An Interview with Shokoofeh Azar

Shokoofeh Azar

© Bea Photography Perth

Shokoofeh Azar is an Iranian Australian writer, journalist, and painter. Born in 1972 in metropolitan Tehran to a literary family, she spent her childhood in a remote village in northern Iran, a setting that has influenced her literary imaginary. As a graduate of Persian language and literature studies, she contributed entries to Farhangnameh-ye Adabi-ye Farsi (The Persian Literary Encyclopedia), which won Iran’s Best Book Award in 1998. She also wrote a children’s fiction book, Shayad Havas Konam To ra Bokhoram (Maybe I Am Tempted to Eat You), which narrated the friendship between a colorful butterfly and a black crow. In 2005, she published Ruz-e Gowdal (The Day of the Pit), a collection of fourteen short stories based on a journey she made hitchhiking the length of the Silk Road. Following the political tensions of the Green Movement, which arose in the wake of the controversial re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, Azar, who was imprisoned three times as a journalist, fled to Australia in 2010.

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017), her debut novel, takes its readers on a journey through Iranian history, literature, culture, and politics. (For security reasons, its translator was given a false name and in later editions listed as “anonymous.”) In 2018, the novel was short-listed for two major Australian awards—the Stella Prize (an annual award for Australian women’s writing) and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award—and in 2020 for the International Booker Prize. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is a groundbreaking text for Anglophone readers, and its hybridized Iranian Australian brand of magic realism makes an important contribution to contemporary literary studies. The novel’s dark venture into trauma and its vision of an absurd world is leavened by its deep affection for the north Iranian landscape in which it is set and its celebration of the rich diversity of Iranian and global literatures. It has been published in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Iceland, Italy, France, Lebanon, Japan, Bosnia, Turkey, Greece, and Thailand, and translated into Kurdish. Although banned in Iran, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is widely available in the underground market. Azar is working on her second novel, which continues her first novel’s exploration of the influence of a political dictatorship on a society. However, while the former is about sorrow, the second novel will address love and desire. This interview focuses on The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, the only one of her texts that has been translated into English.

The novel is a hybrid magic realist text produced soon after Azar’s arrival in Australia as a political refugee. The story focuses on the Islamic Revolution, like most diasporic (largely Anglophone) Iranian literature to date (Sanaz Fotouhi, The Literature of the Iranian Diaspora, Tauris, 2015). It takes place in Iran over several decades spanning the Islamic Revolution (1978–1979), the aftermath of the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979), and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Theorists of diaspora remind us that not all migrants experience the same conditions of mobility: for many, it is extremely difficult to cross borders; movement is restricted, not voluntary or a matter of choice. For some diasporic subjects, return to the homeland is impossible. Azar’s migration was involuntary and, to date at least, irreversible for political reasons.

In light of the fraught circumstances of Azar’s migration, I would like to reflect for a moment on the difference between diasporic and exilic subjects. American Iranian scholar and filmmaker Hamid Naficy describes diasporic consciousness as entailing “horizontal and multi-sited” relationships with both the homeland and the host country, whereas exilic identity is defined by “a vertical and primary relationship with [the] homeland” (An Accented Cinema, Princeton UP, 2001, p. 14). He further argues that exile is characterized by a “separation from home, a period of liminality and in-betweenness that can be temporary or permanent” (Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures, U of Minnesota P, 1993, p. xvi). The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is characterized by what Edward W. Said describes as the “unhealable rift,” the “terminal loss,” and “crippling sorrow” of exile (“Reflections on Exile,” Granta, 2000, p. 173). Exilic texts are generally understood as texts that do not feature the reconfigured diasporic subject transitioning to and becoming incorporated into the new host land. As an exilic text, Azar’s novel grieves the author’s exclusion from the civic and political life of her homeland and her eventual expulsion from it.

In a global context, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is located in the broad category of Iranian diasporic and exilic literature. The majority of texts in the subset of Anglophone Iranian literature written outside Iran fit into the category Naficy describes as “diasporic” in that they figure the migrant subject negotiating its inclusion in the host country. To date, Iranian American Anglophone diasporic literature has been dominated by women’s memoirs, which largely hail from second-generation Iranian American writers (Gillian Whitlock, “The Pangs of Exile,” Ariel, vol. 39, nos. 1–2, 2008, p. 13).

