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language: Persian
country: Iran
year: 2017
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 22.9.25-23.9.25
there are two main, glaring problems with Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (translated from Persian by an anonymous translator). my expectations were, I admit, low going in, first because it was a Booker finalist in 2020 (not typically an indicator of books I will enjoy) and second because I’m dubious of books that are actively marketing themselves as “magical realism” in the year 2020 (it was originally published in Australia in 2017, but I’m reading a US edition from 2020, so I can’t speak to the marketing for the original publication). I wasn’t, however, expecting the specific contours of its flaws.
the novel is narrated by Bahar, the ghost of a girl who died when her father’s instrument workshop was destroyed during the revolutionary fervor of 1979. through Bahar’s eyes, we are introduced to her family and their efforts to escape the violence of the revolution and the increasing religious conservatism that followed from it. the supernatural runs throughout the novel: Bahar continues to interact with her family even as a ghost, a 177-day winter of black snow-sludge consumes the village they seek refuge in, the ghosts of the political prisoners executed in 1988 flood parts of Tehran with their tears. chapter 7 is an elaborate revenge fantasy about Khomeini dying alone in an underground house of mirrors and his body not being found for three months.
Azar’s prose — at least in this translation — is poetic but brisk, and I found the book a quick read. aesthetically speaking it’s an enjoyable enough experience. I appreciated its frank treatment of sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality; I enjoyed the scene of Beeta searching desperately through old love stories for any indication that any of their characters ever masturbated (to reassure her that she’s Normal).
but: the problems.
one: in its opposition to the Iranian Revolution it turns to a Persian ethnonationalism built on a reclaimed (and heavily romanticized-reimagined, one suspects) Zoroastrianism and a relitigation of the Muslim conquest of the Sasanian Empire, which it frames not in religious but in explicitly ethnic terms, as an “Arab” conquest of, implicitly, a unified (and solely) Persian people. one wonders how the Azeris, Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens, Baloch, etc. who make up ~40% of Iran’s population would feel about the positioning of a(n exclusively) Persian-speaking, Zoroastrian ethnoreligious community as the true Iran!
two: the ostensibly “ordinary” (albeit surrounded by the supernatural) family that it wants its readers to empathize with, through whom it levels its critique of the Islamic Republic, are a family that own a large (eighteen-bedroom!!) house-estate (both terms are used) in Tehran; had-have a collection of valuable art (expropriated during the revolution); and are rich enough to finance the reconstruction of an entire rural village, the construction of a new village school, and the employment of multiple teachers in the school. as such, when Bahar complains about people calling her family “bourgeois” and attacking them on that basis during the revolution it really falls flat, because I don’t know what the fuck else you’d call this!
I say this not in defense of the political structures and revolutionary strategies of the Islamic Republic but to identify a core bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand within the novel: The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree implies that its protagonists are just an Ordinary Iranian Family™ trying to “preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives” (as the blurb puts it), when they are in fact a family of highly educated, ethnically Persian intellectuals who have inherited generations of family wealth — enough that the buried treasure of a Sasanian-era fire temple can be plausibly passed off as “family heirlooms” when ultimately sold-donated to the national museum.
if this seems uncharitable, let me add that the novel attempts, it seems to me, to evade this problem by meandering through the village of Razan, where Bahar’s family have settled, and introducing us to the villagers — peasants, in effect; the novel notes, for example, that they are unfamiliar with the practice of exchanging land for money — through a series of folkloresque episodes involving jinn, supernatural love, and similar. crucially, the villagers are unaware of either the revolution or the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, and Bahar’s family make the conscious decision not to inform them of either development. they only learn of them some time later, when military recruiters arrive to start breaking down doors and kidnapping men for the army (which I must say sounds more like atrocity propaganda than a real conscription practice). we are apparently supposed to see this as a good / correct choice — as, in some way, “protecting” the village (notably, Bahar’s father also refuses to build a paved road connecting it to the country’s main roadways during the reconstruction process), rather than as part of a long tradition of the wealthy using their wealth and social capital to exert control over the poor’s access to information. when the villagers begin to develop some political consciousness (and, in particular, to become antagonistic to “rich people from Tehran”, as Bahar’s narration describes her own family), the narrative links the effects of “imported city laws” — what it refers to as “the cry for Islamic equality” — to ecological destruction, the literal uprooting of the idealized “Persian” past as embodied by and in the forest around the village.
the result of all of this is an intensely revisionist, ahistorical portrayal of post-revolutionary Iran as, essentially, the violent imposition of a foreign, “Arab” culture on an innocent — at times I would say even, in Azar’s portrayal, “primitive” — “Persian” population (up to and including, implicitly, forcing (some) people to change their names from Persian to Arabic ones). the Islamic Republic becomes, in Azar’s narrative, an extension of the “Arab” conquest, blithely overwriting fourteen hundred years of enthusiastic Persian participation and, indeed, leadership in the history, politics, and culture of the broader Muslim world in the interest of a narrow ethnic nationalism. I am reminded of some of Alberto Fuguet’s disparaging comments on magical realism in his essay “Magical Neoliberalism”, particularly that “[m]agical realism reduces a much too complex situation and just makes it cute” such that “the eccentric, the overfolkloric, [is] the only way to grasp a world where true civilization would never be established”.
the novel’s conclusion is, simply, that Islam destroys everything that is good and beautiful and wondrous in the world, that it is inherently violent — even murderous. no wonder this book has appealed to Western readers as “dissident” literature!
moods: dark, polemic, reflective, wacky (not in a good way)