the pennsylvania state university press
i n t e r n at i o n a l j o u r n a l o f
persi an l ite r at u r e volume 1, 2016
editor in chief
Alireza Korangy
advisory board
Ahmad Mahdavi-Damghani, Independent Scholar Muhammad Estelami, Independent Scholar editorial board
Leili Anvar, l’Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales Michael Beard, University of North Dakota Dick Davis, Ohio State University François de Blois, SOAS, University of London Carl W. Ernst, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Rebecca Gould, Bristol University Domenico Ingenito, University of California at Los Angeles Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, University of Maryland Homa Katouzian, University of Oxford (incoming editor) Prashant Keshavmurthy, McGill University Justine Landau, Harvard University Franklin Lewis, University of Chicago Leonard Lewisohn, University of Exeter Daniela Meneghini, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia Claus Valling Pedersen, University of Copenhagen Leyla Rouhi, Williams College David Roxburgh, Harvard University Martin Schwartz, University of California, Berkeley Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Leiden University Farzad Sharifian, Monash University Daniel J. Sheffield, Princeton University Sassan Tabatabai, Boston University Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr., Independent Scholar founding editor
Alireza Korangy
i n t e r n at i o n a l j o u r n a l o f
persian literature volume 1, 2016
Editors’ Note • 1 Guest Editor’s Introduction • 2 Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab
articles
Ideology of Warfare and the Islamic Republic’s Poetry of War • 5 Fatemeh Shams
The Fusion of Mysticism and Politics in Khomeini’s Quatrains • 59 Diede Farhosh-van Loon
“The Houses of the Tulips”: Persian Poetry on the Fallen in the Iran‒Iraq War • 89 Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab
Reflection of War Rhetoric in the Persian War Novel Zimistān-i 62 (The Winter of 1983) • 120 Saeedeh Shahnahpur
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Perception of Western Modernity from the Gaze of Ṣadraism: Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabā’ī’s and Murtaḍā Muṭahharī’s Critique of Modern Western Philosophy • 142 Urs Gösken
On Oral and Poetic Transculturalism in Franco-Persian Novels • 164 Esfaindyar Daneshvar
book reviews
Mirror of Dew: The Poetry of Ālam-Tāj Zhāle Qā’em-Maqāmi, translated with commentary by Asghar Seyed-Gohrab • 186 Reviewed by Rebecca Gould
Persian in Use: An Elementary Textbook of Language and Culture, by Anousha Sedighi • 191 Reviewed by Musa Nushi
A History of Persian Literature, Volume 1: General Introduction to Persian Literature, edited by J. T. P. de Bruijn • 195 Reviewed by Alireza Korangy
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International Journal of Persian Literature is a peer-reviewed journal with a novel focus on Persian poetics, poetry, classical Persian philology, prose, and the literature of Iran and the broader geographical areas. The journal aims to examine how Persian has functioned as literary and cultural language, traversing the g eographies of South, West, and Central Asia, including present day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, T ajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, the Caucasus, and Southeast Asia. Published annually, this journal aims to create an international dialogue and forum for Persian literary culture in Iran and these wider geographical areas, while encouraging interdisciplinary interventions. submission information
The International Journal of Persian Literature is a peer-reviewed journal and our editors and peer-reviewers are asked to seek in the submitted manuscripts originality, academic rigor, and a very clear presentation of the argument. A manuscript submitted for publication to the journal must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. We ask that submitted first drafts are presented in as much a perfect condition for publication as possible. We want to make sure that our reviewers access a very polished first copy. The bibliography and the endnotes (please no footnotes) shall abide by the Chicago Manual of Style’s latest edition. All other guidelines (transliterations, etc.) can be accessed via the journal’s website. To submit a manuscript to the editorial office, please visit http://www.editorialmanager.com/ijpl/ and create an author profile. The online system will guide you through the steps to upload your article for submission to the editorial office. For any editorial correspondences prior or after your submission, please contact the editors:
[email protected]. All queries pertaining to book reviews shall be addressed to the editors. subscription information
The International Journal of Persian Literature is published annually by the Penn State University Press, 820 N. University Dr., USB 1, Suite C, University Park, PA 16802. Subscriptions, claims, and changes of
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address should be directed to our subscription services at the Johns Hopkins University Press, P.O. Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211, phone 1-800-548-1784 (outside USA and Canada: 410-516-6987),
[email protected]. Subscribers are requested to notify the Press and their local postmaster immediately of change of address. All correspondence of a business nature, including permissions and advertising, should be addressed to Penn State University Press,
[email protected]. rights and permissions
The journal is registered under its ISSN (2376-5739 [E-ISSN 2376-5755]) with the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 (www.copyright.com). For information about reprints or multiple copying for classroom use, contact the CCC ’s Academic Permissions Service, or write to The Penn State University Press, 820 N. University Dr., USB 1, Suite C, University Park, PA 16802. Copyright © 2016 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved. No copies may be made without the written permission of the publisher.