In Australia, diasporic Iranian literature emerged as a field later than Iranian American diasporic literature due to the nations’ different migration histories. Unlike Iranian American literature, Iranian Australian literature (much of which is written in Persian) has, to date, fallen largely into the category of refugee writing and testimonio. Laetitia Nanquette argues that this trend is a result of various Australian governments’ harsh treatment of Iranian asylum seekers, especially those who arrived by boat (Iranian Literature after the Islamic Revolution, Edinburgh UP, 2021, pp. 214–15). Azar’s book perhaps heralds a change of direction: it does not fit neatly into either the category of memoir or testimonio (although it borrows from both genres) because it relies heavily on magic realism to incorporate a range of fictive and fantastical elements into the bereavement narrative of separation from the country of origin. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree focuses on the topic of familial trauma, which is central to many of the memoirs and testimonios that dominate American Iranian and Australian Iranian (Anglophone and Persian) writing. However, in mobilizing the anti-realist devices and tropes of magic realism, the novel extends the realist representation of violence characteristic of many of these memoirs and testimonios in its efforts to address the extreme nature of the political violence of the totalitarian regime of the Islamic Republic and the devastation it wrought on the family at the center of the novel, which, as the interview suggests, in many aspects mirrors Azar’s own. (The only other text in this broad global category with which the inventive textuality of Azar’s novel might be aligned is the hybrid novel No Friend but the Mountains [2018] by the award-winning diasporic Iranian New Zealand–based writer Behrouz Boochani.)

The alternative worlds facilitated by magic realism allow for the negotiation of what Said identifies as the profuse exilic effects of grief, sorrow, and melancholia that threaten to overpower, disable, and “cripple” the subject. This liminal space of abject subjectivity is figured in The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by the many ghosts that inhabit the novel. The most pervasive ghostly presence is the narrator, the family’s youngest daughter, Bahar, who chronicles the political events of the period and her family’s demise. Their suffering is so intense that the borderline between being alive and being dead seems permeable. The pain of loss is so great that it constitutes a form of dying for each member of the family (even those who initially survive physically). That Bahar is actually deceased, then, comes as no surprise, although it is not confirmed until chapter 5. There we read that she was burned to death in the family home when mullahs and other officials stormed the home to destroy the father’s traditional musical instruments, which they considered decadent and a threat to the religious ethos of the Islamic Republic. There are clearly parallels between Bahar and Azar, as Azar corroborates in the interview; the ghost of Bahar, in effect, is synecdochic of Azar’s experience of exile.

Elsewhere in the novel, ghosts represent the presence of those who have died unjustly at the hand of the regime, often without due legal process, such as the five thousand political prisoners executed after the end of the Iran-Iraq War who wander the city disconsolate at the devastation of lives and the destruction of Iranian culture. The realm of ghosts produced through the magic realist world of the novel allows for the persistence of affects such as sorrow and mourning alongside a demand for justice and an insistence on the importance of commemorating events and murdered people in a regime that has attempted to wipe from the record so many aspects of contemporary Iranian history.

In its textual hybridity—it fuses autobiographical voice and data, the documentation of historical events, and literary fabulation—the novel is committed to recording recent historical events that, for some decades, have remained undocumented. The novel thus can be read as a personalized (auto)biographical response to atrocity, as political witness to it, and as literary fiction within the magic realist tradition. It shares these multiple imperatives with much Holocaust literature of the last three decades (and other fiction about the limits of war and violence) that makes use of anti-realist techniques. Jenni Adams, Michael Rothberg, and other Holocaust studies scholars have argued that since the 1990s, realism has not been the dominant form in fiction for writing about Shoah, and that anti-realist modes dominate in the project of addressing the issue of extreme violence.

