Early in 2015, Divar (The Wall), the first novel by ʿAli Reza Gholami, a professional journalist, was published by Morvarid publishing house. Soon after the work’s release, it was hailed as “the most exceptional novel in the field of Holy Defense”Footnote 1 and a work “with a unique style, that offers a fresh and novel narrative about the matter of war.”Footnote 2 This article offers a close reading of Gholami’s novel to highlight the grounds for its unique narrative quality and literariness. As will be explained at length in the course of this article, the specific narrative quality of Gholami’s novel defies the dichotomies of the production and reception of war literature in contemporary Iran and, instead, encourages and engages the reader in the generation of the novel’s plural and dynamic meanings. This reading is informed by Andrew Gibson’s reflections on the necessity of refashioning the geometry of narrative constructs, both in creation of stories and their criticism. The premise is that it is only through redefining the dimensions of the narrative world that rigid and violent (narrative) spaces can be liberated from the shackles of authoritative truth. As we shall see, reading and discussing Gholami’s novel is barely possible without acknowledging the constant presence of immutable geometrical conceptions exerting their ultimate power on the protagonist and the entire narrative space. Through stretching and re-dimensioning the narrative geometry of Divar, the reader will both discover and actively participate in the creation of fresh interpretive possibilities regarding the novel and, by extension, the Holy Defense culture. This article opens with the contextualization of Gholami’s novel against the discursive background of Holy Defense culture and the production and reception of Iranian war fiction, and then proceeds with a close textual analysis of the novel, commenting on the way the narrative communicates its meaning to the reader.
Truth Matters
The term Holy Defense—or Sacred Defense—is the translation of the Persian term defaʿ-e moqaddas, which refers to the Islamic Republic’s cultural and ideological characterization of the eight-year-long war between Iran and Iraq (1980–88). It foregrounds the wartime era as a decisive identity-making period in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Throughout the years since the outbreak of the war, the maxims inherent in the official narrative of the Holy Defense have been actively promoted by the state through different means ranging from ad hoc and random verbal and visual propaganda to more systematic and long-term projects such as educational curricula and institutionalized art, including the field officially identified as the literature of the Holy Defense.Footnote 3
Articles about Divar and the subsequent interviews with its author reiterate the familiar discussions about the literature of the Iran–Iraq war in Iran’s literary arena today and center on the often-commented-on issues regarding war and Holy Defense literature. The two questions addressed in this article—whether Gholami’s work falls into the genre of Iranian war literatureFootnote 4 and to what extent his novel mirrors the reality of the warFootnote 5—accordingly reflect the gist of the immediate critical attention to the novel Divar right after its publication. Both questions address the heated debate about the so-called narrative “truth” of the Iran–Iraq war in Iran’s postrevolutionary cultural context in an attempt to file Gholami’s work under either of the dichotomous categories regarding the literary representation of the Iran–Iraq war: is Gholami’s novel faithful to the institutionalized ideology of the Holy Defense reproducing its sacred truth in narrative literature? Or does it give a detailed realistic and humanistic account of the Iran–Iraq war despite the state’s severe disapproval of the cultural desacralization of the values of the Holy Defense? Even a cursory reading of the novel dismisses the former category as irrelevant for Divar. Gholami’s novel is far from a propagandist and monological piece of literature. Yet, compared to successful and well-praised samples of anti-propagandist and realistic war literature such as Ahmad Dehqan’s Safar beh gara-ye 270 darajeh (Journey to Heading 270 Degrees) (1996),Footnote 6 Gholami’s novel demonstrates a significant deviation from literary realism in its twenty-four-hour portrayal of a small town under Iraqi airstrikes and its fourteen-year-old protagonist.
The abovementioned highly reductive categorization of ideological war literature versus realistic war literature is only possible if one consciously decides to disregard the multifold nuances of the representation of war in Iranian contemporary literature as well as its controversial critical reception. Nevertheless, most of the available secondary sources discussing the literature of the Iran–Iraq war demonstrate a consensus regarding the existence of these two basic tendencies in Iranian war narratives to date. Ghanoonparvar, commenting on Iranian war literature mainly produced by war veterans, summarizes the matter by observing that “two contending histories of the Iran–Iraq War are being written, each claiming to tell the true story of that war.”Footnote 7
In the case of Gholami’s novel, however, this clear-cut dualism is disturbed, not necessarily because of the imprecise and ambiguous nature of this classification, but rather due to the fact that Gholami has introduced a belated exception into the bipolar narrative discourse of the Iran–Iraq war literature in 2015. On the back cover of his book and in several interviews, Gholami indicates with emphasis that “the foundation of his story is not based on reality”Footnote 8 and that his work “is a story. It is not history. It is not a documentary work either.”Footnote 9Divar, in other words, manages to escape the dualistic logic of the ideological/realistic by making no claim to any kind of truth. Of course, this explicit and emphatic denegation of facticity being an inherent element of the novel can also be read as the author’s all-events-fictitious disclaimer to avoid any legal liability or, rather, the possibility of ideological inquisitions by the regime. However, a closer look at the story of Divar and its constituent elements exposes its carefully crafted narratological construct. In other words, Gholami’s novel, well phrased by one of his interviewers, is the result of “imaginary documentations”Footnote 10 rather than a fictionalized version of an experienced or autobiographical reality.
