Moments of Silence

Authenticity in the Cultural Expressions of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988

Arta Khakpour, Shouleh Vatanabadi, Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479803248
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war of the 20th century. The memory of it may have faded in the wake of more recent wars in the region, but the harrowing facts remain: over one million soldiers and civilians dead, millions more permanently displaced and disabled, and an entire generation marked by prosthetic implants and teenage martyrdom. These same facts have been instrumentalized by agendas both foreign and domestic, but also aestheticized, defamiliarized, readdressed and reconciled by artists, writers, and filmmakers across an array of identities: linguistic (Arabic, Persian, Kurdish), religious (Shiite, Sunni, atheist), and political (Iranian, Iraqi, internationalist). Official discourses have unsurprisingly tried to dominate the process of production and distribution of war narratives. In doing so, they have ignored and silenced other voices. Centering on novels, films, memoirs, and poster art that gave aesthetic expression to the Iran-Iraq War, the essays gathered in this volume present multiple perspectives on the war’s most complex and underrepresented narratives. These scholars do not naively claim to represent an authenticity lacking in official discourses of the war, but rather, they call into question the notion of authenticity itself. Finding, deciding upon, and creating a language that can convey any sort of truth at all—collective, national, or private—is the major preoccupation of the texts and critiques in this diverse collection.

PART I

Transnational Contexts: Interconnected Histories, Geographies, and Languages

1

Narratives of Borders and Beyond

SHOULEH VATANABADI

War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities.

—Ella Shohat

In a previous piece I wrote on the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1989)1 I argued for the necessity of looking at this event not as an isolated moment fixed in time but as an experience within the continuum of temporality as formulated by Walter Benjamin, to point to the shifting and fluidity of times that connected the Iran-Iraq War with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. My argument in that paper also included the usefulness of cultural texts both literal and visual in narrating the experience of war as “a collective experience to which even the deepest shock of every individual experience constitutes no impediment or barrier.”2

I think of this chapter as a continuation of the same attempt through the lens of shifting spatiality and the diversity of geographies of identity involved in the experience of this war. My take on the meaning of spatiality in the context of this chapter is through an understanding of space as a social construction relevant to different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena.3 My emphasis here is on the utility and importance of space as an analytical and representational mode for culture and identity formations that can defy the imaginations of “nations” as fixed, isolated, and disconnected. Here I find it particularly useful to focus on the site of “borders.” Borders are paradoxical points in space, whereas they delineate divides in between imagined communities of nations; they expose the overlaps and intersections between, across, and beyond the constructed dividing marks of nations. The paradoxical performance of borders as a representational category, I will argue, draws attention to the competing discourse involving war and, in particular, the experience of the Iran-Iraq War.

A view from the border highlights the contradictions, paradoxes, and imperfections in the grand narratives of nations and states. At the moment of war, this view spotlights the problematic of “nation” at its very edge, for it is at this very edge where nationalizing policies are regularly subverted. Borders as they represent imperial, colonial, masculinist, and nationalist impositions of power have the potential to open a bottom-up perspective to expose individual and collective border narratives and experiences reflecting the ways in which borders impact the daily life practices of people living in and around them. Borders as zones of instability can point to the ways in which ethical, political, cultural, and national discourses are negotiated, dialogized, intersected, and collided. Borders can shift the analysis and understanding of socio-spatiality away from the static world of container-borders to the complex and varied patterns of both implicit and explicit bordering and ordering.4

Let’s not forget that the borders of “nation-states,” Iran and Iraq, are the workings of nearly five centuries of “bordering and ordering” and conflicts over “territory,” with its players as the Ottoman and Persian empires, European colonial powers, as well as neocolonial and postcolonial nationalist authorities. The long history of shifting maps of inclusions and exclusions across fluid borderlines involving a myriad of different ethnicities, languages, cultures, and religions, brings into question essentialist notions of uniform, homologous, and fixed constructions of nations and the binary discourses of war between them.