However, Rothberg in Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000) argues that, while there has been a rethinking of realism’s limits in representing extreme political violence, the strong interest in issues of reference persists, and new forms of both anti-realist and documentary representation of the Holocaust force the “real” of historical catastrophes “back into view” (8). This is certainly an imperative energizing The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, which wants to make visible and disseminate, in both Iranian and global contexts, information about the Islamic Regime’s use of violence against Iranians and its destruction of Iranian heritage. Other critical work on literature’s representation of political violence, such as Anne Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction (2004) and Eugene Arva’s The Traumatic Imagination (2011), explores magic realism in the broader contexts of war, slavery, and colonization. In a more contemporary setting, Omid Tofighian, the translator of Boochani’s hybrid prose-poetry memoir No Friend But the Mountains, invents the category “horrific surrealism” to describe that book’s representation of the harrowing political violence of Australia’s carceral-border regime, which detains asylum seekers for many years in offshore processing centers (No Friend xxxi). All these discussions bring useful perspectives to an analysis of the magic realist strategies of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree and situate the novel within a broad transnational tradition of anti-realist approaches to war and political terror.

I have argued that the Islamic Revolution in Iran has figured in much diasporic and exilic writing as dramatic rupture—of subjectivity and of national and cultural identity and history. In her discussion of Iranian American women’s memoir, Nima Naghibi argues that most of these authors experienced the Islamic Revolution as pre- or early-adolescent girls (“Revolution, Trauma, and Nostalgia in Diasporic Iranian Women’s Autobiographies,” Radical History Review, no. 105 [fall 2009], pp. 79–91). For them, the revolution represented suffering and trauma inflicted “during a key period in the authors’ personal development” (Naghibi 80). Azar also lived through the revolution as a child, and we see the revolution and its aftermath narrated in the novel from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old Bahar. The traumatic subjectivity of a childhood loss of innocence is aligned with the author’s liminal, exilic subjectivity.

I have suggested that the magic realist textuality of the novel generates this temporality of liminality. The novel is inhabited by ghosts and “the lost” (Enlightenment 104), prematurely aged and traumatized people such as Roza and other “orphan mothers” whose children were murdered by the regime—all those who survived a war and mourned the dead along with the destruction of culture, civic life, national cultural archives, and cosmopolitan history. The main affects of the ghosts and “the lost” are hopelessness and despair, but the book weaves into this story an antidote to despair—the imposing titular image of the greengage tree. The central image of the towering greengage tree, from whose summit the family members receive a cosmic vision of the planetary vastness and interconnectivity, epitomizes the function of magic realism in this novel, which is to bring together difficult and discordant views, affects, and dispositions in the aftermath of the extreme violence wrought by the Islamic Revolution. This particularly pertains to those writing in exile, struggling to temper despair with hope.

The tree itself is a metonym of the protective and resistant capacities of nature—in particular, the wild, resilient, and putatively endless Jurassic-age Caspian Hyrcanian forest of northern Iran, which historically, as Azar explains in the interview, provided a geopolitical refuge for Iranians fleeing the Arab invasion of 561. Its rough terrain proved inhospitable to the invaders, and people there held out against the Arabs for an extra two hundred years. This sense of refuge persists into the present: the area represents an ancient “sanctuary and serenity” to the family fleeing the reach of the Islamic Regime (95).

The novel is bookended by the image of the ascension, by family members, of the greengage tree. This is the tree from whose heights enlightenment is gained—spiritual peace and understanding acquired through ancient Iranian mystical practices (which Azar contrasts, in the interview, with the more dogmatic and instrumental verities of religion), figured in tropes of boundlessness and infinity. Atop the greengage tree, for example, Roza travels “through a world that contained a planet which, despite all its vastness and countries and religions and books and wars and revolutions and executions and births and this oak tree, she had just realized was nothing but a minuscule speck in the universe” (16). The magic realist textuality, I suggest, merges with mystical discourse to the point where the two are indistinguishable. Here we get a hint of the continuity that magic realism provides between ancient and modern that Azar discusses in the interview.

The reiteration of this trope on the last page of the novel reinforces the image of regeneration and resourcefulness: the tree becomes taller and stronger as they climb. An intense vision of the connectivity of the local, the global, and the planetary is achieved: “We looked down. Down at Earth with all its forests, its oceans, mountains and clouds; with all its countries, borders, people, loves, hates, murders and pillaging. We looked at each other and realized how easy it was for us to let go now” (245).