This issue is relevant to the discussion at hand insofar as the production of Iranian war literature is linked to a tradition of memoir and/or fiction writing by soldiers and war veterans whose autobiographical or fictionalized accounts of the war have always had their source in the reality of the war and the writers’ immediate experience of the battlefield.Footnote 11 Reflecting on this issue in an article on the literature of the Iran–Iraq war, Ghanoonparvar observes the “reverse” narratological process of the formation of Iranian war literature:
Writers of fiction often rely on their imagination in their work, and professional writers are able to recreate scenes, events, and incidents of actual or imagined wars by imagining them. In contrast, some of those who experience war first hand, especially as combat soldiers, write about those experiences using the format of memoirs, and on occasion in the form of novels and short stories. The creative process for these veterans who have become writers of fiction is the reverse to that of what I have called professional writers. They fictionalize the actual traumatic events they have experienced.Footnote 12
ʿAli Reza Gholami’s Divar, in this respect, can be regarded as an atypical example of Iranian war literature. In Ghanoonparvar’s terms, therefore, Gholami can be identified as a “professional writer” of Iranian war literature whose detailed account of a war situation is not based on firsthand experience but is rather created through an imaginative, selective, and highly technical process.
I would like to emphasize, at this point, that by the term “professional writers” I am exclusively limiting myself to Ghanoonparvar’s usage of the term in the above excerpt. That is, I am using the term as an indicator of the direction of the “creative process.” The adjective “professional,” in this case, does not refer to the primary occupation of the person who has written the piece, nor does it necessarily refer to the literary quality of the work produced. It only refers to the primary source of the subject of narration, which, in the context of Iranian war fiction, both in the production of run-of-the-mill memoirs and in the creative process of well-written stories, is the writer’s firsthand experience of the physical reality of the war.
Most writers of Iranian war fiction—including writers who have produced artistic works with literary value—have witnessed the war firsthand in one way or another; examples are Ahmad Mahmud, Shahriyar Mandanipur, Qazi Rabihavi, Amir Hasan Cheheltan, Hoseyn Mortezaʾiyan Abkenar, Habib Ahmadzadeh, Mohammad Reza Bayrami, Ahmad Dehqan, and Ahmad Gholami. Most of these writers participated in the war as soldiers, or they have lived in war-stricken areas; they have visited and experienced the warfronts during the war or have voluntarily taken residence in the war zone to create their literary works.Footnote 13 The physical reality of the war, in their work, has then been transformed to represent either the ideological truth of the war or its realistic or documentary truth—and in some cases both.Footnote 14 At any rate, the claim to truth and reality seems to be a recurrent defining feature of the discourse shaping the production and reception of war fiction in Iran;Footnote 15 and, of course, one of the undeniable reasons for this phenomenon is the presence of the war as a historical reality and the writers’ confrontation with that historical moment. Yet it is interesting to see how even writers of symbolic and highly metaphorical works of war fiction like Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Hoseyn Mortezaʾiyan Abkenar, to name two ideologically contrasting examples, still feel the urge to define their literary works—works that in principle deviate from realistic representation—in terms of an existing mode of reality rather than as fictive and mere narrative constructs.
Makhmalbaf describes his own narrative style as “monbaʿes az Qorʾan,” that is, derived from the Quran, and as a mixture of “vaqeʿgarayi va fara-vaqeʿgarayi,” that is, a mixture of realism and ultra-realism. He defines his narrative style as representative of a Quranic reality where man and God used to have a common and shared life (“ensan va khodavand hayati moshtarak dashteh[and]”).Footnote 16 This is how Makhmalbaf would explain his pro-Holy Defense ideological symbolism, for example, in a pivotal work like Bagh-e Bolur (Crystal Garden) (1986),Footnote 17 where the exhumed body of a martyr has defied decomposition and emanates a pleasant heavenly scent or where the breasts of the old grandmother are miraculously filled with milk to feed the baby of her martyred son.Footnote 18
In the case of Hoseyn Mortezaʾiyan Abkenar and his anti-ideological novella ʿAqrab ru-ye pelleh-ha-ye rah-ahan-e Andimeshk ya Az in qatar khun michekeh qorban! (Scorpion on the Stairs of the Train Station or Sir, blood Is Dripping Out of This Train!) (2006), the phenomenon is more complicated. The story, referring to the deadly Second Battle of Fav in the April 1988, is in fact set in a zombie-land of martyrs where the wandering dead and the living are placed side by side. The novella closes with one of the characters’ sudden realization of the fact that he has already been martyred. The book opens with the introductory comment that “all the scenes of this novel are real.” Given the fact that the novel actually defies any kind of realism in its representation of characters, setting, and events, the introductory comment gains an added ironical layer of signification.