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Editors’ Note
This, the first issue of the International Journal of Persian Literature, is thematic. It examines the literary dimensions of war, politics, and polity in Iran and creates a novel platform for new dialogues on the subject. We intend to have many more thematic issues in the years ahead and feel this issue will be an auspicious inauguration for the journal. We would like to thank our dear friend and colleague, Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, for this initiative and his judicious sense of scholarship as our guest editor for this issue. It was a joy working with him. We do hope you will enjoy our inaugural issue and we hope the rigor we apply to the scholarship presented in our journal will inspire rigorous submissions, grounded polemics, and novel research in Persian studies. It is incumbent upon me to add that without the tireless and always cordial efforts and support of Patrick Alexander, Jessica Karp, Julie Lambert, Astrid Meyer, and the rest of the PSU Press team this issue would not be. They made a very difficult task into an absolute pleasure. Last but certainly not least, many thanks go to Valerie Ahwee whose surgical attention to detail in her copyediting cannot be praised enough. Alireza Korangy, Editor-in-Chief Homa Katouzian, Incoming Editor (2017)
International Journal of Persian Literature, Volume 1, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
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Guest Editor’s Introduction Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab Leiden University
Literature, Islamic mystical philosophy, and politics form a triangle in Iranian intellectual history, especially in the last few decades, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In this context, literature has become a transitory vehicle for the political ideology of the revolution, and later, the international politics of the Iran‒Iraq war, the longest conventional war lasting from 1980 to 1988. In this period, we see the politicization of literature and culture and how politics increasingly attains a central role in a culture. This volume investigates various aspects of this triangle. It is certainly a great privilege for me to act as a guest editor for the first issue of the International Journal of Persian Literature. I would like to express my gratitude to the editor-in-chief of IJPL , Dr. Alireza Korangy, for his trust, interest, and enthusiasm in launching the journal with this special thematic issue. His rigor and tireless attention to detail have been exemplary. I should like to add that opinions expressed in this issue are not those of the editor-in-chief as he supervised only the processes of the issue’s production under the auspices of editing. The articles published in this volume are all, except one, a selection of papers presented at the international conference Of Poetry and Politics, organized in 2013 as the final activity of a generous
International Journal of Persian Literature, Volume 1, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
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Seyed-Gohrab • Guest Editor’s Introduction3
research grant I received from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. With a team of researchers, we investigated the role of literature in politics and politicization of literature in contemporary Iranian culture. The project Of Poetry and Politics examined how classical poetical, mystical, and philosophical concepts are recycled to relate to modern political issues during the Constitutional Revolution (1905‒11), the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the Iran‒Iraq war (1980‒88). Literature played an important role during each of these periods. At the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1905‒11), poetry became a vehicle for introducing Western social and political ideas. Persians wished to follow the Western political philosophy model in introducing a parliament, a code of law, and educational and social reforms; however, several of these wants clashed with traditional Persian culture and religion and were resisted. At the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini (1902‒89) was the archetype of the withdrawn mystic without aspirations for political power, writing poetry and using mystical concepts as a buttress for his theory of Islamic governance. During the Iran‒Iraq war, poetry became part of the state propaganda using the cult of martyrdom as an icon for national identity in the face of crisis, while it was also used in intensely personal— and cognitive social—processing of the horrors and quandaries of revolution and war. Diede Farhosh-van Loon analyzes the genre of quatrains in Ayatollah Khomeini’s collection of poetry, investigating how he used this poetic form to comment on political events and to communicate to members of his family about poetry, mysticism, and philosophy. In addition, Fatemeh Shams informs the reader that literature had a wide range of usages during the Islamic Revolution and during the Iran‒Iraq war as it mobilized people to the front lines as martyrdom was depicted as a blessing. Fatemeh Shams’s article examines how Persian war poetry shapes the “Islamic Republican Poetry” (Shi‘r-i Jumhūrī-yi Islāmī). This genre of poetry has been called many things, including Shi‘r-i jang (War Poetry), Shi‘r-i difā‘-i muqaddas (Poetry of the Holy Defense), etc. It is fascinating how the political Islamic ideology is channeled through this poetry to communicate with the Iranian nation. Saeedeh Shahnapur’s contribution investigates Persian novels written on the Iran‒Iraq
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war, more specifically examining Ismāʻīl Faṣīḥ’s Zimistān-i 62 (The Winter of 1983). She analyzes the novel’s war rhetoric, psychology of characters, and the novel’s reception. In my article, I analyze several poems to understand how the culture of martyrdom was cultivated to make death meaningful and to justify violence. As Iran was boycotted by Western countries and could not cope with the wellbacked army of Saddam Hussein (1937‒2006), martyrdom became an effective act in defense of the country. Mystical concepts of love and annihilation were used to give war and death a spiritual implication. Mystical philosophy has a millennium-old root in Persia and mystico-philosophical concepts and doctrines are anchored in the Persian intellectual tradition. These were utilized for various political purposes. Urs Gösken’s contribution focuses on two of the leading religious scholars, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabā’ī (1903–81) and Murtaḍā Muṭahharī (1920–79), and their critical engagement with Western philosophy “by assessing the intellectual quality of their reasoning and questioning their claim to superiority to pre-modern philosophical systems.” The Islamic Revolution and the war against Iraq caused a massive exodus yielding a large number of people who sought refuge in the West. Several of these Iranians chose to write in the language of their new home such as French, English, German, Dutch, etc. The article by Esfaindyar Daneshvar analyzes the novels of several Franco-Persian authors, such as Ali Erfan, who write in French and have created transcultural perspectives that inform concepts such as exile and Islamism in their novels; in addition, they reflect on the reception of such ideas in their new cultural environment.
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On Oral and Poetic Transculturalism in Franco-Persian Novels Esfaindyar Daneshvar University College Roosevelt
Abstract: In this article I will attempt to show how the role of Romanesque writing and the technical choices therein expose readers to transcultural perspectives. Franco-Iranian author Ali Erfan approaches recurring themes surrounding the situation of exile in his novel Adieu Ménilmontant (Goodbye Ménilmontant) and is a good example of this phenomenon.1 He explores the sociocultural and historical antagonisms of his host country and Iran by anachronistically hiding—all the while inciting the reader to reflect upon— ideologies such as Nazism and Islamism. He places the responsibility of engaging in national politics upon the story’s main character, borrowing upon narrative elements (e.g., imagery), and themes from the oral tradition of the Oriental tale, including the search for one’s self and its reflection in the metaphorical mirror—by remodeling them in the (post)modern context. Finally, the surreal ending of the plot and the character’s psychological profile emphasize, once more, the possibilities of fictional writing within the totally free space of creativity. Keywords: Oral tradition, Oriental tale, French-Persian, interculturality, transculturality
The Spirit of the Oriental Tale Orality, as an old narrative genre, is a central element in Erfan’s tale, which draws upon the mythology and imagination of a storyteller’s International Journal of Persian Literature, Volume 1, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