The paratactical listing has an augmentative effect, as if connections are widening and growing. The imaginative resources that the ascension of the tree provides regeneratively link the human with other sentient beings and other forms of life, even with those forms of life that are nonorganic, that are not living in the conventional sense. These key tropes of linkage and “travel,” I suggest, are common to both magic realist writing and mystical discourse. As connections proliferate so does the opposite: the family perceives the possibility of “letting go” of histories, loves, hates—attachments and aversions. Chief among these are the complex investments in death and violence. As in many of the novel’s parables of the wandering dead and the would-be dead (for example, the ghosts of the Siberian hunters [53–54] and of the five thousand executed political prisoners [74–77]), the narrator decides upon the futility of revenge and affirms that life, however painful, continues elsewhere/otherwise in spite of people’s crippling “anger and anguish” (245).

This simultaneous movement of connectivity and “letting go” leads us back to the trope of diaspora with which I opened my reading of the novel. Does The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, with its vision of global and planetary expansion, end on the cusp of the trajectory from exilic to diasporic, which numerous theorists, including Naficy, have mapped? Fiona Sumner, for example, observes a gradual shift in the Iranian diaspora, from “the irrevocability of ‘exile’ to the more connected notion of diaspora and the ostensible inclusiveness of transnationalism” (“Between Nostalgia and Activism: Iranian Australian Poetry and Cinema,” JASAL, vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, pp. 2–3). In other words, is the ascent to the summit of the greengage tree a metaphor for the travel of migration? The expansive imagery of the vision that the ascent affords certainly represents a movement outward and forward. Further, Azar herself articulates a bi-directional backward-forward movement between host land and homeland in her description of her vocation as a writer. She refuses severance, insisting—in the face of expulsion and exile—on her ongoing civil connection with Iran, by defining herself as “an indispensable citizen of Iran through writing.” Perhaps her second novel will shed further light on this issue.

On this question and others that have arisen in my reading of her first novel, Shokoofeh Azar gave me generous and considered responses in the interview I conducted with her on August 19, 2019, at the Deakin University corporate campus, Melbourne, Victoria. I would like to thank Laetitia Nanquette for her assistance and feedback and for introducing us, Jodie Fitzsimons for transcribing the interview, Sarah Pope and Elham Naeej for research assistance, and Sue and Jeff Kossew for their hospitality.

Q. Your novel refers to a specific cultural moment in Iranian history. It is about a family and narrated by a young girl, Bahar. There are parallels between you and the protagonist: Bahar is a ghost; you are a person in exile. Is the story of this family (auto)biographical?

A. If we agree that biography is not about your physical life but your emotions, dreams, and imagination, then yes; otherwise, I’m afraid, no. Some parts of the novel are factual, like the family: I was born in Tehran, the capital city of Iran and, in 1972, when I was only six months old, my father, who was an artist and writer, moved us from Tehran to a very remote village. This happens to the family in the novel. Our house with five bedrooms was on top of a hill surrounded by rainforest, rice fields, and greengage trees in a village exactly as it is in this novel. When I was writing this story, I drew my childhood house to reimagine it. I imagined that Bahar lived in my room, and when she moved to the treehouse, I could imagine her on top of an oak tree that I always climbed to observe all around. All the stories about the greengage trees come from my experiences and my feelings about this tree. My father’s name is Hushang, and my mother’s name is Roza, like the parents in the story. Bahar wants to be a writer—like I am. We buried our books when the Revolutionary Guards and a mullah came to our house by surprise, as happened in the story. The Gezou Brothers shrine that you see in the story really exists, and I have been there. The location and atmosphere of Razan are the same as the village that I grew up in. So from this perspective, the book is full of my personal experiences.

However, since this novel is written in the style of magic realism, it cannot be a standard (auto)biography. Therefore, we can perceive this novel as a combination of my personal experiences (autobiography) and my imagination (fiction). There are many political, social, historical, natural, geographic, and literary facts in this story, including names of books, writers, poets, folk stories, religious beliefs, political and social realities. Examples are the serial killing (which refers to the killing of intellectuals by the Iranian Regime between 1988 and 1998), the 1988 execution of Iranian political prisoners (which is known as the Summer of ‘88), or references to Khavaran Cemetery in southeast Tehran (an irregular, unmarked cemetery of political prisoners who were killed illegally by the Iranian Regime in 1988). So I can assure you that in each paragraph of this novel, there is a true story. This true story could be a political story. Or it could be based on a religious fact, a dream that I had, a folk belief, or an old oral tale.

