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Portrait of an Artist in Exile: An Interview with Farnoosh Moshiri

By Farnoosh Moshiri

Archives - Dates and Topics

2004 – print

January

Author Farnoosh Moshiri

Editor’s note: Iranian writer Farnoosh Moshiri is the author of two novels, At the Wall of the Almighty (Interlink Publishers) and The Bathhouse (Black Heron Press/Beacon Press). Her recently published collection of short stories is called The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree and was put out by Black Heron Press in October. After the revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979, Moshiri, who had just received her Masters degree in drama from the University of Iowa, returned to Iran. She taught at the College of Dramatic Arts and worked as a dramaturge for the Theatre Division of the Ministry of Culture and Art. She also was politically active and a member of The Council of Writers and Artists of Iran and Women’s Organization. When the fundamentalists seized power by 1981, she was labeled “an enemy of God” and was forced to flee with her two year-old son. “This marked the end of my career as an Iranian playwright,” she says. She teaches college English in Houston, Texas.

PA: Your novels are basically about political repression in Iran. Can you talk about your experiences there?

FM: I spent between 1977 and 1979 at the University of Iowa. When the revolution happened I went to Iran to participate. And as you know, at the beginning, all the groups and the parties and ideas were involved. The Islamic ideology was just one of many. I was a very active person. I was a playwright and also involved in many cultural and political activities. Of course I was a feminist and had Marxist ideas.

But gradually things turned to the right, and Khomeini’s group took absolute power. At first, in the first year-and-a-half of the revolution, there was relative freedom, then they began to arrest the secular activists and intellectuals. So all of my friends were either arrested or disappeared. My life was in danger and I had a baby. So I went underground for a while and then crossed the border and left Iran. We were a small group that crossed the border to Afghanistan in 1981. I lived there for four years.

PA: Your novels for the most part are about imprisonment and the brutality of both the regimes of the Shah and the fundamentalists. Do you see any hope for the main characters who are imprisoned? Or is there a possibility of freedom or liberation?

FM: My first novel, At the Wall of the Almighty, is a very dark one. It is very close to the experience of my friends getting executed. Some of my very close friends and relatives were killed by the regime. This novel is circular. The end goes back to the beginning. It starts with the protagonist being tortured in various parts of the prison, forgetting his name, going through many chambers, meeting people, and ending up with Kamal, the loony torturer again. In my second one, The Bathhouse, a 17 year-old girl is abducted and taken to this old bathhouse, a make shift prison. After experiencing all that horror, she is free to tell the story to everyone else.

At present I’m not very optimistic about the situation in the Middle East. Because we’re living in a time when any change that happens in Iran or other countries of the Middle East is going to be influenced by the US.

I think this is new colonialism. It’s harsh, and it’s extremely dangerous, because they have ties to Christian fundamentalism. I have some experience with religious fundamentalism. It’s very, very dangerous.

PA: The Bush administration seems to think that the only way to affect any change is to attack countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. “Now we’re liberators,” they say. Could you comment on that style of “liberation,” if that is indeed what it is?

FM: I think this is new colonialism. It’s harsh, and it’s extremely dangerous, because they have ties to Christian fundamentalism. I have some experience with religious fundamentalism. It’s very, very dangerous. It brings medieval times to mind. And what the Bush administration is doing is colonizing. They’re interested in countries for their resources. They want to control the world; this is an obvious thing. I’m amazed that the American people don’t see this, they don’t want to see it, or they’re brainwashed by the media, which, in fact, is a state media.

PA: Your first novel, At the Wall of the Almighty, has a magical realist quality. Can you tell me why you chose that form of writing?

FM: I don’t know. It just came this way. I don’t always write magical realism. The whole thing started with a dream that I had. I was relatively new here after four years of exile in Afghanistan and India, and I came here and had a very hard life. I had a recurring dream about long corridors of a prison and my lost comrades. The whole thing came in a dream and well, there’s a lot of homesickness here too. The neighborhood where the protagonist lives is really where I lived, my neighborhood, you know. That part of it is autobiographical. And also, I was not an experienced novelist; I was a playwright before. This was my very first novel. Naively, probably, I thought I could experiment with genres. I have a play within the novel, I have magical realism, I have surrealism, and all that, which I don’t think I’m going to do again [laughs].

And to tell you the truth, I didn’t even know that it was going to get published; I was just writing for myself. And a couple of people read it, and they said, “Are you crazy? You have to send it out.” It took me three years to be able to find a publisher. Nobody, at that time, was interested in what happened in Iran. That was a long time before these incidents; it was the 1990s. Finally, I ended up with a small publisher, and that’s why I never got into the New York Times Review of Books. The novel is dead in fact, unless a publisher wants to reprint it again.

PA: The dream like quality of the novel has a way of being imaginary and at the same time being historical and divulging the social forces at work under the Shah and when the fundamentalists come to power. But there is a scene in the story where the narrator and his sister, make a pact about what they want to do when they get older. As youth, they are outside the prison thinking about their father when they make a pact to work for social justice. Is that pact a reflection of a real phenomenon in Iran, or is it also imaginary?

Thousands of women march in the streets of Terehan following the 1979 revolution to demand equality in the new republic.

FM: Well in a way it is reality and it depends on where one is coming from. I was coming from a family who had very, very strong sense of social justice. I grew up with that mentality. When I was a child, I was thinking about these issues: why some people are so poor and some so rich? When would justice be restored in our society? I remember very well I was in high school at the time of the Shah’s big coronation. He had invited all the presidents and kings from around the world. I was a dancer in a ballet company and they took us to this coronation ceremony to perform. When the carriage passed (the Shah was dressed like Darius the Great and there were horses and golden carriages) everybody stood and hailed him. I didn’t stand up. Later, I thought what a dangerous thing I had done. They could arrest me. But I thought that everything was such a masquerade, everything was such a terrible lie – to the Iranian people. So I didn’t stand up.

I grew up with this kind of political mind. And then I created a narrative on the basis of my own childhood and my feelings about justice.

PA: You lived in Kabul, Afghanistan in the early 1980s. What was that experience like?

FM: I lived there from 1981 to 1985, four years. Afghanistan had a communist government. We were the first refugees who entered Afghanistan. They gave us very decent apartments in the neighborhood where the Soviet advisers were, which, in fact, was a very dangerous place, but it was a guarded neighborhood. There was war in Afghanistan at that time. It wasn’t in the city of Kabul yet, but the fundamentalists were in the mountains. Kabul is surrounded by mountains. And they were throwing bombs and rockets into the city and especially in this area because the Soviets were there. My life was really in danger for four years. We didn’t have any documents to travel out of Afghanistan. We were waiting for the United Nations/Red Cross to issue passports for us. It took close to four years. The refugees were all in one area. We were not allowed to go to the city unless we were in guarded buses. I was working there. They gave me a job. I was working at the University of Kabul as a drama instructor. Life was hard and it was strange. It was curfew all the time. Blizzards. Dust storms. But at the same time I became very close to some Afghan people and when the later bloodsheds happened I experienced the same feelings that I had about my own comrades in Iran. It was another loss and another exile for me.

PA: Your book of short stories came out in October [2003]. What are those stories about?

FM: These stories are all written in the 1990s. I think in the 1990s I was very productive, because I wrote At the Wall of the Almighty and The Bathhouse and a third novel (The Drum-Tower) that is not published yet, and at the same time I wrote several short stories. I’m not like that any more. Teaching full-time has drained me. The short stories are all about the themes of prison, justice and some of the situation of immigrants in the United States who are coming from such a background, not immigrants who come for fortune or comfort. These stories are theme oriented and are one way or another related to one another.

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