Much has been written by way of political and historical analysis of the centuries-long shifts of border involving the geographies of Iran and Iraq.5 On the subject of the Iran-Iraq War, whole bodies of work have concentrated on the descriptive history of contestations over the formation of borders involving these areas. Yet the information on border formations has not been adequate to point to the intricacies of life experiences across, in-between, and beyond these borders. It is perhaps on the site of cultural production, where the borders of politics and poetics intersect, that narratives of these life experiences as they encounter more intensification at the time of war are communicated.

In what ways do narratives of spaces that lie within zones of conflict (borderlands of war) provide an alternative perspective on the experience of war by the inhabitants of these zones? In what ways does an interpretive lens on spatiality expose the complexities of geographies of identity involved in the experience of this war? How would this lens shape alternative readings of the experience of this war as it dialogizes and overlaps with domestic spaces such as the home front, communal spaces such as nations, and the wider transnational landscapes? How are power relations expressed through the lens of spatiality? How are these relations inverted and contested? In what ways do narratives informed by the space of the borders expose the competing discourses of officialdom that construct the space of “nation” as monologized and monoglossic containers? In what ways does the dialogism of a polyphony of geographies of identity subvert the unitary notions of a “nation”? In what ways do the border zones of this war perform to foreground the paradoxes involving the contested power configurations? In what ways do narratives of borders communicate the experience of this war beyond the divisions imposed by imagined “nations” which undermine the “overlapping territories and intertwined histories”?6 In what ways do cultural products, visual media, and literary texts, informed by borders in both their physical and metaphoric senses, bring to purview the paradoxical and competing discourses of war?

Literal and visual texts on the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) can provide a practical forum in which one may examine the individual experiences, collective memories, and their connections with local/global interactions as they relate to that event. Of course, cultural production is one of the primary sites appropriated by the official discourse of the war as well as by the non-official counterdiscourse. In this respect, war stories function around the binaries of war to promote the nationalist official discourse, while at the same time they provide the possibility of changing and countering the binaries produced by the discourses of war, raising other issues immediately impacting the societies involved.

There are numerous examples of films and literary texts on the subject of the Iran-Iraq War. In both Iran and Iraq from the outset of the war, the media of literature and film were active loci for both official and non-official expressions regarding this event and its impact on society. Many cultural works serving the national homogenizing projects emphasized the dichotomous discourse of war as officialdom drew on past symbolisms to produce meanings for a meaningless war. In Iran, the officialdom drew on the moment of consolidation of an Islamic state and named the war “Defa’-e Moghaddas” (the Sacred Defense). In Iraq, the Battle of Qadessia (the AD 637 defeat of the Persian Sassanid by the Moslem Arab army) became the official name of this war in order to emphasize the Arab nationalism of the Iraqi state. Though a whole body of cultural texts falls under this rubric, many literary and visual texts produced in both Iran and Iraq drew on the experience of this war to find ways to collapse the exclusivist discourses of nations and national divides while critiquing the hierarchies within these nations as well as articulating the multilayered complexities of their respective societies. A great number of works with this critical and subversive attribute revolve in different ways around the space and subject matter of “border” in the form of national boundaries, points of crossing, points of in-between-ness and even war fronts. Examples of these works include films like A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) by Bahman Ghobadi; A Place to Live (2005) by Mohammad Bozorgnia; Kilometer Zero (2005) by Hiner Selim; as well as literary works such as Don’t Take Me to Baghdad (2006) by Nahid Kabiri; At the Border Line (2003) by Sherko Fatah; The Umbilical Cord (1990) by Samira Al Mana.

Whether the story of these works involves the home front or the Iran-Iraq War, the border becomes a common force of narrative in all of them. The border in these works functions as the paradox to demonstrate the experience of the war as the diverse geographies and identities of Arabs, Persians, Turks, or Kurds, and many more whose intertwined lives, histories, and geographies defy the boundaries constructed by discourses of nation. In what follows, I will examine two films, each demonstrative of war as experienced either at the “home front” or at the epicenter of action, the “war front.” In all cases, “border” points to the fluidity of the notion of space to subvert the official discourses of war.