Many popular beliefs today, called superstitions, are rooted in mythology with a profound meaning. For example, in our culture, if a crow comes in front of your house and starts singing, it means someone will come unannounced to your home and stay as a guest. Nowadays, no one knows that this belief comes from mythology. In the religion of Mithraism (which is an Iranian religion from about three thousand years ago), the crow was the messenger of God to Mithra, and Mithra is a symbol of loyalty and friendship. It is a beautiful feeling to identify the remnants of mythology in today’s life. I tried to show this beauty as much as possible in this story, the beauty that has been lost amid today’s turmoil and the anomalies of our contemporary political and religious life. In other words, everything in this novel is a fact or connected to a fact—whether it is politics or public beliefs, myths, symbolic elements, dreams, or life experiences.

Q. And so some of the events are imaginary or fantastical? The word “superstition” seems problematic to me.

A. “Superstition” is a word that describes some popular beliefs science cannot prove or confirm. However, I try to not use this word because, in my understanding, many of the events derive from beliefs that have roots in mythology and have a meaningful interpretation, as in the example that I gave you in my previous answer. Maybe the terms “public beliefs,” “common beliefs,” or “folk beliefs” are a better choice than “superstition.” I’m referring to meanings that cannot be measured by scientific criteria. I am from the East, where throughout the length of history we have been searching for the meaning of life. We people are poets, prophets, or mystics, while you, the Western people, are writers, philosophers, and politicians. We live with our heart, while you live with your mind.

On the other hand, I am a journalist. The core and foundation of the story is based in/on true and journalistic facts. A journalist works with the bitter and unfortunate realities of society. And a journalist deals with fact, not meaning. Maybe that is why, after working for many years in journalism, I have resorted to creative writing and magic realism where I can use both my skills. The journalistic facts are the central reality of my story/life, and I give meaning, beauty, and direction to it with the assistance of myths, poetries, imagination, and dreams.

Q. So the stories like that of Sohrab being forgotten in the cell and the story about the young boy receiving the lashes for eating a plum are based on fact?

A. Both these stories are facts; they happened to friends of mine. Such stories are unfortunately very common after the Islamic Revolution.

Q. What about the story of Hushang, who is in prison and has been told to write?

A. This scene came from a combination of my experiences in prison and my imagination. Many prisoners talk about their experiences in jail, but they could not write about them as this was against the regime’s propaganda. I had a collection of information about prisoners’ stories as a journalist, and I thought, as I am in Australia and safe, it is an opportunity to write a part of this oral history.

Back to my experience in jail: The interrogators’ technique is to ask you a question. Then they make two questions from your one answer. Then they make four questions from your two answers and so on. In this way, they capture you in a confusing, intricate net—the net that started from your first concise answer. The more you explain, the less convinced they are because, basically, they don’t mean to be convinced. They intend for you to confess to things you have never done. Hushang is in the same situation.

Q. Bahar’s mother, Roza, achieves enlightenment on August 18, 1988, which is the date that Sohrab is killed. But the Iran-Iraq War didn’t end until two days later.

A. The war ended on August 20, 1988. However, the Security Council Resolution 598 (War End Resolution) was accepted on July 17, 1988. The leader and founder of the Islamic Republic, Khomeini, is said to have commented: “signing the resolution for me is like drinking a cup of poison.” He did not want the war to end, except with the conquest of Karbala in Iraq. Only nine days after accepting the resolution, Khomeini signed a document (on July 26, 1988) ordering the execution of all political activists in the jails (in my story, Sohrab is one of them). As you can see, the dates of the resolution and the beginning of the executions are meaningfully close to each other. We believe the massacre was the revenge of Khomeini. He felt defeated by the end of the war. He didn’t want the war to be finished because the new regime needed it. Why? Because they could use the chaotic atmosphere of war to kill many opponents or put them in jail. They could make people scared and obey the new regime. The new leader and politicians of Iran knew nothing of politics. They were naive, narrow-minded, poor mullahs, who had gained political power overnight. They needed time to figure out what politics meant (and still they don’t know). The state of war is an emergency for any country. This situation is the best tool for uniting different and opposing groups under the umbrella of “uniting against the enemy.” The Islamic Revolution was formed with the help of several leftist groups, which were nevertheless opposed to the rise of power of the mullahs.