Ghanoonparvar contrasts the predominant existence of the autobiographical element (or the element of first-hand experience) in the creative process of writing war fiction in Iran to its opposite, that is, to a condition where a war narrative has distanced itself from the physical and temporal reality and immediacy of the war as a historical event. In the book chapter “War Veterans Turned Writers of War Narratives,” he mainly refers to and expands on the former category. This article is pointing to the gradual (and probable) emergence of the latter, of “professional” narratives of the Iran–Iraq war fiction; and ʿAli Reza Gholami’s novel Divar is an example of the case.Footnote 19
Divar is a poignant story about the extreme and indifferent violence of war. The narrative is set in an unspecified small Iranian town under the Iraqi air raids. The linear plot of the novel unfolds through an unnamed, honest, but naïve narrator/protagonist, a neglected boy around the age of fourteen, who relates the horrible events of twenty-four hours of his life during the intensive bombardment of the town, in meticulous yet unsentimental and at times seemingly irrelevant detail. The language of narration remains unadorned throughout the novel. The sentences are rather short; and the use of adjectives is limited to occasional simple words such as “big,” “tall,” “loud,” “bad,” “good,” “happy,” “cold,” etc. The density of painful, improbable calamities and the nightmarish mode of the story create a surreal ambiance that clashes with the simple, objective, and realistic descriptions provided by the young and naïve narrator, leading to a paradoxical effect that reveals the unjustifiable absurdity of the war and its meaninglessness for the civilians. The highly ironic and at times sarcastic style of narration is perceived by the reader but not intended on the level of narrative persona.
The story begins with the narrator’s account of the start of an ordinary afternoon school assembly in late 1980s wartime Iran, with the usual formalities of standing in lines, reciting the Quran, and chanting revolutionary slogans. The ceremony is abruptly interrupted by the bombardment of the town and the sudden death of the school principal from a piece of shrapnel. The chaos brought about by the nearby explosions and the death of the school principal prepares the ground for the protagonist’s twenty-four-hour trivial yet tragic odyssey. In the midst of the confusion, the protagonist manages to steal the presents that were supposed to be given to some deserving students. Afterwards, he leaves the school premises and wanders about. He discovers the mutilated body of his little brother, Jamshid, who has died in the elementary school destroyed by the missile. He looks for and finds the missing leg of the brother among other accumulated dismembered limbs of the deceased. He carries the body and the leg of the dead brother in a wheelbarrow to the graveyard, where he happens to meet his disheveled mother. They dig a grave with their bare hands and bury Jamshid without any obsequies. They return home but do not mention the death of Jamshid to his father, the stepfather of the protagonist, who is disabled and immobile due to a previous air raid during which he has lost both legs. The protagonist goes out and sees Mohammad, a boy from the neighborhood and somewhat hesitantly promises to meet him later to go the Pakistani woman who allegedly “shows stuff for free and only charges five Tomans, if someone wants to touch them.”Footnote 20 In the meanwhile, and before meeting Mohammad again, the narrator finds out that his mother is also now dead in another explosion. He goes back home and sets fire to some old letters and photographs kept by his mother in a yellow envelope. During the burning ritual, we find out about the family history and the fact that the father, a former colleague of the stepfather, was executed in prison a year before the revolution. At this point, filled with hatred, he lets his stepfather know about the deaths of his son and wife, ignores his call for help, and leaves him on his own to his fate. Later, on his quest for the Pakistani woman, the protagonist crosses over some barbed wire into forbidden (military) territory. On the other side of the wire, he is arrested by revolutionary guards, who accuse him of war espionage. Unable to convince the guards of his innocence during the preliminary interrogations, he is finally driven to the Islamic Revolutionary Court heading towards an unknown, but most probably tragic end.
If judged only on the basis of its synopsis and the consecution of its abstracted events, the story of Divar might come across as superficial and melodramatic. Nevertheless, the experience of reading Divar is of a different quality; the work is much more complicated than a content-based story. The language, symbolism, juxtaposed elements, and the narratological construct of the novel are engineered to enhance the reading experience, constantly forcing the reader to be engaged in a process of extra-textual meaning making. The short and simple sentences of the novel function as a sequence of minimalistic snapshots that mediate between the narrated text on the page, the historical reality of wartime Iran, and the state’s ideological construction of the Holy Defense discourse.
Going back to the controversial dichotomy of ideological/realistic representations of the Iran–Iraq war in Iranian literature, it is important to point out that ʿAli Reza Gholami, born in 1978, does not belong to that generation of Iranian writers who have experienced the war firsthand and is not, therefore, one of the so-called “war veterans turned writers of Iranian war narratives.”Footnote 21 The idea of Divar was thus not triggered by the traumatic experience of the war, but, according to the author, by a relatively recent Holy Defense exhibition of wartime photography which had taken place a few years prior to the publication of the novel.
