Reading about the Islamic Revolution in a Time of War

In the waiting room of the fertility specialist and while spreading her legs to be inseminated, the narrator of the novel Disoriental, by Negar Djavadi, recounts the tales of her family. Kimiâ Sadr, who fled from Teheran to Paris, goes back to the days of her great-grandfather Montazemolmolk and the birth of her grandmother Nour in his harem, as well as to the fight of her parents to eliminate the Shah regime and the corrupt relations between Iran and the US in the days leading to the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The rich history of Kimiâ’s ancestors and the tragic events in her family lead to a short moment in the present, a moment in which science and mysticism, insemination and reincarnation, life and death, are all blended in.
The novel, though published in translation to English in 2018, suggests a complicated view of the Middle East, one that is in great need these days. The intellectual left had struggled justly to eliminate the monarchy in Iran—even Michel Foucault supported Kimiâ’s father in the novel—but the likely results should also have been taken into consideration. “Who could have imagined back then that this Angel was really just another Demon, and the Light an illusion?” says Kimiâ Sadr about the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. “Who could have known that, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the Old Man would soon lead the children of his country into a cave and trap them inside?” (p. 195).

Kimiâ Sadr strings together the stories of her family with skill, navigating through tales and histories, and using backflash and flash forward to create a unique voice—the voice, as the narrator explains, of her kin. “[The] tendency to make endless small talk, to throw sentences like lassoes into the air to meet one another, to tell stories, which, like Russian matryoshka dolls, open to reveal other stories, is, I suppose, one way to deal with a fate consisting of nothing but invasions and totalitarianism. Like Scheherazade, who used the power of words to put an end to King Shahryar’s bloody crusade against the women of the realm, the average Iranian feels trapped in a daily existential dilemma: speak, or die” (p. 53-4). The result is amusing and dense, though burdened by detail and tangents at times.

What I found most impressive in this novel is Djavadi’s attempt to create art that amalgamates East and West by referring to both One Thousand and One Nights and cartesian rationality. Djavadi also mixes traditional themes, such as family and politics, with the more contemporary issues of sexuality and queerness. Her main character, an Iranian-French woman, represents this amalgamation not just by name—Kimiâ comes from the word alchemy—but by finding her way between her ancestors’ traditions and her new life in Paris. She represents the option to enjoy both the freedom of the West and the rooting traditions of the East, without them being mutually exclusive. When it comes to having children, for example, Kimiâ adopts her mother’s belief that motherhood is “the higher plane of existence” (p. 51), yet she chooses an alternative family. She believes a family can offer a unique relationship, perhaps especially in a post-modern world of multi-national countries, and the way to cultivate these special familial relationships is by telling stories about the family and its origins. Kimiâ makes a point of starting right away on this task—at the moment of her child’s conception.

I enjoyed Djavadi’s complex look at the history of Iran, and, as an Israeli who emigrated to Canada, I related tremendously to the characters’ pain of leaving home, even when their country has changed for the worse. Djavadi even mentions Palestine in a footnote when she talks about the methods used by the supporters of the Shah to bring him to power. She refers to a news report “filmed amid the ruins of Palestine, where Hezbollah representatives go door to door distributing dollars to help families survive and rebuild” (p. 179n). Those deceitful methods to reach people’s support were done by the Ayatollahs, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as by fundamentalist organizations in Israel, and are a danger to democracy. Just like in the days before the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the progressive and radical left that supports the foundation of a Palestinian state should also consider the consequences of building a country on conservative and extremist religious ideas. And of course, the same is true for Israelis who vote for religious parties or for parties that most likely include those fundamentalists in the government.

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi. Translated from the French by Tina Kover. Published by Europa Editions, 2018.