Stories about Iran are rarely allowed to remain what they are. They are conscripted and converted into myths by the state, by its enemies, and by satellite studios, think tanks, and well-meaning interpreters who make a living “explaining” a place they have little right to. Salar Abdoh has spent much of his life writing against that conversion; he is a writer who lives inside the story others tell. Abdoh’s fiction returns, again and again, to the ‘layer-on-layer’ nuances of contemporary life in Iran, as it probes the pressure of myth within and beyond the country, the seductions of ideology, and the private costs people pay inside public crises.

I met Abdoh on a January morning in Beirut, a day after he arrived from Iran, twelve days after the Iranian government imposed a nationwide communications blackout in response to mass protests. Our conversation began in a tentative register, shaped by the long habits of Abdoh’s writing life: a slow and intentional wandering through ideas. We spoke about the moral bind of representation and the choice between being seen through the wrong frame and not being seen at all; the uses and abuses of sacred language; the myths a state sells even as bread becomes unaffordable, and the brutality that follows when those myths begin to fray; and the dream of a literary revolution that breaks the frame in which his writing is inevitably seen. 

This interview is a snapshot of that conversation in Beirut, carried out in the space between departure and arrival, with a writer who left one home in flames and reached another just long enough to catch his breath before lifting his suitcase and carrying on.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica 

Raaza Jamshed: Iran is often rendered in global media according to a logic of spectacle. In an earlier interview, you said it’s “bullshit” when Iran is filtered through people sitting in Los Angeles or Washington, DC, without a real sense of its nuances or lived complexities. But when the internet blacks out, there are suddenly no outside witnesses at all. I keep thinking about that tension between being seen through the wrong frame, and not being seen at all. You were in Iran on January 8, when the internet blacked out – was it a complicated moment? I wonder what it means when a place that is so often overexposed suddenly becomes invisible to the outsiders, especially to those who have only ever known it through screens.

Salar Abdoh: I guess it comes down to this, even at an individual level: might one prefer not to be seen at all if the only other option is to be perceived entirely out of focus and wrongly? Having spent so much of my life between two worlds and more, I’ve given this question some thought. I think for me another question would be: to be seen by whom? And why? And what is the point of being seen if what is seen is off – even, or perhaps especially, by well- meaning folk?  In regards to Iran there is a cottage industry built on agendas that a citizen like me has absolutely no say over. I cannot fight this monolith of disinformation bots and satellite TV networks and think tanks and presumed activists and talking heads and authors who earn a living off of writing about how they can explain over there to you. All that I can do is do my little part of living there and writing, if possible, about the nuances; it is within the layer-on-layer world of such nuances that life happens. It takes not weeks or months, but years – even decades – to really know a place. I’m always learning, I’m always surprised. 

Now then, taking all of this into account, who am I writing toward and why am I doing it? Even when people go on and on about neocolonialism and decolonization and what have you, they are still performing for someone sitting in New York or London or Paris. The foundational scaffolding of the discourse rests on this: performance for the fellow on the other side. If I show my anger, I’m performing for them. If I don’t, I’m still performing for them. Because they hold the purse. I don’t. I would like, honestly, to get to that place in life and history where constantly battling to be seen or heard is a non-issue. I’d like to live in an Iran or Middle East or Asia (all of which Iran is, or is a part of) where I don’t even have to address that person in New York or London or Paris. Let them live their lives and let me live mine. Thanks very much, in other words, but no thanks. 

But since this is fanciful thinking – at least for now – then yes, the blackout in the midst and aftermath of carnage imposes deeply conflicting emotions. Because on the one hand, I don’t want to have to play witness for those people in those capitals of the world. They are not my priority. I want to work things out on my own ground and with my own people. Yet I don’t have that option. Nevertheless, when the means to do what I don’t like to do and yet must do are actually taken away, I feel doubly chained and hopeless. Hopelessness of a sort that makes you question every move you ever made in your life, every action you took – to be a writer, to be a witness, to report from wars or refugee camps or those broken ends of the earth which are everywhere now. When the blackout was happening, I was also aware that it would be over sooner or later, and when it was, we would be exactly where we left off. And as always those barking the loudest would have their day. And their day is every day. 

Raaza Jamshed: I’m thinking about how the regime shapes and controls meaning inside Iran. Where do you see the regime still managing to shape how things are understood, and where does that start to lose its hold? I’m thinking especially about how the regime uses the language of the sacred to hold onto legitimacy. Is it mostly among young people, or the western-educated, where the regime’s control is at its weakest, or does that resistance lie entirely elsewhere? 

Salar Abdoh: This regime, or really any regime – whether a dictatorship or a so-called democracy – ultimately manages its narratives via its own echo chambers. It is important to have a minimum number of bodies that believe in you, support you, want you to remain in power. The Islamic Republic has those bodies, in numbers that would be unwise and also unfair to dismiss. These supporters of the regime are also people who love their country, who are of it and have fought for it and given blood for it, perhaps more so than those who are critical of the regime. But – and this is the crux of the matter – the two sides are not so much at odds with one another, as much as they simply do not see each other. Neither acknowledges the other’s existence in any meaningful way. They hold no debates, no discourse, no attempt to come to an understanding. The only thing that exists between them is utter loathing. Which means that nothing constructive is possible. It is all reactionary. 