It was about three years ago that I came across an exhibition of Holy Defense photography at the Enqelab-Vesal junction. I was just passing by. The loudspeakers were playing martial music; and a young boy was distributing sherbet. As I was drinking the sherbet, a strange photograph caught my eye. Corpses of a few elementary school children were arranged next to each other. Two guards were standing in front of them. They had set up a railing behind the corpses; over the railings were a lot of men and women standing; everything was frozen in that photograph. They were just looking. If one of those children had survived and could see the corpses, I thought for a moment, what could have been his reaction? This thought kept my mind busy for a while and formed the primal idea of the story.Footnote 22
In the same interview, Gholami also refers to the sources he has consulted for the composition of the novel Divar: newspaper articles, the well-known televised spiritual war documentary Revayat-e Fath (The Narrative of Victory),Footnote 23 and battlefield memoirs, systematically published by Sureh-ye Mehr, a publishing house annexed to the Islamic Arts Center known as Howzeh-ye Honari.Footnote 24 Gholami’s novel, in this sense, is an intertextual and interdiscursive construct. The constituent elements of the novel have been imported from different and at times clashing discourses about the Iran–Iraq war. Documented facts, news, footage, autobiographical records, as well as the spiritual interpretations and representations of the war, modified—to a lesser or greater degree—and made accessible to the public by the ideological apparatus of the state, all function as the building blocks of the novel Divar. Yet, in communicating its unique story, Gholami’s novel is concise and signifies precisely in the manner of the oxymoronic violent peacefulness captured in that framed frozen photograph that primarily inspired its author. It is pictorial in demonstration, silent in its emotional and interpretive language, and dynamic in its literary effect.
“Geometries of Violence”
But Geometry vitrifies space and freezes duration. It ensures the repetition of the identical and the rule of the same … Thus difference cannot be thought within geometrical models.Footnote 25
Reflecting on a theoretical evolution for the conception of a postmodern narratological imaginary,Footnote 26 Andrew Gibson refers to Michel Serres’s theorization of how Euclidean geometry has strictly shaped the structures of our philosophical and critical thought and his emphasis on the necessity of the deconstruction and pluralization of “spaces of [narrative] knowledge” including the “mind” and the “psyche.”Footnote 27 By sketching the historical development of narratology, Gibson asserts that the “geometry of the text and its intelligibility” are “inseparable” and that “For narratology, geometry is a kind of universal law.”Footnote 28 Drawing upon Serres and in pursuing his own aim for fostering a poststructuralist understanding of narratology, Gibson underlines further that:
it is in pluralising all our forms and finally ruining all dogmatisms that we will best resist the political danger of a unified and systematic knowledge … In their subjugation of the local to the global … all unitary spaces are geometries of violence, “blind and closed in on themselves.”Footnote 29
Concisely put, this article is the study of the Serres-Gibsonian “geometries of violence” in the narratological structure of ʿAli Reza Gholami’s novel Divar. It is intended to offer a textual analysis of the novel, with a particular focus on its narratological complexities and its configuration of narrative space and meaning. The analysis will elaborate on how the dialogical literary effect and the extra-textual meaning of the story are largely dependent on the geometrical re-dimensioning of its narrative construct and the reader’s cognitive involvement in re-shaping the story’s narrative geometry.
Angular, Circular, “Blind and Closed in on Itself”
Divar consists of 143 pages in thirteen chapters. It opens not with narrative utterance, but with visual sketches. The spatial setting of the narrative is complemented by a hand-drawn rudimentary map of the protagonist’s unnamed small town of residence. The act of narration in each chapter is preceded by the visual symbol of a round clock indicating the exact moment of the protagonist’s narrative articulation in that particular chapter.
The map of the town is illustrated in parallel lines and right-angled shapes, six of which are appointed with a number and identified in the map legend. The locations include: (1) The Narrator’s School, (2) The Deaf-Mute School (the school of the narrator’s brother attacked by the first air raid), (3) Jahan-Abad (the graveyard), (4) Bahman Hall (where the narrator finds the mutilated body of his little brother Jamshid), (5) The Narrator’s House (including the neighboring houses), and (6) Mr. Farzaneh’s Grocery Shop. The names of the five main streets and a territory referred to as Barbwire Fields (zamin-ha-ye sim-khardar), located at the upper margin of the town, are written on the map itself.
The act of narration starts at 12:30, indicated by the round clock symbol before the opening of the first chapter. The clock of the closing chapter displays 12:25. Since the durations of the narrated and narrating times of the last chapter do relatively correspond, it can be concluded that the narrative time of the novel extends to exactly twenty-four hours, providing the narrative with a classically symbolic quality.
Apart from the strict compartmentalization of the spatial setting of the novel through the introductory croquis of the town, the text of the story is filled with recurrent references to right-angled shapes and frames, parallel and straight lines, and cubical spaces. The protagonist of the story meanders through the maze-like angular setting of the narrative articulating his objective but half-informed descriptions of his intensely ideological surroundings. By the end of the story, a gestalt is formed connecting the said to the unsaid.
The first chapter of the novel covers a detailed account of the protagonist’s afternoon school assembly, a very brief reference to the sound of the sudden explosion, and the school principal, Mr. Rasuli, tumbling down the platform. References to geometrical forms start within the first three lines of the story, where the narrator initiates his extended description of the daily ritual concerning how the students are supposed to form and stand in lines before the normal school syllabus begins.