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fantasy. Formally, Erfan’s stories are heavily based on this uncertain and ever-fluctuating oral dimension, but his technique breathes into them an expressive and lively element. However, the author does not hesitate to exploit the genre and to update this narrative technique. In Erfan’s collection of novellas, La 602e nuit (The 602nd night), references to Oriental tales are clearly visible in an epigraph that cites One Thousand and One Arabian Nights: “On this night, the sultan listened to Shehrazad’s own story from her mouth. It was the sixhundred-and-second night.”2 Erfan deliberately continues on with this tradition by guarding and retaining the Oriental oral narrative technique of the storyteller, and the references to this source continue. In an interview Erfan asserted, “If I do not write, I am dead, if I write, I am killed,”3 a situation reminiscent of Shehrazad, which highlights the high price of reality. On the back cover of his book, Olivier Bonnerot also places the emphasis on “the word of Shehrazad that tirelessly proclaims the victory of Knowledge over Death,” introducing thus the concepts of knowledge and truth as they pertain to modernity.4 The oral aspect of traditional tales is also reflected in the embedded structure of the short stories in a digressive form, in the mise en abyme of episodes that transform the successive chronology of the narration into a typically “Oriental” spiral of thought. This change in form is reflected on two levels: within each short story itself, and as a connection among all the short stories of the book. In novellas like L’Arme blanche (The blade) or “La 602e nuit,” there is an explicit juxtaposition between the two levels. The volume possesses a content form that qualifies it as a collection of short stories/novels. It is a succession of apparently autonomous stories linked together in such a manner as if to complete a “painting.”5 Thus, even though each short story seems thematically and structurally self-contained, the return of—and the implicit references to—certain elements belonging to the other short stories justify intrinsic connections that unify the collection. This interconnection between the stories gives the collection all the attributes of a novel. Furthermore, the narrators of the various novellas, for all intents and purposes, constitute a single and unique voice. That said, in meditating upon the authorial discourses, the reader observes the mark of a single soul and the very same modern quest/inquiry for identity. It is a structure comprised
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of rich elements that are meticulously adorned with a poetic tenor. Reading on a second level highlights the signs and metaphors that essentially project a modern take on the historical roots of a country anchored by tradition. In order to achieve this, Erfan often imposes a labyrinthine form upon the stories where there is a puzzle, a secret, or even an issue of a universal moral message similar to that used by Paulo Coelho.6 The dialogism of images and signs is made not linearly, but rather spirally, because this nestles itself within different textual and temporal layers. In his novel Adieu Ménilmontant, Erfan creates a mise en abyme of the narrator’s image, together with those of the other characters, in order to address themes such as violence, religious extremism, and Nazism. Therefore, the oral narrative contributes to make the temporality organic enough to allow for updating characters and historical events: in so doing, the narrative structure of the story remains modern. According to the Franco-Iranian author Goli Taraghi, one of the defining features of the Persian language is its richness: it is a “particularly sonorous and poetic language, and for each natural phenomenon exists corresponding onomatopoeia, which makes translation into French for novel-writing an extremely laborious process.”7 These sonorous qualities are an integral part of the oral tradition and have cemented their dominance in the communicational and cultural terrain of all Iranians. These particular characteristics of the Persian language, undoubtedly influenced by poetry combined with musical rhythm, have been passed down through the ages to the present. For centuries, the poetic side of the oral tradition has contributed to the pronunciation of the emotive, meditative, and even religious orientations in the Persian-speaking world, and by extension to modern writing.8 This poetic culture highlights an Iranian “vision of the world” that is both criticized and valorized by the Iranian intelligentsia. There are geopolitical reasons and events that throughout history have contributed to the reinforcement of oral storytelling in Persian culture. This is manifested in the literary events that came about after the Arab invasion and the banishment of the Sasanian dynasty in 651 CE. The official and literary language of Iran, Pahlavi, was hugely influenced by Arabic, and was supplanted as its administrative and religious language until the tenth century, at which point the use and protection of the Persian
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language, Dari, was once again taken up by a wide range of authors, among whom Firdausi, the author of Shāhnāma (Book of kingship).9 All in all, ambiguity, sonorities, and images created by the oral tradition of storytelling contribute to the subversive and critical attitude of the author to transgress taboos and prohibitions of the existing system, and there are too many authors to credit for the strength of this oral tradition and recording of it. From the perspective of phonetics, Persian language is different from French as it prodigiously employs imagery and rhythms based on various elements of nature. Yet sonorities must at times be complemented with or even possibly replaced by equivalences when it comes to translation. A single word may contain multiple metaphorical references, trigger a succession of images in the collective subconscious, or create a specific poetry for an Iranian audience; its equivalent may not be found in French. Furthermore, these difficulties in translation can sometimes encourage other methods that focus on the specificity of the orality in French. Jean-Marc Moura emphasized the functional mechanism of the spoken word in other languages, forcing authors to distance themselves from norms of French usage: “The approximations and the self-corrections of narration, parenthetical precisions, the interrogations of the reader and the bearing of the illusion of the presence of an audience constitutes many calls for the participation of readers constantly solicited by the narrator.”10 Such processes are also the highways and byways of literary transculturality that may be seen in certain Franco-Iranian authors like Erfan. The epigraph and the set structure of the short stories of La 602e nuit confirm the reference to the genre of the tale and the oral nature that it characterizes. The narrative process of métalepse, frequently used by Efran, also reflects the oral aspect.11 The technique of directly addressing the reader engenders the effect of a narrative transgression in marking an oral dimension. We read, for example, “He was lying, specially in my presence. (Even you may attest to this!).”12 The author here plays on the nuances of direct address to keep the reader continually in suspense, and to conjure a unique interaction: “You too, you don’t believe it. But you will see!”13 Or: “It is no longer possible to leave this story or skipping lines, to tell it in short. One must still read the text with the greatest attention, word for word. An avalanche is falling, be careful! Get
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away from it!”14 Sometimes a parenthetical note accentuates this structure: “(That being said, just to warn you, my memory is not infallible. My memory takes the colors of the present time. So do not expect of me the exact reproduction of events! You know it well, fidelity is a moral affair and it has nothing to do with writing. Let that be clear between us, if you wish for me to continue my story.)”15 Even if the technical parabasis in a free and direct discourse is nothing new from a narrative point of view, Erfan uses structures and statements derived from the pedagogical literature in vogue before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. It is interesting to note that one sometimes finds the same kind of parabasis in Erfan’s work as in the work of the folklorist Ṣamad Bihrangī (1939–67). Bihrangī, as a professor, author, and committed pedagogue, was quite engaged with the education of children. He conducted interesting research in the domain of folklorist novellas and Azerbaijani tales before his premature death. The existence of sociocultural research from 1930s is in fact evident in various literary novels that give oral literature a place in modern society. Note below the remarkably similar oral aspects of the narrative between the two authors. One of Bihrangī’s short stories, “Pūst-i Nāranj” (The skin of the orange tree), begins as follows: Yes I was guilty. I was guilty because I was forced to stay in the city Friday night. Maybe it’s the waitress at the coffee shop, who was guilty because she had a stomachache. But no, but no, it was I who was guilty and not the waitress. The story isn’t that simple. It would be better if I told you the story from the beginning so that you decide the identity of the guilty one for yourselves. But it’s also possible that there is no guilty party.16 The short story “The 602nd Night” starts similarly with the parabasis directed at the reader in the same tone: Surely the same has happened to you . . . ! One is busy reading a story and voilà: all of a sudden it turns out to have such hypnotic power that one believes they are a part of it. This is exactly what I am experiencing. I suddenly find myself inside a story written by a certain Ghulām.17
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In both cases the narrator is directly involved in the novel and solicits the reader as judge and jury. As such, the author stimulates curiosity for the plot and the mystery therein. Enigma is always omnipresent in Erfan’s oral narrations and novels.
