات نیستیم

با ما به جام باده‌ی صافی خطاب کن

کار صواب باده‌پرستی‏ است حافظا

برخیز و عزم جزم به کار صواب کن