Once a week, Mr. Rasuli would speak about the importance of [standing in] lines. He would say if we want to improve, we should value [standing in] lines more than anything else. In order to form the lines, we would have to stand on some yellow lines that were drawn on the ground of the school courtyard. I had counted them once during the break. They were 13. There were 12 classes in the school though; and line number 13 was used for special purposes.
[…] No one’s foot was supposed to cross the line; because it would be regarded as transgression [(tamarrod, in the Persian text)] and Mr. Rasuli would not tolerate it. I do not know the meaning of this word. But whoever committed transgression [(tamarrod)], would have to leave his line and stand on line number 13.Footnote 30
The scheme of the entire narrative can be traced in the above excerpt from the early pages of the novel. The passage replicates a minimalistic abstraction of the narrative setting of Divar, the laws prevailing in it, and the characteristics of the narrator/protagonist reflecting and acting within it. The simple and sketchy lines of this outline grow in dimension and sharpen in detail as the narrative develops and the protagonist approaches his horrible destiny, a denouement the probability of which is already hinted at in this passage. Symbolically approached, the text signifies the exhausting quality of ideology and its inflexibility. Repetition and immutability are communicated not only through linguistic elements such as the adverb of frequency “once a week” and the imperfective verb forms implying the monotony of a routine,Footnote 31 but also through the graphic composition of the text. The repetition of straight and parallel lines serves as a symbol for the forced order and the necessity of the identical. The universal law of order, regarding the utmost “importance of lines” is conveyed through the prophetic figure of Mr. Rasuli surveilling the semi-military formation of the students from an elevated position on a platform. The ambivalent act of “transgression” (tamarrod), meaningless and unspecified for the protagonist, is to result in ostracism and punishment in a designated space “for special purposes,” the ominous line number 13, where the reader can expect the protagonist to end up. Ideology reigns in this passage; it forces its right-or-wrong logic upon the subject and disciplines through its threatening truth.
What is missing from the excerpt above—in relation to the entirety of the story—is the constant presence of the war situation, an element of the narrative plot that intensifies only after the first chapter of the novel. Nevertheless, there are a few textual cues signaling the historical adjacency of the narrated events of the novel to wartime Iran prior to the closing lines of the first chapter where the explosion discloses the temporal setting of the narrative in a more explicit manner. These cues are: the first official national anthem of the Islamic Republic of Iran sung in chorus by the students during the flag ceremony,Footnote 32 the content of the slogans and the prayer lines referring to the Soviet Union, Saddam, the Iranian soldiers, and the martyrs of the war,Footnote 33without mentioning Khomeini as the deceased leader of the Islamic revolution. The huge wartime mural of the “Emam” (Ayatollah Khomeini) has a live and commanding presence during the ceremonies.Footnote 34
After the flag [ceremony], it would be the time for the slogans. In the afternoon assemblies, we were supposed to chant three times down-with-America, three times down-with-the-Soviets, and finally, three times down-with-Saddam … Our feet were not allowed to cross the yellow line. … We were allowed though to turn our heads towards the picture of the Emam. I would always look into the eyes of the Emam who was staring at faraway places with a seemingly calm look. He was not looking at us.Footnote 35
The constellation of different elements captured in this passage adds another dimension to the ideological setting of the narrative. The element of the Iran–Iraq war is brought to the fore by the hostile slogans directed against Saddam Hussein, whose denigrated and decaying figure is juxtaposed to the gigantic presence of Ayatollah Khomeini on the wall, framed in a mural “taller than an entire storey.”Footnote 36 The juxtaposition highlights the frontal line between the two parties involved in the war for the benefit of the Iranian side. The idea of the Holy Defense is suggested by the image of military antagonism acted out by the students standing in lines and the direction of the protagonist’s longing look turning up towards the “seemingly calm” and godlike image of Khomeini. At the end of the paragraph, however, an agitating effect is created on the part of the reader by following the visual perspective of the protagonist through text. The narrative focalization is disturbed. The protagonist is struggling in vain to focalize on the eyes of the Emam, who is simply “not looking” back at him. The intended focalization fails. The “seemingly calm look” might shockingly signify not serenity but blind indifference. The anxiety about line number 13 continues: the “feet were not allowed to cross the yellow line.”
As pointed out earlier, the passages mentioned above represent a rough outline of Gholami’s narrative in its entirety. The images, concepts, and symbols highlighted in these two excerpts will be reiterated and reinforced throughout the rest of the novel. Each repetition accentuates and illuminates issues that are not explicitly narrated within the text but achieve signification only in relation to the other constituent elements of the narrative and through insinuating extra-textual meanings.