One may ask why things are this way. One reason is that the regime long ago silenced its own best and brightest, instead immersing itself more and more in a swamp of self-hype and yes-men, hoping to make itself inviolable. What it did though was lose a large swath of the population. These were added to the swath of people it never had to begin with. All of that, combined with a barrage of fabrications and broken treaties from the regime’s enemies over several decades have turned the Islamic Republic into the very thing those enemies wanted it to become: a brute. In such an environment, even genuine resistance becomes co-opted by larger forces and turns into a simulation of itself. And once that happens, the state has its excuse to clamp down ferociously. In a way, it is a win-win, lose-lose for everybody. Dissent becomes performance, as does violence. With each side trying to score points they cannot win. Another name for this state of being is purgatory. 

Raaza Jamshed: When both dissent and violence turn into performance, something has already happened at the level of narrative. Looking at the myths about Iran – those coming from Western analysts, those the regime projects outward, and those it tells its people internally – I’m curious about the ones that keep power in place: which myths about Iran end up being the most useful to the regime to keep its control?

Salar Abdoh: I think to a large degree I’ve already answered this question in the earlier answers. The gist of it is that the myths the Islamic Republic tells itself are enshrined in the revolution and the very long bloody war that followed it. As time goes by, these myths start to, literally, sink and disappear. You cannot feed people on myths alone; you also need bread, and the price of a dozen eggs needs to be affordable. And forget about trying to buy bananas and strawberries for your children. The next stage is when a regime itself senses its myths no longer have many buyers. Then the only thing left is brazen violence. Iran is on the cusp of losing a set of myths, but only to replace them with others that have to do with the supposed greatness of pre-Islamic Iran and the Persian Empire. Even the Islamic Republic itself resorted to the pre-Islamic default after the Twelve-Day War. Ultimately, people purchase the lies they can afford. 

Raaza Jamshed: You and I come from neighboring countries, so I understand how your writing is shaped by a long history of pain and war. But you are writing now, in the midst of an ongoing crisis. What does writing mean to you in this moment? We know that historically, when mass violence occurs, art risks becoming consolation in the way it allows readers to feel the pain, process it, and then move on. How do we write in a way that refuses to turn suffering into something that can be comfortably consumed, and then forgotten?

Salar Abdoh: When you write in the midst of an ongoing crisis you run the risk of running with, or at, or against current events. In my last book one reviewer mentioned that parts of the plot seemed to have been taken right out of the news. How does one convey to such a reviewer – who most likely teaches in some creative writing program and is ensconced in the lap of safety – that: Hey, some of us are in fact living events that for you are just a CNN report. The answer is that you can’t; you can’t explain it. This person is never going to understand you are writing a life, your life, which for him just happens to be a two-minute read with his morning coffee inside the Washington Post. 

Therefore, how do I write in a way that refuses to turn suffering into a consumer product? I don’t. I fail at trying not to write that way. Because it’s not really what I’ve written that matters, but the perception of what I’ve written, and the checkmark it might or might not receive before the whole culture moves on. This is another reason why, as I said earlier, I would really, really like one day to write – if I write at all – within a totally other paradigm. But I know a lot of these things are pipe dreams on my part. I still dream about them though. 

Raaza Jamshed: In A Nearby Country Called Love, Issa had gone to Beirut “to search for love.” You’re here in Beirut today, and it makes me wonder whether Beirut holds a particular meaning in the Iranian imagination as a place of connection, or at least the possibility of it. Does this suggest a kind of solidarity between people in this region that exists beyond the logic of the nation-state and official political rhetoric?

Salar Abdoh: Well, Beirut has always held a particular meaning in people’s imagination – the songs, the history, the sea, the poetry. Even a great Persian writer and thinker like Nasir Khusraw of Balkh, wrote of Beirut and Sidon and Tripoli in his travel account of a thousand years ago. For me, Beirut is an extension of my love of a world that, not unlike for Nasir Khusraw, encompasses North Africa, the Middle East, the Sub-Continent, the Caucuses and Central Asia. A region that nourishes my everything because it is my history far and wide. The solidarity that you mention lies in the small things – maybe a similar word in Urdu and Persian, a dish shared in Iran and Turkey, a towering philosopher or mystic who wrote in Arabic but was of Persianate geography. This here then is my dream palace, this territory. And Beirut, for all its realities and its fictions, its lovingness and its tragedies, satisfies my soul in that way. It is a version of coming home. It is not the only place where I feel a sense of coming home, but it’s one place, and an important one. Issa could have searched for love in many other places. But Beirut happened to call. Because that is the call of Beirut. 

Raaza Jamshed: From here, you return to a United States grappling with its own crises of legitimacy and its own forms of silencing, especially in places like Minneapolis. You’ve made this journey many times before. Does this return feel different to you?

Salar Abdoh: Every return feels different. Because where I come from – I mean the greater Middle East – is a place often in a state of crisis, some of it of its own making and much of it imposed from without. Therefore, to leave that world and come to very faraway North America is not necessarily jarring so much as it is just profoundly melancholic. Suddenly you are cut off from the things that feel most urgent. You leave behind the forces that are swirling back home, the storms and the casualties and the constant threats and intimidations and arrive at a place whose discourse is not really yours, even when it directly concerns you, as in what has been happening in the brave city you mention in your question. In a way, every return is to arrive having packed a different suitcase mostly filled with pain. Sometimes the suitcase is bigger, sometimes it is smaller. And no, you can never travel anywhere without that suitcase. Those who do and claim to be free of the baggage are living an illusion.