An introduction to this series:
Yeki bood, yeki nabood: this is what traditionally begins the telling of Iranian folklores, a prelude to each story meaning “there was someone, there was no one”. The words originate from Iranian writer Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh’s short-story collection
of the same title, copies of which were publicly burned by the Iranian Islamic clergy for its reflections on the social and political conditions of Iran. One-hundred-and-two years later, yeki bood, yeki nabood are still the words uttered by Iranians before telling
stories, a gentle introduction into a world suspended in no specific time or place. One-hundred-and-two years later, the words that follow can be just as polarising.
For my minor thesis, I worked on invoking the words yeki bood yeki naood through fiction writing, addressing the question, ‘how can one be Iranian?’. In answering, I depicted a family: Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, and called their voices forth to speak alongside mine. This family structure is a mirror of my own, and the choice to base my writing on a fictionalised imagination of what for me is reality is a play on the Western demand for “authenticity” in Eastern art. The result that I share with you now is a fragmented work, rooted not in time, place, or person, but the vatan: ‘the womb whence one had been born’ (from Najmabadi).
I sought to write into this fragmentation, sketching out ways in which Iranians are able to be Iranian and, rather than remain wholly bound by our ethnicity alone. What I have created is not a new response, but a continuation, manifesting as a re-writing of my own question, seeking not to pin down a singular answer to ‘how can one be Iranian?’, but rather allowing the multiplicity of possibilities in asking, ‘how can one not?’. It is not my words, my experiences, my truths, my fictions alone that can form an adequate response, and it is precisely for this reason that I borrowed from the Farsi vocabulary of my ancestors to tell these stories, and begin now with a found poem constructed from the works of renowned Iranian writers below. Yeki bood, yeki nabood...
Prologue
Unknown story,
beloved wound –
suspended in history and
recurring dreams of freedom.
Brother, whisper.
Ask no questions of the moon, the mirror.
The carnivorous beating hands of God
buried the strangers you love
under a walnut tree;
intoxicated by heaven’s colourless perfume,
hatred overflowing from
cup to cup ceaselessly.
Thou’ spoke,
shaking, laughing, begging for answers:
‘whose prophets remain?
what saviour, sage, sultan?’
Silence hung,
the shade of a gravestone looming.
Reverberations in the alleyways said,
‘go’.
‘Go?’
‘Go,
take your heartsick to the meadows of exile,
where children sing and howl
with the alphabet of innocence;
where in the absence of understanding,
in the anguish of desolation,
life must return.’
Behold, traveller:
worlds waiting,
opening.
I must write now
of my own sacred prophecy.
Between pages,
I demand both midnight and sun.
My kin, my blood with me,
I feel the ghost of your roots
everywhere,
and I search for a nowhere,
that is Home.
Father
There was a scratch in my throat and it was hard to not dream of the sweet tea from home. A nabat with saffron, made sweeter when stirred in by my madar’s hand. But I was no longer a child, and there were sugar cubes in the cabinet, a thermos by the table outside where the boys were playing cards. Still, when Soheil came in, knocking the back of his hand against my foot to say jokingly, akhe, bache, you don’t feel good? even the pretence of softness was a comfort I yearned to curl into. Was this adulthood? The abandonment of tender looks and a wet washcloth draped over the fevered forehead? I felt queasy at the thought of it, that you could be only loved fully like that for some years, then seemingly not at all. All the love and care had to come from inside of you, somehow, self-sustaining like your own blood and marrow. I pictured going home, and my gaze betraying me. Confessing to my family that I’d changed and crossed over to that other kind of love; the type that went unsaid, unshown, uncertain. What torture. Better hatred, I thought, than love that wore the sheen of indifference. Better fear.
With my face pressing hard into the pillow (as if to turn away from the thought and avoid it from coming true) I felt stupid in an inconsequential way, like a fly that knows nothing but its own noise and spends hours turning in circles around itself. I yearned for my textbooks, my black overcoat, the neighbourhood stray cat. The rinds of an orange peeled slowly, a blank, lined page – things small and irrelevant on any objective scale, that appeared suddenly so integral to my selfhood.
To conceive of both realities in which I’d existed presented itself like an impossible task. It asked to split not only the self into two, but the universe. As though another me was at home, and I the counterpart who in equal materiality laid in the bed here. Did the other self know about me? How could this be true when I never perceived, in any period past, the impression of there ever being anything more than the singular character I was in that moment?
The rules of this universe felt too shaky to grasp. I thought about the theory of life coming to be by the rapid expansion of a few atoms, that were still multiplying, swelling, reaching out to their fate of infinitely collapsing and expanding. The futility of such an existence could make you cry, the way it violated all the logic of survival to the point of absurdity. Yet somehow this made the theory more acceptable, a near comfort even, to find confirmation that life really was this contradictory and inconsistent, made of endings and beginnings that made little sense. The self bounding nonetheless at full speed into some unseeable, unlit, inescapable corner.
Whatever particles that previously expanded had already collapsed for this world to exist, meaning that alternate version of me I longed to return to had since burned into the place of the truly inaccessible: the past. I was then in fact, without ever intending to, becoming irrevocably changed.