The Framed Omnipresence and the Ominous Number 13
One of the repetitive patterns in Divar is the narrator/protagonist’s momentary references to the large and full-height images of Ayatollah Khomeini set up in frames and murals throughout the entire narrative setting. There are eleven such moments in the work; and they are relatively evenly distributed in the text of the narrative. The first case emerges on the opening page of the novel and the last one on the penultimate page.Footnote 37 Not only is the same content reproduced in these patterns but they also reiterate the same narrative effect. In all cases, the reference to the image of the Emam is followed by the narrator/protagonist’s comment on the direction of the portrait’s eyes; and since the protagonist has once mentioned that “he would always look into the eyes of the Emam” who is never looking back at him,Footnote 38 it can be inferred that in each confrontation, by commenting on the direction of the Emam’s gaze, the protagonist implies a hope for some eye contact. These moments are meaningful in the novel. Other than the two references in the first chapter, where the pattern is being introduced, in all the other cases the image of the Emam is contrasted to catastrophic situations. In Bahman Hall, for example, the reference to the image of the Emam coincides with the description of the bodies of little children laid next to each other for identification.Footnote 39 Or, at the entrance of the graveyard, the passage is followed by the portrayal of screaming mothers carrying the bodies of their little children into the graveyard.Footnote 40 This pattern fulfills a function on the narratological level. The protagonist’s searching gaze attempting to focalize on the eyes of Ayatollah Khomeini creates a pause in the narrator’s flow. By the term pause, I do not mean a moment of silence, but rather a change in the quality of narration. On these occasions, the naivety of the narrator is supplemented by an undeveloped sense of doubt. It is as if the protagonist’s focalizing eye is complemented by the reader’s insight. The fourth wall into the narrative geometry of the story is broken in these moments. The reader becomes a functional part of the fictional world, adding to the content of the written text.
In all the eleven instances of this pattern in Divar, the image of Khomeini is looking in random directions, leaving the protagonist out of sight. He is either looking at “faraway places” (durdast-ha)Footnote 41 or “downward” (payin)Footnote 42 or “to the front” (ru-beh-ru)Footnote 43 but never into the eyes of the protagonist. There is only one occasion where the eyes of the two meet.
I noticed that there was a full-height picture of the Emam on the wall. … His right leg was slightly further ahead than the left; it was as if he was about to step towards me. He was looking to the front, but seemed tired and calm. I drooped my head and when I lifted it up again, I noticed that the Emam was still looking at me. I went and stood in a corner.Footnote 44
This passage is related to the moment when the protagonist has already been arrested by the revolutionary guards after crossing into the Barbwire Fields. He is in detention in a dimly lit and empty room. The protagonist and the kinetic “full-height picture of the Emam on the wall” are facing each other in the cubic and cage-like space of the room; the protagonist feels cornered like a little creature. The act of “transgression” is completed. The protagonist still does not have the slightest clue about the nature of his transgression, or why he has been arrested. Scrutinized under the attacking and vengeful eye of the authority, the protagonist already belongs in the zone of punishment, on line number 13.
The significance of line number 13 in Gholami’s story is not limited to the connotations regarding the ominousness of the number 13. The meaning of number 13 in Divar is developed through a fractal repetition hinting at the outer margins of the story’s narrative geometry. Both the story and the destiny of its protagonist in the novel are concluded—with an open ending—in chapter 13 of the book. Apart from this, after crossing over the barbed wires and committing the ambivalent act of transgression, the protagonist is taken to an unidentified location in the spatial setting of the narrative. There are exactly twelve specified locations on the introductory map of the town (reminding one of the twelve existing classes at school); and the protagonist ends up in the unknown space of location number 13 (resembling the line number 13 for the transgressed). Moreover, by the end of the story the clock is moving towards 13 o’clock.
There are two repetitive elements in Gholami’s novel with a carefully crafted symbolic function. The first is the repetition of the gigantic framed images of Ayatollah Khomeini throughout the narrative setting centralized on walls representing power and omnipresence—the “wall” (divar in Persian) being the very location of the plot conflict and hence the title of the novel. The second is the reiteration of number 13, always referring to the margins of the narrative setting, the terminal points of the narrative’s space and time, where and when the act of punishment is implemented. The combination of these two repetitive elements juxtaposed to the lifeless and mutilated bodies of children in the wartime setting and to the helpless condition of the teenage protagonist calls to mind the image of Hoseyn Fahmideh and his iconic significance within the discourse of the Holy Defense. According to official accounts, in the beginning months of the Iran–Iraq war, in the fall of 1980, a thirteen-year-old boy by the name of Mohammad Hoseyn Fahmideh was allegedly successful in “halting an entire division of advancing tanks” by wrapping himself in grenades and blowing “himself up under an Iraqi tank.” According to Ayatollah Khomeini, the “13-year-old child who threw himself under the enemy’s tank with a grenade and destroyed it” is “our leader” (rahbar-e ma).Footnote 45
It is interesting to note that the original mural of Hoseyn Fahmideh was composed of exactly the same individual elements as those mentioned regarding the novel Divar. It had been painted on the sidewall of a multistorey building. In the middle of the mural, there was a portrait of a teenage boy with a grim countenance. The image of Ayatollah Khomeini had covered the entire background in slightly blurred colors, providing it with the qualities of a spiritual and omnipresent existence. The two portraits rise up from within a battlefield in the midst of explosions. Ayatollah Khomeini’s quote about Hoseyn Fahmideh having drunk “the sweet elixir of martyrdom” (sharbat-e shahadat) appears on the top of the mural; at the bottom, it is stated that “Fahmideh is one the values of the Holy Defense era.”Footnote 46
The crucial point in understanding the dynamic literary effect of Gholami’s Divar is the fact that there are neither direct nor indirect references to the narrative of Hoseyn Fahmideh in the entire text of the novel. Nevertheless, Gholami’s story, ironically inspired by a Holy Defense exhibition and having grown from within that same culture, manages to destabilize the iconic singular position of Fahmideh’s narrative in the Holy Defense discourse through emblematic representation and by relying on the cognitive knowledge of his reader. It is as if the author has taken the constituent elements of Fahmideh’s narrative and rearranged them with a different geometrical logic. The singular image of Fahmideh has been multiplied in the image of the lifeless children. These children are not part of the portrait but are situated in front of it, outside of it, and in a lower position in relation to it, longing for eye contact, longing for a dialogue with the framed frozen photograph on the wall.