In the final stages of the fall of the Shah, all forces opposed to him (from religious to leftist forces) united to destroy him. Although the leftist groups had a very strong base among the younger generation, they did not have support among the older generation, which was traditionally religious. The belief of the leftist forces was that they could take power from the uneducated religious forces as soon as the Shah fell by relying on their young and educated base. But their plan did not work. As soon as the mullahs got the power, they started the war and the suppression of the leftists at the same time. The mullahs took the opportunity the war presented to make these forces unite with them or be destroyed.

The mullahs were also under the delusion that their mission was to expand the Shiite world, and they wanted to conquer Karbala in Iraq. They aimed to show the power of the Shiite religion to the region and the Western world. The war was the best opportunity for them to buy time to compile and promote the doctrine of the Shiite Regime.

Q. Thousands were massacred, weren’t they?

A. We know it was two or three months, starting from early August 1988. The climax was in these two to three months. Some people believe they killed three thousand, and some talk about five thousand or even more. We had only eyewitnesses to these events for decades. No documents. Only in the last two to three decades, some groups of leftists who were exiled in Western countries started to draw up documents. In 2007, for the first time, an international tribunal called the Iran Tribunal was set up by a group of eyewitnesses and families of those executed in 1988. With the widespread support of Iranians at home and abroad, especially the families of the victims, the Iran Tribunal succeeded in convicting the Islamic Republic of crimes against humanity in two stages: the London and the Hague Tribunals. As soon as eyewitnesses found a safe place in Europe and the United States, they started writing their memoirs.

Q. You draw parallels in the novel between the Islamic Revolution and the earlier Arab invasion of Iran (Persia) in 651. You say that two centuries of silence followed the earlier invasion. Are you speculating that there may now be two centuries of silence following the Islamic Revolution?

A. We cannot equate the Arab Invasion with the Islamic Revolution in terms of weight. The first was a foreign invasion that took about two hundred years to conquer the entire country, and the second was an internal revolution that was established in one month. In the novel, they are likened to each other because of some similarities: (1) In the Pahlavi era, Iranian identity and culture were more appreciated and important than Islamic identity, as in the time of the Sassanids before the Arab Invasion. (2) The religious revolutionaries of 1979 overthrew the Pahlavi Regime in the name of Islam, God, equality, brotherhood, and justice, just like the Arab Invasion in 651 that defeated the Sassanids. (3) The religious revolutionaries carried out a massacre across the country to consolidate their power, just like the Arabs did in 651.

There is a very controversial and popular book, Two Centuries of Silence, by a professor of ancient Iranian literature and culture, Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub. On evidence drawn from historical books he suggests that Islam was an imported and imposed religion for many Iranians, and that for two centuries after the Arabs’ first invasion, all opposing voices were muffled.

This conquest of Iran by the Arabs took about two hundred years. Because the Iranians put up a lot of resistance, especially in the forest areas of northern Iran (the location of my novel), the Arabs could not immediately infiltrate those areas. They didn’t know what the jungle was because they had lived in the desert. The geography helped people to resist the Arabs, and it was the last part of Iran that the Arabs got into. In other parts of the country, the Arabs destroyed the capital of the Sassanids in Ctesiphon, Ivan Madain, the library of Jundishapur University, the Baharestan carpet, and many historical, cultural, and artistic monuments. However, book burning was the worst harm that the Arabs inflicted on Iranian culture.

Q. So is the novel set in that northern area by the Caspian Sea, near the jungle?

A. The jungle is the Caspian Hyrcanian mixed forests region, which is a large area of lowland and montane forests near the southern shores of the Caspian Sea of Iran and Azerbaijan. The location of my novel is in Mazandaran province, on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, Iran.

Q. Why, after fourteen hundred years, is the Arab Invasion still important to you, and why is it mentioned in your novel?

A. Iran has been invaded by foreigners many times, but the most effective, destructive, and lasting one was the Arab Invasion. In my opinion, there is a deep and unsolvable difference between Iranian thought and Islamic thought that has not yet been resolved and never will be. That problem comes from the differences in worldview. Iranian cultural insight is in contrast with Islamic cultural insight. Iranian culture in the length of history is welcoming, open, cheerful, and seeks progress and development. In contrast, Islamic culture is unaccepting, closed, death-oriented, and tradition-based. Iranian culture has a global perspective, but Islamic culture has an ethnic perspective. These cultural differences are innumerable, which is why many Iranians have not yet digested Islamic culture.