I rubbed my eyes, and in the colours that appeared (flashes of stark white, pistachio green, specks of crimson) I saw that maybe it was also true that I could give myself things that weren’t given; because the only colours we saw here evoked no feeling, no flavour. They worked hard in their pigment to mimic only the plains. A canvas muted; made of dust and wood and sunburnt grass - the colour palette of a gag. It reminded me of the 16th century European traders who had smuggled over Egyptian mummies to crush for brown paint pigment. The shade had been uncreatively dubbed as ‘mummy brown’, and somehow that felt like the worst part; the apathetic transparency in calling a thing exactly what it was. ‘Mummy brown’ was the undoing of that which was sacred, a death without poetry, as if one could be spared the same fate by varnishing the mere image of themselves, using the very essence of another – gag indeed.
In a moment of forgetting, rare and merciful as they were, I was struck by the desire to reimagine the plains when I was back home again. To transform them through new hues, Monet-esque, dappling the hills in a blurry softness with my oils that took days to dry. But the thought of this alone, that there would ever be a ‘back’, and an ‘again’ and days passing in the way they ever did before, returned me into the orbit of the absurd. It was no longer reassuring, the truth didn’t matter. I didn’t want to play by the non-rules of this fourth dimension, where life could go in all the directions you knew, up, down, left, right, back, forward, and another you couldn’t even visualise, that you couldn’t even see coming. I wanted a straight line. I wanted ease. I wanted the sky to not haunt me. And it hurt most of all, irrelevantly and stupidly, to wonder if I’d remember how to hold a brush, loosely, without desperation.
Outside, the game was over. It wasn’t clear who’d won. Mehdi had the qelyoon at his lips, inhaling the bubbles gurgling wildly in the vase. The cards lay face up by the dates used as bets, though they were always shared in the end anyway. I split one open and put both halves on my tongue with a sip of tea before chewing. They weren’t the good kind, with smooth, thin skin that peeled away with a bite. Instead, they were the type that hardened around your teeth, clinging, desperate to not part from your cheeks to the deep abyss of the core.
Then words came addressed to me through a vapour, Mehdi saying with a burnt pomegranate breath, Asad agha, we thought you’d gone Rohan on us. With this we laughed, because here, everything was funny. Even the guy who’d arrived writhing and moaning from heroin withdrawals. That glassy gaze and those limp arms that said maybe I won’t even make it long enough to really die. There wasn’t enough pity to give him and him alone, all used up on ourselves and whoever we loved without us and the open air that had to be full of smoke. We watched him like a premonition, thrashing in and out of the arms of the loneliest void. All of us wondering, was that what it would it be like? Like rustling sheets in the dark and the held breath? Like solitude in a way that was complete, all parts of the soul accounted for, as well as the vacant spots of what could have been? We wished, without sound or sigh or shiver, to not know, not yet.
But here, something else. A different type of green we clung to, eyeing the pills scattered more heavy-handedly than the dates (like a vial around the neck), an envy that when you’re far from reality, you get to believe in anything. Because eventually the medics had hooked Rohan up to saline with a morphine sticker stuck on it, and his eyes squinted open enough to read it, to unfurl his eyebrows and sleep through the night for the first time in weeks without clawing at his own skin. And when he woke and felt shame, we knew he was human again.
Someone turned the radio dial, and Shahram Shabpareh’s voice came through, singing:
to ye gorgi
man ye bare
man too khabo roya dombalat gashtam
to ye koohiyo
man dare
to ye gorgi
man ye bare
you are a wolf
and I am a lamb
I looked for you in dreams and dreams…
you are a mountain
and I am a valley
you are a wolf
and I am a lamb.
As always with Shabpareh, his weighty lyrics played against a wild and joyful tune, like he almost didn’t know what he was saying.
Soheil howled, Amir turned the song up and began clicking in a beshkan, the thwack of his fingers following the rhythm. Masoud appeared with his camera, his voice coming a second before the flash so when we looked the photo was already taken. The qelyoon, the tea, the cards, the dates, us. In some universe, I thought, maybe sunset never comes, and this moment lasts forever. I didn’t know if that’s what I wanted, or if the fear of infinite endings and beginnings simply outweighed the finality of the eternal.
But in the middle of a laugh, again it felt so small, the distance between the joy and the terror. I wondered if it was possible to collapse in on myself right then. To cease to exist in an atomical way. Both realities running into me like two hands colliding, I the trapped air between them. It was a birth year called on TV and the dizzying scent of jasmine. It was a plane overhead and sunflower seeds between my teeth. It was a bus ride, it was a bunk bed, it was never being seven years old again. It was the groan of an animal unseen, the wolf, the lamb, it was the beast that is me.
And then, when we heard a yell, it was an out breath caught in the back of the throat. Our hands gripped around our guns from the place between our legs, mottled in the drops of tea lost between cup and lip, scanning across the plains in unison, a pack on the scent. I am the wolf, I am the wolf, repeating.
But our eyes were to land not on a target but the same relief: Masoud emerging from the darkroom, his arms pushing Nader back and out with a growing limpness that came with the remembering; that we were here, that it was this. Nader, his palms up in defeat, his expression all remorse and sorrow, moving to help Masoud dump the film washed white with his opening of the darkroom door.
Shabpereh’s voice returned, singing, I looked for you in dreams and dreams. Who did I look for in dreams if not myself? Would I find him here, some version that would fail to meet me elsewhere? I took another date and split it open, submitting to the hardening, submitting to the abyss.
"Better hatred, I thought, than love that wore the sheen of indifference." just wow-- hooked on this story, devouring each part slowly!
the first two lines alone wiped me out... at a loss for words, simply - i eagerly await the next parts <3