The Dialogue and the Outer Margins
Divar, taken at face value, is a strictly geometrical narrative, both in the sense that its setting and motifs are consolidated through a large number of rigid geometrical conceptions, and in Gibson’s sense as an ideological and “unitary space” afflicted by “violence” and threatened by “the political danger of a unified and systematic knowledge.”Footnote 47 The story, however, exposed to the act of reading and to the cognitive involvement of its reader, reorganizing and expanding its narrative geometry, becomes generative of plural meanings and unsettling narratives. Despite the absurdly tragic closure of the novel and the constant communicative deadlock between the protagonist and the authoritative image on the wall, the narrative of Divar defies a definitive denouement. Gholami’s novel does not offer “no-dialogue” as its narrative conclusion. However, the dialogue in Divar does not take place on the story level, either. The plot of the novel—reduced into its narrative events, characters, and actions—represents and conveys a story of struggle, injustice, and victimhood. It is only through extending the narrative geometry of the novel into its adjacent, outer margins that the novel starts to exert its dynamic literary effect. The dialogue in Divar is brought forth through the constant interplay of a series of juxtapositions among three narrative portraits pertaining to the Iran–Iraq war: (1) the image of the so-called real, the documentary photograph that, according to Gholami, has inspired the creation of the novel, (2) the ideological mural of Fahmideh’s narrative discussed above, and (3) the novel itself, created through the rearrangement of the constituent elements of the other two pictorial representations.
Some of these portraits are themselves embedded within other frames and thereby gain multifold meanings through re-representation. The fact that the inspirational documented photograph of the dead children has been represented in the larger frame of a Holy Defense exhibition, for instance, provides the image in question with yet another layer of meaning. The contrast between the celebrated social event, set against a background of invigorating martial music, and the framed image of inanimate lifeless children, for example, intensifies the tragic effect, emphasizes the absurdity of the war, and questions the very culture that glorifies it. This unsettling paradox was definitely not intended by this particular propagandist Holy Defense exhibition; yet the paradoxical twist concerning the captured catastrophe would not have been possible in a straightforward anti-war or anti-Holy Defense exhibition.
With the same logic, if we consider the author’s creation of the story Divar as a reflection upon, or rather a reframing of the photograph of the lifeless children in that exhibition, it is particularly of interest to note how certain components of this image have been reflected, rendered, and have acquired new significations in Gholami’s narrative. I once again quote part of Gholami’s account of how he was inspired to compose his narrative, for the reader’s convenience:
The loudspeakers were playing martial music; and a young boy was distributing sherbet. As I was drinking the sherbet, a strange photograph caught my eye. Corpses of a few elementary school children were arranged next to each other. Two guards were standing in front of them. They had set up a railing behind the corpses; over the railings were a lot of men and women standing; everything was frozen in that photograph. They were just looking.Footnote 48
Variations of the same constellation—i.e. setups, composed of the same individual elements at the exhibition, such as the children, a war situation, railings, etc.—are repeated several times in the text of the novel.Footnote 49 The following excerpt refers to the moment when the narrator and the next-door neighbor, Khaleh Nahid, have entered the sports hall to look for the corpses of the children, those of the narrator’s little brother and the neighbor’s son.
Bahman Hall is for volleyball and basketball games. On the Hall’s wall, there was a big picture of the Emam, who had raised his right hand. They had put up the picture on the wall, exactly in the middle of the two teams. Underneath [the picture], it was written We would defend Khomeini, the iconoclast [(botshekan)], until the last drop of our blood. Khaleh Nahid and I were standing in front of the picture; and the Emam was looking downwards.
In the middle of the Hall, they had spread out a plastic sheet and laid the corpses on it. … They had set up a continuous iron railing around the corpses. There were a lot of guards there; they were protecting the railings.Footnote 50
The passage above contains the components of both Fahmideh’s original mural and those mentioned in the author’s account of the inspirational Holy Defense exhibition. The varied constellation in this passage, as we shall see, generates a multifaceted dialogue among the three portraits involved. This dialogue is ultimately capable of unsettling the status of the authority.
The corpses of the children have been taken out of the Holy Defense exhibition and integrated into the space of the sports hall, named after the Persian month of Bahman, a reminder of the victory date of the Islamic Revolution. The sports court is populated not with vigorous and active children but with their inanimate and silent corpses. The full-height picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, set up “on the wall, exactly in the middle of the two teams” with his “raised … right hand” is supposed to signify justice and righteousness but quite ironically fails to do so in juxtaposition with the disfigured corpses of the innocent children lying around.