Poetry, Poetic Style, and Prose “In literature, there is probably no category more ancient or more universal than the opposition between prose and poetry,” declared Genette.18 In “Langage poétique, poétique du langage” (Poetic language, poetics of language), he evokes the major principle of poetry and poetic language, like a “gap,” seen as an “anti-prose” with relation to the norm of “writing.”19 Such theoretical considerations are effectively and concretely self-renewing in Franco-Persian novels and they create a considerable cultural gap with the Persian traditions. Despite a dominating illiteracy up to the Revolution of 1979, poetic culture and poetry have always survived and also orally propelled a particular vision of the world. Philosophers such as Daryush Shayegan have criticized this mode of poetic comprehension as an obstacle to modernity.20 Assuming a large gap between poetry and prose, one must ask to what extent Franco-Persian literature could mix poetic language or even introduce Persian poetry into modern prose: How does this poetic dimension intervene and in what manner is it comprehended? Quite clearly poetry has vigorously contributed to fashioning the Iranian semantic universe, and has evolved all the while adapting to other trends across time and place. Yet even if the emblematic figures of modern poetry, such as Furūgh Farrukhzād, Parvīn I‘tiṣāmī, or Nīmā Yūshīj, have challenged the classical poetic paradigm, the collective imagination is geared toward an almost overweening classical comprehension. With the exile of Iranian intellectuals, this poetic dimension has been propelled to the very heart of the paradigms of modernity and its essential links to prose. For the first time, authors have gradually but surely combined poetic heritage with the Western modern tradition of writing. But for these writers it is above all a change in the cultural paradigm, then transposed to the technical level of writing, a phenomenon all the more interesting because its impact on poetry, at the sociocultural level, creates
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a wide variety of images and emotions within the mind of the individual and of Iranians as a whole, contributing to the formation of their vision of the world. Franco-Persian writing was born in exile. It evolved by engaging a certain multiculturalism and interculturalism to express a diluting transculturality. As such, an unknown cultural dimension that can often obstruct one’s grasp of the text does not confront the French reader. The host society reader is instead bemused by a “lyricism” that encapsulates the “body” of the text.21 This is because Franco-Persian poetry does not qualify as a “proper genre” that shares inner mechanisms with prose. In the spirit of such complications, one must approach the poetic dimension of these novels not as a juxtaposition of two separate genres, but rather as a fused and dynamic cohesion of the two. The poetry within Franco-Persian prose is more of a subsection within the conception of transtextuality (which, taking from Genette’s esthetic theories, understands other conceptions such as paratextuality, intertextuality, hypertextuality, and metatextuality).22 Franco-Persian writing is in part pervaded by poetry and speaks to poetic sensibilities. Considering the question of literary genres, Schaeffer defines this relationship as “a textual component that defines generic relationships as a set of reinvestments (more or less transformers) of the same textual component. Genericity can be perfectly explained by a game of repetitions, imitations, loans, etc., of a text in relation to another.”23 Here, the notion of “reinvesting” is important because the manner in which transculturalism invests in prose and poetry is specific to each author and to each text, all the while investing in the whole. This transcultural intermarriage is either accomplished via the gaze of the characters, the narrator, or from a linguistic and intertextual angle. This literature, which aims to draw the attention of a large French audience, has now come to claim its own technical methods. In the Franco-Persian novels the poetic is often elaborated by subtle wording—and not in an affirmative, diluted, or amplified fashion—while emblemizing and reappropriating the Persian heritage. As such the significant elements of Iranian culture take on a modern nuance and offer a new narratological and transcultural paradigm. Authors like Atiq Rahimi and Firouz Nadji Ghazvini are forerunners of this writing style. Their style demonstrates an
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explicit use of citations, images, sonorities, and rhythms. The reinvestment of genres and writing technique is also made in a parallel manner within the universe of the other. The mirror of the soul as an image and the quest for the self are popular themes in Persian poetry. In the prose in question they are projected through the image of the foreigner in a host society. The antagonisms and paradoxes of the “I” identity redefine themselves in the historical context of exile and by the figure of the “other.”
History and Space of the “Other” as the Identifying Mirror The search for an identity and social antagonisms incites criticism on the author’s culture of origin. The stay in the host country eventually leads to a new space and time that progressively replace that of the native country. The hybrid perspective of the author represents a transcultural vision of events that crosses histories through the agency of the narrator. New cultural references, the time of exile during which he procures this “confrontation,” and reflection upon and comparisons of the critical aptitudes have come to add to the author’s initial perception of the world. Nuanced sociocultural antagonisms in the author’s universe are a result of a long process of cultural interconnection and recognition of identity that transcend monocultural and monolingual a priori. What we call here “antagonistic transculturalism” effectively shows the impact of spatiotemporal distance, which arouses the exiled author’s profound investigation bygone concerns without resentment or activism. It also occasions the introspection about the author’s exile. Erfan’s Adieu Ménilmontant, whose plot resembles that of a detective story, is set in a contemporary multicultural space in a popular area of Paris. The story revolves around an exiled Iranian who is confronted with the story of the occupation of France. Subsequently, what unfolds reveals the considerable difficulties of assimilation within an exuberant space belonging to others: essentially, this is confrontation with a past. Through this sociocultural reconciliation within a different spatiotemporal paradigm, antagonisms of the narrator—and his own culture—are highlighted. The originality of this work is instilled in the image that reflects the host country as a mirror. This is because the hero-narrator’s investigations have
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delved him deep into the space and the history of the new culture right from the first moment of his exile. But this excursion finally highlights for him the downside of his own personality—and the history of his native country. Furthermore, the transculturalism here goes beyond the idea of assimilation or integration to judiciously pronounce the universal dimensions of human nature. Historical vision, progressively painted across this literary work, finds its interest in the conceptual hybridity that it continuously proposes from other domains, including human and social sciences, but also the topography. This is here presented by the multicultural area of Ménilmontant within Paris as the chosen setting. In Adieu Ménilmontant Erfan puts on stage the physical space of the neighborhood, which actively participates alongside the other “characters” in the history of the occupation. The narrator of the novel is an Iranian exile in Paris. He inhabits an old photography shop in Ménilmontant, a symbolically significant location. Both the shop and the neighborhood contain not only a memory of their own but those of characters who frequent them. The places frequented by the protagonist equally integrate both the intimate “duration” that constitutes his vision of the world and his psyche.24 He lives on Ménilmontant, where he slowly emerges in the streets of the neighborhood amid the vestiges of the dark period of the German occupation. Throughout the story, the author forges a “bridge” between this dark period in French history and the mind of his Iranian hero. He puts on display a postmodern reflection of a collective destiny (both French and Iranian) through the fragmented and “simple” life of his characters. Moreover, the history of France for the past fifty years looms large in this Parisian neighborhood as seen through the prism of Iranian exile. In this way, the intimate history of the narrator progressively deepens within the history of the district and even further the occupation. The space is linked with the history of the multiethnic protagonists living in a barely tolerated proximity. The antisocial elements of multiculturalism, along with the intercultural necessity to be convivial, are reflected in a background burdened by memories of extreme intolerance, specifically Nazism. In fact, this ideology suggests another more contemporary ideology, Islamism. Therefore, analogy and anachronism occasion a Universalist reading of extremism while giving these characters common human attributes.
