When Your Next Word Could Be Your Last

Iranian author, Shahriar Mandanipour, spoke out against Iranian censorship.

Now he’s paying the price.

We think of certain occupations as dangerous: window washer for tall buildings; coal miner; fire fighter. In Iran, add to that list, writer. This reality is the material of Shahriar Mandanipour’s life and work, and of each story in the newly released collection, Seasons of Purgatory (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022), stories published (save one) in a batch in Iran during a brief window of semi-tolerance. That window closed in 2009. Shahriar’s two major novels (of his major works available in English translation), Censoring an Iranian Love Story and Moon Brow, are outlawed in Iran. So is Shahriar.

In 1994, Shahriar and 134 writers signed a petition opposing government censorship. Not long after, Shahriar and several fellow writers boarded a bus in Tehran headed, ostensibly, to a writing conference in Armenia. Late that night the bus driver, seeing his passengers asleep, set the bus on a course over a cliff and quietly jumped out. Unbeknownst to that driver Shahriar and another writer were awake and rushed to save the bus, which came to a stop with its front end dangling over a precipice. Shahriar lived to write another day in Iran, the country of his people, his language, and his culture.

However, at the end of a two-year Visiting Professorship at Brown University, from 2011 to 2013, during which time Shahriar gave several talks about Iranian censorship, he was advised, “You mustn’t come back.” It was a life and death choice.

Shahriar remained in the U.S., where he has continued to teach and write, cut off from his lifelong social communities as well as the professional communities he’d held dear throughout his career.

Did you study writing? When did you decide to become a writer?

“When I was in high school…I was sure that I would be a writer… I was reading literature as much as I could…[but] I needed some education in political science, and studied … at Tehran University.”

There are many animals in your stories. Can you speak about an example of that?

In “Shadow of the Cave,” A man …lives with a window that has a view of the zoo, and … notices that [unlike the animals] the people around him are intentionally in… cage[s]. At a deeper level, this goes directly to the regime…which treats people like caged animals.

You refer to your stories as dark. Do you see yourself as a writer of tragedy?

I don’t want to be a dark writer. I would like just to write a beautiful love story, not necessarily even a Hollywood happy-ending love story…not a romantic story…just a story written according to the rules of story writing aesthetics, the essentials of literature, character, setting mood, tone, the elements of craft. [But] the way that the world is, our situation, our existence in the world…”

Can you elaborate on that? Is there hidden hope in the darkness?

As much as you could see the darkness of the world, I think it means [there is] the possibility of … brightness. As much as you see the ugliness, I think it means you know that there is beauty –…That should be somewhere between the lines of my stories. You can write a tragic, bloody,

dark story beautifully because you know the beauties of art. Art explores what remains of the beauty in our world.

Is there something about Iran itself, beyond the specifics of censorship, that has a role in terms of darkness in your work?

Sure. I am affected by that, by living in Iran, [with] our history… there are parts … great conquest[ing] kings, like Cyrus, Nadar Shah, Shah Abbas– but they are the short tail of history…Iran was invaded…Turks, Mongols, Arabs. Our history is full of suffering… just walking in the streets it is all about mourning, sadness, dark clothes, dark flags…sad ceremonies …tears, misery, poverty, particularly in the era of the Islamic Republic, which is not really a republic at all.

You say you believe that a writer must go out in live in the world. How has your life (teaching, travel) affected your work and your process?

I served in the army as a second lieutenant during the Iran-Iraq War, an absurd war. About fourteen months at the front line. War is cruel, disgusting, and a great teacher for each soldier. It is not only about perceiving and feeling death. It is also about touching your existence. For example, when you patrol a minefield, you will figure out that each step could be the last moment you have feet; you feel that your heaviness can cause your death.

I [once] grabbed the wound of my best soldier, and he gripped my arm, asking his life from me. His blood pumped out among my fingers. Hours later, I must eat with that bloody hand.

I had a [writing] rule that I named the 3 to-4 second rule…in the bunker. I could hear the Iraqi shells being discharged. It took three, four seconds for a 120mm mortar shell to reach our line. If it landed on a trench, everyone inside would turn into chopped meat. So I had three to four seconds to add one more word to my story. One word in the distance between life and death, one word that could be my last, and the best word on a piece of paper of my life. In those few seconds, I grasped the weight and value of words. I felt the heart-beat of the words. It has been established in my mind. It has come with me.

Karen Askarinam is a writer living in Maryland. She holds an MA in Literature from American University. Karen has taught writing at the university level and continues to teach students privately and provide editorial services to fellow writers. She is currently earning her MFA in Fiction in Southern New Hampshire University’s Mountainview Program, where she is working on a novel about Iranian Jews in America.