In The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, I attempt to show the cultural values of the pre-Islamic culture of the Zoroastrians. The main religion of people in the Great Iran of the Sassanid era was Zoroastrianism; however, there were other religions, such as Maanavi (Manichaeism) and Mithraism. According to the latest census, today the population of Zoroastrians in Iran is only 25,000 (less than 0.04%), while 99% of Iranians today are Muslim. My next novel, which I am currently working on, The Gowkaran Tree of Middle of Our Kitchen, attempts to show the values of the culture of Mithraism, which was the Iranian religion before the Zoroastrians.

Q. How do you feel about your work being described as “magic realism,” given that it is a term that initially referred to South American writing?

A. Although magic realism in modern literature was introduced to the world by Latin American writers, it does not mean that this style has existed only in Latin America. Mythology and the classic literature of many ancient countries—Japan, Egypt, India, Iran, China, Greece—are full of elements of magic realism. What Latin American writers did was create a natural connection between modern literature and their classic literature. I have no problem with my novel being called magic realism, but I would like to take this opportunity to clarify my definition of contemporary magic realism. In my opinion, contemporary magic realism is more than a literary style. It is also a cultural and critical reaction to the modern world. To me, it seems that something is lost in the modern world that exists in the world of myths, and that is meaning. Contemporary magic realism is an opportunity in literature to display this shortcoming to the modern world.

The words “meaning” (in Farsi, manaa) and “spirituality” (in Farsi, manaviyat) have a common root in Farsi, which is minou (manyu). Minou is an ancient Farsi word for whatever includes or relates to spiritual meaning. It is the opposite of appearance and material existence. Therefore, in Farsi, spirituality means the existence of meaning. And whatever is not material is called manavi. Thus, in magic realism, I am searching for meaning.

In my opinion, magic realism can be seen to have four properties:

1. A magic realism story often has a natural connection between modern literature and the classic literature of the author’s culture. In other words, magic realism in Latin America, Iran, India, Egypt, China, Greece, and Japan, which have rich and long histories of literature, could be seen as a natural continuation from their classic literature to their modern literature because the essential element of magic realism, which is believing in the interaction between visible and invisible/supernatural beings in everyday life, remains strong in these societies and in their folk beliefs, songs, religion, literature, and even politics.

2. For this reason, I believe the style of magic realism in new countries such as Canada, the United States, and Australia is not the product of the natural heritage of white literature. For me, it sounds artificial unless Indigenous people write it—Indigenous people who have believed in the interaction between natural and supernatural beings for thousands of years. It seems to me these beliefs are rooted in their myths and in their contemporary, everyday life.

3. Magic realism, for me, often presents the conflict between ancient beliefs and modern life. In my understanding, magic realism is not just a writing technique or skill. It is a cultural insight that has been crystallized in literature and is the product of a confrontation between two worldviews: a modern worldview, which relies on physics, science, and industry, and an ancient worldview, which relies on nature, emotion, and soul. Hence, these stories often carry a critical social perspective within them. But I don’t think every story about interactions between human and supernatural beings is magic realism. For example, The Lovely Bones, although a good novel, is not a magic realist story. As I describe the magic realist style as a reflection of an ancient and sophisticated culture of the author, this literature can also be seen as an echo of these complexities. So I think a magic realism story is a complex, multilayered, unpredictable, melancholic, ironic, spontaneous, and poetic text, as these elements are inherent in the culture of the author.

4. Finally, magic realism is a platform of social strife and struggle to reclaim what totalitarian regimes, cultures, and invading foreign religions have taken from ancient societies. Because magic realism stems from the rich millennial culture of Indigenous writers, these writers have powerful and versatile tools for this conflict. They rely on all that the millennial culture has entrusted to them: nature, myth, culture, art, language, customs, and ancient beliefs.