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The narrator starts an investigation into the past, his neighbors, his street, and his workplace, where the spectre of Nazism still lurks. Himself a political exile having escaped an Islamic regime, he is dragged back into the gloomy history of France. There are parallels between major political episodes of the two countries: the Iran‒Iraq war and the Second World War, and the shadow of the two totalitarian systems that followed. However, the spatiotemporal situation of the narrator and the distance that separates him from the events place him in a sociocultural purgatory, giving his perspective a new transcultural angle. The foreigner’s gaze evolves as he observes his environment, creating a strong emotional bond between him and the neighborhood. He is a photographer—evidence of his penetrating look, as another, on his time. The shop also acts as a symbolic place of passage because numerous owners, clients, and neighbors of diverse cultural origins wander around while placing implicit emphasis on the French tradition of the host country. But it also becomes a crossing point that recalls the temporary affiliation of the migrants with a space that not only influences them but is influenced by them. So, a tradition of cultural mingling is transmitted from gene ration to generation as is cultural heritage to the narrator. The narrator, who is a photographer, refers directly to the question of collective memory and historical imagery. It is in such a setting that the narrator recounts his memories of query into the characters of the neighborhood, the collaborations, the hatred and denunciation: his new world reflects his postrevolutionary Iran. If the cruelty of the Islamic regime is a theme of the Franco-Persian literature, in the autofiction25 the author/narrator brings his very personal inquiries, affording a postmodern—and one may even say universal—insight into otherwise out-of-sight ideologies. Thus the antagonistic enquiry into liberty and democracy is put in contrast with totalitarianism and fantasy. This backdrop supersedes the analytical and didactic framework in order to valorize first and foremost the postmodern autofictional writing in a detective-themed genre. The genre of the narration is placed in a time shift tainted by postmodernism and perceived by the fragmentary identity of the antihero. The tone and the somewhat “disinterested” mannerisms of
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this antihero are kept at bay by cold humor, auto-irony, and selfcriticism. This point of view provides a sort of in-between cultural sketch for a multicultural society. The view of the narrator and the memories evoked are symbolized by illustrations of empty photographic frames designed by the author in some of the early chapters. Erfan’s originality resides in the fact that he radically avoids direct and unilateral critical approach to history, whether it is that of Islamism, the revolution, the mass exodus of Iranians, etc. Also, for the first time, in this genre of literature, Islamism is not addressed directly but through the histories of others—and of Nazism—within the borders of a host country that has slowly become his own. Thus the others become the mirror of “I” of the narrator while he remains a foreigner. Sociologically, the novel outlines a multicultural society with individuals isolated from one another, all the while constituting the pluralistic body to which the “foreigner,” the hero-narrator, belongs. Essentially, this becomes a paradoxical and complex state for the narrator, who experiences emotional ties with his host country. His emotional acceptance of his new environment is explicitly expressed from the outset: “One cannot say it in a simpler way than this: I love this street” (8). The feeling of belonging is in itself an emotional mark of cultural appropriation and of the changing psychology of the self. New identity references are traced in the multicultural landscape, though the shared space is devoid of xenophobia and bitterness. As regards differences, the author addresses the problems from a minimalist angle and focuses on the role of the individual: “It’s the moment to once and for all take my responsibilities and to be myself ” (143). Basically, the recent history of the neighborhood is revived, putting the reader in contact with a universe of men and women who once shared that very same space. If places are part of the history of societies, the integration of foreigners in these spaces seems to act reciprocally with their historical baggage. The protagonist of the novel ends up creating spatiotemporal interferences, provoked by the intrusion of his imagination and his culture, in these places. At the end of the novel, the narrator sells the shop and leaves. He takes revenge on his neighbor, the xenophobic and the Nazi “old lady”; he executes her in a surrealist and ambiguous way via imagining her murder and writing it.