The propagandist slogan written under the Emam’s picture in Bahman Hall glorifies the soldiers’ desire for martyrdom for the sake of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader (rahbar) of the Revolution. This large image of the Emam is, at the same time, in dialogue with the original mural of Fahmideh. As mentioned earlier, Fahmideh’s figure has been multiplied in the image of the children’s corpses that are banished from the gigantic central image on the wall. But there is still more to the dialogue. According to the ideological narrative, the thirteen-year-old Hoseyn Fahmideh is supposed to be “our leader,” our rahbar,Footnote 51 a term that only refers to the highest authoritative rank in the political and legal structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a term that at the time was only linked with the very person of Ayatollah Khomeini himself and nobody else. But ironically no one was able to “defend” Fahmideh, “our leader,” “until the last drop of [their] blood.” The Fahmidehs of Gholami’s narrative—quite like the historical figure himself—are already dead or, in the case of the protagonist, might have to face execution. The soldiers in the passage above are not defending the leader or the nation. They are busy “protecting the railings” around the dead bodies of little children, an element present both in the documentary exhibited image and Gholami’s text.
Gholami’s description of the inspirational Holy Defense exhibition is also in dialogue with Fahmideh’s original mural and the slogans inscribed on it. By blowing “himself up under an Iraqi tank,” it is stated on the street mural, Fahmideh has drunk the sweet “elixir of martyrdom” (sharbat-e shahadat).Footnote 52 The term elixir, as a metaphor for martyrdom in the Holy Defense culture is a translation for the word “sharbat,” a sweetened cold drink of diluted fruit juice. The image is reiterated in Gholami’s account of the Holy Defense exhibition, where the drink is being offered by a young boy of a later generation as a symbolic reminder of Iranian funeral offerings, in general, and the martyrs’ funerals, in particular. Drinking the symbolic sharbat, the writer of Divar is inspired to create his story of the Iran–Iraq war, a story that through its subtle network of suggested and implicit meanings disturbs the monological discourse of the authority without antagonistic attacks. The story, inspired by and deeply rooted in the Holy Defense culture, scratches the surface of the urban walls that propagate that same ideology. Self-destructiveness is part of the ideological game. The image of the “iconoclast” (botshekan), by the inherent logic of the term, cannot belong on the wall.
Conclusion
Can it be claimed that the production of Iran–Iraq war literature is evolving out of its autobiographicalism as time goes by and as a new and younger generation of writers emerges? Can it be stated that writing about the Iran–Iraq war in Iran is becoming a matter of “professional”Footnote 53 literary creation resulting in narrative constructs that mediate between the experienced realistic truth of the war and devotion to the ideological truth of the Holy Defense? Can it be concluded that the printing policies, censorship, and the general obstacles on the way of literary expression in Iran can all be circumvented by a style of writing that depends more and more on the cognitive knowledge of readers and their role in constructing the gestalt meaning of the literary text? These questions are not easy to answer. For one thing, the literary trend in question, if there is indeed a trend to be identified, is at an early stage of its formation. Only the passage of time will show the direction the Iran–Iraq war literature might take in the future.
But the more complicated and less linear factor in Iran’s publishing system today is the ambiguity of the markers delineating the red zones. What is allowed to be written and what can be criticized or targeted in the literary text and with what degree of clarity has always been a matter of obscure relevance in Iran’s postrevolutionary cultural context.Footnote 54 As observed insightfully by Karimi-Hakkak “Ideological states at times tolerate non-conformist utterances in literature as a way of substantiating their claim to overall tolerance. Certain oppositional stances perceptible in literature are tolerated while others are not.”Footnote 55 I would assume, for example, that if the focalizing eye of the narrator/protagonist of Divar would have targeted the images of the present leader of the Islamic Republic instead of those of the deceased one, the novel would not have received its publishing permit. But does this mean that the revered figure of Ayatollah Khomeini is now no longer strictly off-limits? There is not a definitive answer to this question. But since the present reading of the novel Divar has been closely linked to its outer margins, to the contiguous context conditioning the extra-textual meaning of the narrative, one more point is worth a brief mention.
In 2009, about the time when the upheavals around the presidential elections had taken center stage in Iran’s domestic political affairs, Fahmideh’s mural was repainted and altered. Ayatollah Khomeini’s portrait has been omitted from the new Fahmideh mural.Footnote 56 Whether the decision of altering the mural had to do with the fact that the opposition’s candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was the successful wartime prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1981–89) and a political figure favored by Ayatollah Khomeini is beyond the scope of this article. But even as a coincidence, the alteration of Fahmideh’s mural signifies, if not the unsettling dynamisms within and around the Holy Defense narrative, but at least a refashioning of the values of the Holy Defense discourse.
I would like to express my gratitude to Christoph Werner and Asghar Seyed-Ghorab for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Iranian Studies for their careful reading and insightful comments.
