A family thriller, Seeds of the wild fig treeby Mohammad Rasoulof, masterful, oppressive and caught up in the movement “Women, Life, Freedom”, which has just marked the two-year anniversary of its courageous emergence and bloody repression. It can also be seen in theaters Tatamico-directed by Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi and Israeli Guy Nattiv. It tells the story of a judoka who is pressured by the government to knowingly lose a fight, so as not to take the risk of facing an Israeli judoka, and therefore having to shake her hand – the complete opposite of sportsmanship, we must agree.
Iranian Women Writers and Heroines
While Iranian cinema regularly receives honors from major festivals, critics and the public, Iranian literature is more confidential and deserves a spotlight. In this case, I took out two Iranian writers from my library. The first is Zoyâ Pirzâd. Born in 1952, she is also the Persian translator from Alice in Wonderland as well as Japanese poetry, which is not very surprising since her collections of short stories offer a certain kinship with, for example, the short novels of the Canadian-Japanese Aki Shimazaki. We find there the same limpidity, a way of writing by tableau, and the art of seizing a detail in one story to deploy it in another. Thus, in The bitter taste of persimmonsit features several heroines prey to the illusions and disillusionments of life as a couple, keeping them under a hushed but constant pressure. These short stories offer a stroll through Tehran, open the doors of homes, kitchens, because the fragrant dishes circulate there like relational stakes, sometimes causing stains that one of the heroines, Leila, strives to make disappear with a comical, and of course metaphorical, stubbornness. The anchoring in the country, the customs, the scents is sensitive, and the references are both Persian and European. Cinema, for example, is very present, through John Wayne, Alain Delon, Romy Schneider or even Fellini Roma. We find this same delicious mix of culture with familiar and unfamiliar taste in Nasim Marashi, considered the heir of Zoyâ Pirzad – she was born in 1985 and is also a journalist. Her first novel, Autumn is the last seasonis a polyphony where we follow three friends: Leyla, Shabaneh and Rodja. One is going through a romantic breakup (her husband left Iran for abroad and she did not follow him), the other does not know if she is in love, but is very concerned about her disabled younger brother whom she adores, and the third is trying to get a visa for France, where she wants to do her doctorate.
Dissonance of personal aspirations with political reality
Let’s read an excerpt from Nasim Marashi’s novel. “Mum offered me a borage tea, but I refused. It’s not like I’m taking the university entrance exam. It’s just an appointment at the embassy, it’ll all be over by noon. But I didn’t sleep a wink, even though I had gone to bed early. That’s probably why. I tried to look at it first The Big Lebowskifor the third time. Then I gave up. What’s the point when I have to get up at four thirty in the morning? (…) I couldn’t stand the feel of the sheets on my skin any longer. I sat up, got up. Always the same nightmare of not waking up and arriving late at the embassy. (…) As soon as my eyelids drooped, little springs immediately lifted them up, eyes wide open. Yesterday, I couldn’t stop humming a song by Cohen. In fact, after seeing QuillsI was in such a state that I blasted Leonard Cohen in the car. Since last night, that damn song has been stuck in my head. And then everything got mixed up: Cohen is still singing, and I’m in a nightmare, with blood everywhere, on prison walls, and all that kind of crap. I wish I could take my brain out and scrub it down. Maybe with all the scrubbing, what’s stuck will eventually disappear down the sink.”
Here we hear, in the course of a sentence, the terror of a political situation which defies the normality to which these women aspire, and which we find in the films cited at the beginning of this column.
Bibliographic references
The bitter taste of persimmons by Zoyâ Pirzâd and Autumn is the last season by Nasim Marashi are both delightfully translated from Persian by Cristophe Balaÿ who left us last year, and are published by Zulma, a publishing house open to the world that we salute here.
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