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The novel’s approach to space and time reflects the transculturality of literary creativity, which mixes the imaginary with reflections on the social body and its history. The autofictional perspective draws its elements from the exile of an author, who narrates the story and highlights each stage. The emotional adoption of the exile, and of France, is an element of the narrator’s cultural hybridization. The narrator says, “During all these years, my past conjoined with the present and my life opened up with my memories of Isfahan, of Iran, and of all the places I had lived. This time, this past-present has pressed me to profit from the existence of this street” (157). Moreover, the past and the memories are told utilizing analepses, which reports in a present time and not, as is customary in the socalled literature of exile, from a substituted past extending to the present. A good example of the latter would be La maison de Shemiran by Goli Taraghi (Shemiran’s house).26 The use of analepsis justified the transculturality of the narratival gaze in relation to the events, which is to say that the narrator clearly remembers a past that he describes in the present with no emotional hindrance. In the two narrative tenses, the spatiotemporal distance of the narrator from himself opposes the initial period of his exile and his old identity extending to the present. They also highlight the transcultural view of the author as he is faced with various historical issues. This narrativization technique allows the author to extract temporal snapshots from Iran’s internal conflicts, pushing the reader to reflect on an ethical basis on the role of citizenry in political destiny. The desired reflection embodies the psychological antagonism of an individual (including that of the narrator) in all mixed societies and the interpersonal rapports that ensue. The author seems to imply that the core of the problem stays intact. He puts into perspective the abject barbarism of which man is capable, which lies low in the depths of populism and awaits the opportunity to manifest itself behind different masks in crises and sociopolitical antagonisms. The parallelism between Nazism and Islamism highlights commonalities. There is always a category of an individual, like the old anti-Semitic lady, who, despite humanistic appearances, embodies political unease and evil intent. A central character of the novel, the “old lady” was a Nazi collaborator who had condemned Jews in her past. From a literary point
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of view, she is an important actor as far as the detective element of the plot. She feels a bond with the Iranian narrator, who listens to her hateful discourse and gradually unearths her past.27 After regaining a clear conscience and defusing the influence of the old lady, he shoots her in the head in revenge. The execution remains opaque and surreal because the narrator writes it on paper while it also seems to be literally happening. The author thus draws the reader into this game of interrogation and reflection on the limits of the subconscious, repressed desires, and the power of writing. The reader who follows the hero-narrator also accompanies him in his acts; in this way, the author takes his reader to the extreme limits of human hatred from which most feel immune. These limits open a Pandora’s box of ethical and philosophical questions about the psychic antagonisms of human nature, individual responsibility, the freedom of choice, and vengeance. The Franco-Iranian politico-cultural mirror reflects a transculturalism that facilitates exceeding the boundaries of postmodern fiction and humor. Although embarrassed and despite his disgust, the narrator quickly becomes the old woman’s sole confidant. He is finally so filled with her hatred that he exacts revenge on her in the end. Persuaded by the legitimacy of his ideology and his action, he becomes himself a murderer like Raskolnikov killing the old usurer. The narrator says, “A violent desire for vengeance has taken over me. I pray that my wish is fulfilled. It may no longer escape punishment” (137). The allegory of power and the artistic liberty of the author is reminiscent of the maxim, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”28 However, if discourse and political reflection constitute the backdrop of the narrative framework, Erfan’s writing remains connected, above all, to modern literary criteria and to a transcultural vision. It avoids militant diatribes and moralizing discourse. His pattern of detective investigation allows for reflexive paths leading to discoveries of more profound psychological causes of evil and the relationship of the individual to the system. Local history and history at large are bound in this space where memories finally blend and destinies are tied: “Why don’t I put an end to this story? It’s either the effect of curiosity or a disease: to live in the skin of others, to identify one’s
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self with others and recuperate their memory, to appropriate their past? All I know is that as an exile and in the absence of a utopia, a battle perspective, I meddle with a conflict that had taken place before I was in the world” (98). “To live in the other’s skin” is first the ability to transcend one’s own vision of the world in order to be able to de-territorialize it and penetrate into that of the other.29 It is at that point that literary transculturalism transcends the two cultural visions, creating its own fictional space where finally the author gives himself full liberty for creativity and eventually affects a universal dimension of reflections and sensibilities. This mechanism becomes possible only with the dynamism of the hybrid identity (visible in the hero-narrator) interacting with the multiculturalism of the host society. But transculturalism resides most particularly in the creative act of the novelist himself (or, by extension, in the narrator as a photographer), who through his writing comes to realize a shading of cultural particularities. From a technical point of view, the narrator only indirectly evokes Iranian sociocultural antagonisms (the revolution and the rise of Islamism), but they are updated through the image of the other—and other historical events.
Humor as a Transcultural Space Humor is an important characteristic of transcultural writing. The cynical wagging at one’s own deprecation becomes an essential aspect of a narrator’s dilemma. For example, as the narrator is confronted by the old anti-Semitic lady (a former lover of an SS officer during the occupation) on a daily basis, the narrator, who feels obliged to hear her out due to deference for her age, examines his own reactions. He reflects upon his reaction and the irony brought on by his own cultural automatisms (identity complexes). He says, “I ran away from the torturers of my country and those who exacted the worst tortures on even the smallest of their opponents. Now I listen to this cynical shrew who could carry the entire world in her tomb; and to cap it all, I am photocopying her unbelievable list of Jews without reacting, without flinching” (111). Haunted and disgusted by having to listen to the anti-Semitic rants of the woman “with a politeness full of hypocrisy” (106), the
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narrator becomes irritated and criticizes his own exaggerated cultural politeness, which, in reality, hides discomfort, and frustration with identity, perhaps as a strategy for survival. So, he begins to imagine how the old woman sees him: I suppose she’s died of joy, because she’s found the most idiotic man in the world: I, who listen to her, I who pretend to believe her, I, who approve of her with nods of the head. I’m certain that if she had met me at the time of the Occupation, even if I were a Jew, she could have spared me from deportation and the camps. She is thinking ‘this man [that means me] is ridiculous and naïve’, and would not even have been worthy of being gassed and thrown into the oven. He only serves the purpose of listening to her stories. (107) This realization of his passivity in his conversation with the old woman engenders a deep disgust; nonetheless, a dialectic of resentment develops between those two protagonists that echoes their mutual and different-yet-similar histories. Finally, the narrator compensates for his exasperating passivity by planning the murder of the old Nazi. He leaves for Tahiti, where he starts to write (literally) his murder plan (because he doesn’t take action). Curiously, the old anti-Semite, by proxy, dies in reality. The writing thus serves as an outlet for the protagonist (and author). Erfan refuses to moralize the solution. Where the author cannot make missteps in his speech, the fictional character takes it on with utter liberty: “Although I had not envisioned this brutal of an end for a relationship that had started on a simple note, I never stopped fearing the bitter consequence of her existence: the punishment. The verdict of death for my neighbor was being cooked up in my head for a very long time. I wished to execute her myself ” (143–44). Polysemic in many ways, transcultural writing allows for added liberties to concoct creative endings. Execution of the old woman by his hero implies a macabre humor exercised by the author himself. Transculturalism of creativity ultimately reveals to the reader the essential task of the creator, which is breaking free from any moralizing pledge that could corrupt the œuvre.
