Portrait of the Iranian writer Shahriar Mandanipour: Living with the scars of a superfluous war

‘This is the land of a thousand impossibilities’, says Shahriar Mandanipour after a simple Persian dinner in an open air restaurant in a district around Shiraz, his favourite city in Iran. The river is divided into little canals running along the tables of the restaurant, while nourishing big surrounding trees cast their shadows over the day and the kebab dinner. Later that evening when we visit a desolate amusement park with his wife and son, he adds: ‘Actually I live here against my will.’ The brightly coloured lights and iron toy machines didn’t just reflect his words. They were in fact illustrating their despair.

Shahriar Mandanipour, one of the most influential contemporary writers of Iran has suited the action to the despair by emigrating to the United States. That’s where he wrote ‘Censoring an Iranian Love Story’, his first novel which was translated into English and soon after into Dutch. At a literary festival in Winternachten in The Hague we summarized all of his various travels and meetings. But when I raise the fact that his new living place has also brought forth a new writer, he replicates: ‘The obscure and maybe even horrible writer still wanders in my mind.’

Shahriar Mandanipour’s head is full of demons. ‘Sometimes I’d like to write a clear and beautiful story which moves readers because of the beauty of its language or the relationships between characters. But I don’t seem to manage. I’ve seen too many terrible things in my country which I carry around like scars in my mind.  I’m not even sure if I want to get rid of them. I’d rather tell my own, damaged story’. During the long conversations we had in Shiraz, Shahriar summarized his stories which were only published in Persian. A man who likes to live in harmony with nature finds one evening the body of a stranger lying in his bed. Three intellectuals want to safe some people from the water after a flood has taken place. Very soon they find out that helping the drowned men makes their own boat sink. A lonely boy with a dog gets rejected by the village and dies with his frightened eyes wide open, without knowing what he saw during his lasts moments. Talking to Shahriar Mandanipour certainly doesn’t make you cheerful yet it isn’t too crude. The advantage of being a writer himself is that he has already tried many times to put his own nightmares into words in a way that it doesn’t disconcert him anymore. Although after 45 minutes of rooting his soul, Mandanipour insists on leaving the Dutch hotel where he’s staying to smoke a cigarette and to give his mind a rest.

“Its because of the war”, he adds with a sourly and apologizing smile.

At the front

The war he’s referring to is the Great War between Iran and Iraq from 1980-1988. Mandanipour was a volunteer who moved willfully to the front. Why? ‘To become a writer for the people. I needed to be where the disasters were. Even though I opposed to war in general and to this one in particular, I wanted to defend my country against the invasion of Saddam Hoessein. On the other hand I was also defending the Islamic Republic, which was terrible.’ There’s no clear segregation between good and evil in Shahriar Mandanipour’s world. Each choice has its own contradiction and each deed results in a broad spectrum of knock-on effects.

The young recruit had his way and was sent to the front to experience eighteen months of trenches, massacres and total madness. This, inevitably, had a great effect on his mind. On the first day at the front I promised myself I would never be the first to fire my arm. I didn’t want to be a killer. I promised that I would look the Iraq soldiers right into the eye and try to understand them and I promised I would write about them. Fifteen months later I had to conclude that I pointed the mortar fire accurately to the spots where Iraq soldiers were.’ It was a shock to Mandanipour. He couldn’t understand why people would kill so eagerly in a ridiculous war which he couldn’t support.

Of course, death does not only roam on one side of the front line. Shahriar Mandanipour found out the hard way as his best friend got shot and died in his arms. Shahriar had to eat with his friends blood on his hands due to lack of water that day. It’s a dilemma that continues to exist.

After the war, the nightmares began. ‘Mutilated bodies, dead friends…I kept seeing them every night again and again. They were always accusing me of surviving while they didn’t. Perhaps my dead friend would have been a better father than I am’. Even when Mandanipour is writing, his demons might come to trouble him. Even now they still do.

Daily life in Iraq also presents a lot of demons, called the basij; buffer troops of the regime. One day they are enforcing the people’s morality and the next day they are separating demonstrations. ‘In the first years of the revolution the basij were seen as selfless heroes. Today they’re a bunch of mad and opportunistic policemen who serve the regime. They always seem to get easy access to universities and well paid jobs. Instead of unpaid compliance, awarded repression came along. The new generation basij isn’t necessary religious, but is willing to pretend as long as they get paid.

What Mandanipour loathes is the hypocrisy amongst millions of Iranian people enforced  by the whole Islamic Revolution. We need to get rid of a system which imposes one to continuously wear masks and forces people to pretend to be someone else. Nowadays fear is constantly present. Fear for colleagues at work, the neighbours, even your own family. People are forced to become each other’s enemy instead of brothers and sisters. No wonder statistics have shown extremely high numbers of people suffering from mental problems in Iran. The current situation has become exceedingly dangerous, not only for the Iranian people but also for the Middle East. On the other had, if the Iranian people could overcome the dictatorship and install a new democratic government, it could have a healing effect on the entire Middle East.

Everything is politics

About ‘Censoring an Iranian Love Story’. An Iranian love story describes how the love between Dara and Sara is being hindered in a country where the government ordains hundreds of rules and laws to prevent encounters between boys and girls. Yet at the same time the writer reflects on his own assignment by trying to write a love story within this context while criticizing the petty laws in the Islamic Republic.

It’s a political parable, a contemplation about writing within the limitations of an authoritarian regime, a story about a hopeless strife for true love.

‘Everything is politics’, says Shahriar Mandanipour. ‘In a country where the government imposes people to appear unshaved and to dress inconvenient, one can provoke power by dressing up, using perfume and by making love. Above all by making love as nothing else creates more beauty than the love between two people. The words politics and love swap places, not only by meaning, but now also take place in a country where love is illegitimate and dominated by superior power and where politics rule in bedrooms as well as in bathrooms.’

Shahriar Mandanipour approaches love as a sentimental and romantic matter. When asked about his favorite verse by the great and classical poet Haafez - a question which brings each Iranian to personal urburdening- Mandanipour quotes without doubt: ‘Boasting about love and lamenting loved ones / O how hollow is this vanity / Such lovers deserve their mutual detachment.’ Apologizing for the sheer lack of poetry in this translation. Not much remains of the original turn of phrases after translating off-hand an improvised speech of Persian verses into English.

‘When I write in Persian, I find myself on the other side of a deep ravine which separates me from the rest of the world’, tells Mandanipour in Shiraz. And yet writing in Persian feels like home, the rock upon which his identity is built, the history which is reaching further back than the origins of Islam, the band with the great writers from the past: Haafez, Saadi, Rumi, Khayyam. It’s also the language which he continues to use when writing in the United States. It’s the language of his demons.