Borders of the Home Front—Bashu: the Little Stranger

Bahram Beyzai’s film, Bashu: Gharibeh-ye Kuchak (Bashu: the Little Stranger), is perhaps one of the earliest films made during the war; it was produced in 1986 and shown only at the end of the war in 1989. Where the central space of the film’s action is a tranquil village in Gilan in the Caspian region in northern Iran, far from the stages of combat of the Iran-Iraq War, the central force of the narrative destabilizes the seemingly calm and in many ways linguistically and culturally uniform population of the village who are Gilakis who speak a distinct local dialect of Persian. Yet the core of the narrative in the film is initiated at the epicenter of war—the border region between Iran and Iraq in Khuzestan in the south of Iran. Bashu, a ten-year-old Arab Iranian boy who witnesses his family’s death in a fireball of Iraqi bombs and who climbs on a truck to escape, emerges a day or two later in the totally different linguistic, ethnic, and physical geography of Gilan. This is a foreign land to Bashu, who speaks Arabic, while those now surrounding him and rejecting him as a dark-skinned outsider speak Gilaki Persian.

When Bashu emerges from his hiding place in the truck still in a state shock from the explosions and tragedy he has witnessed at the southern border, the primary stage of the war, he runs into the rice fields and is discovered by two children who alert their mother Naii of the stranger’s presence. Naii is a single mother in charge of the family and their farm; her husband, a war veteran who has lost his right arm, is away in search of work. Not having had any exposure to any other Iranian outside her village, Naii is astounded by Bashu’s darker skin color, and thinks he has been in a coal mine. She takes him in and protects him against the xenophobia and racism of the villagers. Following the story of Bashu’s crossing into Iran’s cultural borderlands and the initial encounter with unfamiliar zones of identity and geography, the story develops into a bond between Naii and Bashu through a process of negotiation and coming to terms with their culturally informed differences that eventually lead to Bashu’s inclusion into the family and the new geography.

Like many stories involving the border, Bashu’s is a story of crossing, a crossing that involves his traversing across and within the boundaries of Iran. But, as the film makes clear, the boundaries within are not the safe zones of familiarity, uniformity, and homogeneity. This is what the dominant official discourse of “nation” imposes with a particular emphasis on the time of war. Indeed, Bashu’s traverse within the national boundaries lands him in an indefinite zone of cultural, linguistic, and racial differences. Bashu is indeed a stranger in this zone; he is a Gharibeh (an outsider, with negative connotations in Farsi).

The breaking point in opening a path toward Bashu’s inclusion is a highly significant scene in which Naii and Bashu surmount their linguistic divisions by engaging in a dialogical relation through translation. Pointing to different objects, Naii mentions the name of the object in her Gilaki Persian dialect, encouraging Bashu in return to identify the objects in his Arabic dialect. The scene is not free of its own ironies, for in the process of naming the objects, the past colonial connections of constructing this linguistic identity are revealed as well. For some objects, it turns out Naii uses the Russian word, whereas Bashu uses the English terms—a reference to the colonial division of northern and southern Iran under the influence of the Russians and the British. It is after this dialogic moment that Bashu is gradually taken in by Naii to become a new member of her family.

Though taken in by Naii, Bashu continues to remain “a stranger” to the community outside Naii’s family. Even the husband with whom Naii stays in touch is adamantly opposed to Naii’s determination to take Bashu into the family. It is only at the end of the film when it becomes clear that Bashu can be an invaluable helping hand with their farming that the disabled husband yields to Naii’s insistence.

The various connections created between Naii and Bashu point to the ways in which each of these characters undermines the established discourses of nation, community, and family structure. It is through Naii’s agency that the patriarchal structure of her family is subverted to pose a challenge to the masculinist power informing it. The communities’ discomfort with Bashu’s inclusion and its constant challenge with Naii’s insistence are also in many ways related to her gendered position as a single woman, a subtext that in an interesting yet subtle way exposes the interconnections of race, gender, and cultural divides. If the immediate space of Naii’s actions of resistance is within the parameters of the village and community, Bashu’s story and his character move the field of defiance to the broader areas to destabilize notions of spatiality and counter the fixed discourses of national unity and homogeneity.

In a highly significant scene, when Bashu is bullied by the children of the village who think of him as mute and stupid, Bashu picks up a school text and reads a passage from it in Persian with his Arabic accent: “We are all children of Iran.” This official line of the state as expressed in the school textboo...