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Subsequently, the author takes hold of his creative liberty, and with a touch of self-mockery the protagonist goes against the wise advice of his old friend Mimi, who reminds him of the intolerance in Iran: I hope Mimi forgives me! She often said that the tragic heroism of certain resistance fighters during the Occupation has today become a farce played by usurpers of the memory of the victims. She added that religious hatred is an insoluble problem, an incurable disease, because history cannot be erased from memory: “My boy! She said, forget the vengeful God. Forget his remedy: the law of the Talion! Look at what is happening in your country” (146). The logic of the crime is thus justified and planned in the mind of the character and can be equally traced in the derisive pen of the author. One can even say that writing becomes an escape from personally meting out the desired punishment administered in a distant à la Dostoyevskian diversion: “To experience the crime, everything functions as a pretext. I am on the other side of the world, she doesn’t hear me and her cries don’t reach me,” affirms the narrator (144). In contrast to Raskolnikov, who pays for his crime by his moral culpability, Erfan’s narrator deconstructs morality. Completely independent in the writing space, the narrator allows free range for his vindictive impulses and shows no remorse. As such, he positions creativity below morality and law. In line with his detective genre, Erfan experiments with the limits of cultural codes when he shares secrets with the reader, who is treated like an accomplice in the events: Henceforth, everyone must know that, during a calm night, a mysterious death took place on Ménilmontant Street. An assassination, which was committed in utter silence considering the habitual tumult of this street. Strangely, nobody seemed to understand the motive and the police saw the case as one that was straightforward. It was as if there existed a tacit complicity between the police and the inhabitants of the quarter. This story that resembles a dream of a fool will be forgotten the same day it was told and will be safeguarded in the annals of
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anonymity. At present I am a murderer against which justice has no charge. But does this text not constitute a damning proof? (147) Through the theme of murder, Erfan’s transculturalist writing allows him to conduct investigations into the neighborhood’s inhabitants and the richness of their historical fabric. The exiled narrator of the novel, who saw the Revolution and the jettisoning of Shah’s dictatorial regime by a totalitarian theocracy in 1979, observes his own weakness and condemns his cowardice in the face of the old anti-Semite. She symbolizes the turpitude of history and incarnates the category of individuals that have served its purposes. The novel subtly, but clearly, establishes a parallel between those who, at an individual level, have contributed to the rise of Islamism in Iran and compares them to those who contributed to the rise of Nazism. The novel does not aim at a politico-historical analysis. It is a literary reconstruction mired in quotidian details of simple people and their small lives. One might wonder if regardless of deportations, denunciations, and so much hatred—whether in France under the occupation, or in other places—is it enough to accuse others by placing a radical separation between “me” and the “others”? From a general point of view or a militant one, the response would be yes! However, the reflection opened by the literary transculturalism onto the sociocultural common paradigms begs us to delve into profound causes, which in turn implies placing responsibility on each individual. Antagonistic transculturalism seems to advance, first and foremost, this paradoxical and primordial dimension, which scrutinizes the role and the responsibility of every single individual (passive or not) under an oppressed system: a person who participates despite himself as part of a whole. This does not mean that everyone thirsts for a barbaric regime. It does imply, however, that there is an intrinsic and necessary link between a political system, cultural paradigms, and the collective subconscious: in fact, anti-Semitism in France was as instrumental in the rise of the Vichy regime as religious traditionalism was in Iran and the Islamic Republic’s rise to power. An author, who is an integral part of the social body, represents, like all others, particular contingencies. He also expresses through
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his novels the essential values of collectivity and the spirit of the people, who are its essential components. In this sense he is a visionary and in some ways molds that culture. Common points thus create a union between the Franco-Iranian authors: from the moment they express the same questions and trace their inquiries to their past, an auctorial discourse linked with their common history is formed. This is while some of the characteristics of the host society add to the dynamics of the self or the collective “me” in their writings. As such one can see the importance of the role of the individual in history: one can see the relationship between history, the collective spirit, and political institutions. The de-territorialization that takes place by the author’s perspective reveals hidden problematic dimensions in the common subconscious of a nation. This perception is only possible for a culture that contemplates itself in guise of another. Accordingly, transcultural antagonisms among the Franco-Iranian authors can be construed as modern phenomena affected by the postmodern condition witnessed in heterogeneous societies. Exile and métissage (hybridity) modify both the cultural perception and the conscience of the Franco-Iranian author. In his writing, he participates as a free citizen in social dialogues. He also realizes simply the idea of culture alone, as a homogeneous entity, has been obsolete for a while. Consequently, the role of métissage becomes central because it reveals the individual’s antagonisms and stimulates self-transcendence. In this bilateral confrontation of paradigms the author heeds the existence of globalizing thoughts and the collective impetus in each epoch.30 Furthermore, the Franco-Iranian author, as a cultural mediator, constructs a proper transcultural “discourse.” His approach allots him the ability to reconsider antagonisms by means of auto-observations: that of the “other” and of the hybrid inspiration, which is framed in this new space. The shared spaces undoubtedly intervene in the evolution of this consciousness, this sobriety. By questioning his own culture, in his confrontation and the simultaneous acceptance of another, the author penetrates the depths of antagonisms by putting forth a critical and self-aware analysis. Individual fault, fear, and the trauma of postrevolutionary Islamism are shadows cast upon his narrator’s discourse in the Parisian neighborhood. An entire generation’s profound sentiment
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of disarray is hence reflected. Yet, his sense of guilt justly confers upon him the acuity of repairing the fanaticism under all its forms and begs his suspicion. Let us not forget that it is about a generation condemned by Islamism and for whom this ideology is no less dangerous than Nazism. In describing the state of the multicultural street, the narrator says: For some months, the new “all on sale,” the third Pakistani, got himself settled on the same street. And from the first few days, he provoked vivacious reactions. Every morning from his store he played the Qur’an on his stereo with volume set on high, which obviously delights the bearded grocer. But to us, the Kabylian and me, this chant gave us memories linked with massacres committed by some fools of God in the name of the sacred Book . . . I asked him to lower the volume and to listen to me. . . . He came close to me with an incomprehensible hatred and he let loose with rage: “I may stop the recitation, but long live Bin Laden.” (154–55) Erfan’s characters and their nationalities reflect the current state of multicultural occidental societies, their unease, and the failure of the multiculturalist political stance.31 The question of integration and the refusal of Islamism are still open to discussion, of course.32 Today, the intrinsic reflection upon Islamism certainly goes beyond Iran and begs multicultural societies to revisit democratic values and their limits of tolerance in light of dangerous ideologies. Franco-Persian literature unveils its own historical experience and the sources of its antagonism by contemplating them through the gaze of modernity and transculturalism. Not es 1. Ali Erfan, Adieu Ménilmontant (La Tour-d’Aigues: L’Aube, 2005). References to this novel will be given parenthetically in the text. 2. Erfan does not hesitate to refer directly to the tales of Scheherazade: “Morad, or any revolutionary guard back from the front, reminds me of the vizier of the One Thousand and One Nights.” La 602e nuit (Paris: L’Aube, 2000), 29. The oral style of Erfan’s short texts is directly inspired by the tales of the
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One Thousand and One Nights, which are themselves based on an ancient system of oral transfers of tales and fables. According to Vincent Demers, “The assumption therefore is that the tales were born in India and they would have reached Persia orally, where a Hizār Afsana had already been written.” “Les mille et une nuits: Analyse des contes,” April 2000, http://pages.infinit .net/vdemers/nuits.html. 3. Ali Erfan, “L’enfer paradisiaque d’Ali Erfan,” interview with Mathieu Lindon, Libération Livres, November 14, 1996, http://www.liberation.fr/ livres/0101197782-l-. 4. Olivier H. Bonnerot, La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle: De l’image au mythe (Paris: Champion-Slatkine, 1988), 251. 5. This is similar to a film like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), where the significance of apparently unrelated scenes emerges out of the slowly revealed links between them that together complete the whole puzzle. 6. Paulo Coelho, L’Alchimiste (Paris: Anne Carrière, 1988). 7. Goli Taraghi, interview with the author, March 2012. 8. “Persian poetry is perhaps the most brilliant and richest expression of the Iranian genie. Born over a century ago, it’s developed without interruption to the present. Persian, an Indo-European language spoken by Muslim peoples, has been strongly subjected to Arabic influence. Persian poetry, at the beginning, was inspired by Arabic poetry. However, it attaches itself, through more subtle links, with literatures of pre-Islamic Iran.” Zabihollah Safâ, ed., Anthologie de la poésie persane (XIe–XXe siècle) (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 9. 9. “It is like a mental schema that invests the writing in a diffusive manner. What differentiates oral literature from written literature is the ‘performance,’ the execution of the narration in front of an audience (naqqâli). This art imposes a thematic and formal structuration specific to the material: it’s this model that prints its mark in the written novel in the Book of Kings. Once written, the Book of Kings was once again transmitted orally thanks to the story tellers.” Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, “L’épopée iranienne: Le Livre des Rois de Ferdowsi,” in Epopées du monde: Pour un panorama (presque) général (HAL Open Archive, 2010), 19, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00651452/ document. 10. Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris: Quadrige, 2007), 97. For comparison, see the novels of Henri Lopes and Ahmadou Kourouma. 11. The narrator also places himself outside of the text. See “the intrusion of the narrator or of the extra-diegetic narrator in the diegetic universe (or diegetic characters in a metadiagetic universe),” in Gérard Genette, Figures III: Discours du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 244 (author’s translation). 12. Erfan, La 602e nuit, 21. 13. Erfan, Ma femme est une sainte (Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 2005), 15.
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14. Erfan, La 602e nuit, 127. 15. Ibid., 15‒16. 16. Ṣamad Bihrangī, Talkhūn va Chand Qiṣṣa-i Dīgar (Tehran: Mu’assasa-yi Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 1970). 17. Erfan, La 602e nuit, 119. Ghulām translates into “slave boy.” 18. Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 123. 19. “The major principle of poetry thus offered in the discussion is that poetic language defines itself, with relation to prose, as a gap with regards to a norm, and so . . . poetry can be defined as a stylistic genre, studying and measuring characteristic deviations, not of an individual, but of a genre of language, which is to say quite precisely of what Barthes proposed to name a piece of writing. . . . Poetry does not deviate from rules of prose as free verse with relation to a constant theme, it steals and transgresses, and it is contradiction itself: poetry is anti-prose.” Genette, Figures II, 127. 20. Daryush Shayegan, La lumière vient de l’Occident (Paris: L’Aube, 2001). 21. From the back cover of Erfan’s novel, referring to the detachment of thought from the Neoplatonic ideals and its affiliation to a modern vision— terrestrial and materialist. 22. Ibid., 194. 23. Ibid., 186. 24. Referring to Bergson’s concept in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 4th ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1889). 25. Neologism created in 1977 by Serge Doubrovsky, literary critic and novelist, to designate his novel Son. 26. Goli Taraghi, La maison de Shemiran, trans. Leyli Daryouch (Paris: Actes Sud, 2003). 27. The choice of the “old lady” who looks for complicity with the Iranian exile may refer to a trend in Iranian nationalism that claims the Aryan origins of Iranians (“Iran” literally translates to “the land of the Aryans”). Historically and politically speaking, the Iranian government was pro-Nazi during the Second World War. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Par-delà le bien et le mal [Beyond good and evil], trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913), aphorism 146. 29. The concept of de-territorialization is developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in L’Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972). 30. On the notion of “discourse” according to Foucault, see Paul Veyne, Foucault, sa pensée, sa personne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008). 31. For example, the media discourse on the German chancellor Angela Merkel, on “the failure of multiculturalism in Germany.” 32. Nadia Kiwan, “Le refus de l’hybridité culturelle chez les femmes musulmanes en France et en Grande-Bretagne: Repli communautaire ou esquisse d’un projet politique?” Les Cahiers du MIMMOC 4 (2007), http:// mimmoc.revues.org/306.
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Ref e rences Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. 4th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1889. Bihrangī, Ṣamad. Talkhūn va Chand Qiṣṣa-i Dīgar. Tehran: Mu’assasa-yi Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 1970. Bonnerot, Olivier H. La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée française au XVIIIe siècle Paris: Champion-Slatkine, 1988. Coelho, Paulo. L’Alchimiste. Paris: Anne Carrière, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. L’Anti-Œdipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Erfan, Ali. Adieu Ménilmontant. La Tour-d’Aigues: L’Aube, 2005. ———. La 602e nuit. Paris: L’Aube, 2000. ———. Les damnées du paradis. Paris: L’Aube, 2002. ———. Ma femme est une sainte. Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 2005. Feuillebois-Pierunek, Eve. “L’épopée iranienne: Le Livre des Rois de Ferdowsi.” In Epopées du monde: Pour un panorama (presque) général. HAL Open Archive, 2010. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ hal-00651452/document. Genette, Gérard. Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. ———. Figures III: Discours du récit. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Kiwan, Nadia. “Le refus de l’hybridité culturelle chez les femmes musulmanes en France et en Grande-Bretagne: Repli communautaire ou esquisse d’un projet politique?” Les Cahiers du MIMMOC 4 (2007). http:// mimmoc.revues.org/306. Moura, Jean-Marc. Littérature francophone et théorie postcoloniale. Paris: Quadrige, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Par-delà le bien et le mal [Beyond good and evil]. Translated by Henri Albert. Paris: Mercure de France, 1913. Safâ, Zabihollah, ed. Anthologie de la poésie persane (XIe–XXe siècle). Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Théorie des genres. Paris: Seuil, 1986. Shayegan, Daryush. La lumière vient de l’Occident. Paris: L’Aube, 2001. Taraghi, Goli. La maison de Shemiran.Translated by Leyli Daryouch. Paris: Actes Sud, 2003. Veyne, Paul. Foucault, sa pensée, sa personne. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008.
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