Q. I’d like to turn to the topic of mysticism in the novel and your use of the term “enlightenment.”

A. Eshragh and ishraq are Arabic words referring to the culmination of a mystic’s inner vision. They describe the highest stage where one reaches the perfection and peak of deeply understanding the function of this universe for a short moment: the moment of mystic experience of becoming clearly part of the whole universe. The root of the word eshragh means east, the place of sunrise, and the light. In English, the only words that the translator and I found for eshragh were “enlightenment” and “illumination.” People generally attempt to simplify deep and complex ideas. They usually don’t have the patience to go deep into ideas. In this sense, religion is more understandable and accessible to people than mysticism. Religion simplifies the work for people through introducing a series of rules—in the name of God, do this and don’t do that!—while mysticism/spiritualism relies on individual effort, knowledge, and experience. Mysticism suggests that you do not need holy books, the prophets, the divine laws, the mullahs, or priests to have access to spiritual insight. You alone can attain the status of God/Creator. In some mysticism/spirituality doctrines, there is no God. There is pure wisdom and knowledge. Enlightenment/ishraq/eshragh is the stage where the mystic becomes one with the creator. Are you familiar with Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh]? He says if you have a profound and inner connection with your sexual partner and have a deep understanding about love, you may experience enlightenment/eshragh. Roza and the traveler, in my story, experience something like this: the enlightenment of love. Later, we learn that she suddenly found enlightenment at the top of a greengage tree at the same time as the execution of her beloved son. This experience of enlightenment for her is the beginning of melancholy, the melancholy of abandonment. Roza leaves everyone and walks the unknown paths of the forest.

Q. And why did you choose the greengage tree?

A. This goes back to a very personal experience. After we moved from Tehran to a very remote village: our land was thirteen hectares of fruit garden and jungle with lots of wild greengage trees. In spring, their white blossoms were everywhere, and when the breeze blew, the petals of greengage blossoms, like rain and snow, fell on us, on the garden, and [on] the village. It was such a beautiful sight that I still enjoy remembering it. A large part of my childhood was passed on top of greengage trees.

Q. I wanted to ask you about a conflict at the center of the novel. On one hand is Khosrow, with his mystical and spiritual understanding and his practice of acceptance. On the other, you have Hushang and his resistance, his political idealism. There’s a tension here, isn’t there?

A. Yes, there is tension. Khosrow and Hushang are very much the opposite of each other in how they face the world. Hushang is looking for a quick, definitive, and mass treatment for the unwell society of Iran. By contrast, Khosrow tries to tell him that there is no immediate and definitive remedy for such a society, and if there is a treatment, it is a long-term remedy, and it starts from personal insight. Hushang seeks the solution in politics and governments, while Khosrow seeks the solution in individuals and hearts.

Q. And it’s not resolved.

A. These two worldviews never could reach a common discourse. The main difference between the two worldviews is that Hushang looks from the world of outside to inside, while Khosrow looks from the world of inside to outside. There is no right answer; there is no one answer for this kind of question. So if I ask a spiritual man, “What is the solution of all of these problems in the world?” He says, “There is a solution, but it’s a long way to reach it. And it’s not the way that one person can solve it.” In his view, the problems of the world are the result of people’s inner problems. But if you ask me, as a modern journalist, I would say, “By changing this suppressive regime with a democratic political system, most of our problems will be solved, and many lives will be saved.” So there is no right answer, or both answers are right.

Q. Can you describe the situation that prompted you to leave Iran?

A. From 1999 until 2010, when I left Iran, at least twenty reformist newspapers were banned and closed by the government, and many journalists [were] arrested and kept in jail. But we still had hope, as reformism was young, and it still had a strong voice among the society and politicians. However, many journalists left the country in 2009 (according to BBC Persian, about a hundred journalists left that year). [The year] 2009, the year of the presidential election, was a crucial year for our fate as journalists. Ahmadinejad, the former president, had narrowed the field of activity for journalists and activists more than before. Many wanted political change. So they voted for a reformist candidate, Mousavi. But on the morning of the election, we woke up, and they said Ahmadinejad had been elected. Everybody was upset and angry. I will never forget those days. We all went onto the streets and demonstrated for about nine months. Our main slogan was “Where is my vote?” But in the end, they were able, again, to suppress us. Thousands of demonstrators were arrested and kept at unknown places; hundreds of them were raped or [they] disappeared; hundreds of journalists and activists were jailed or fled the country, including me. It was the end of hope, for me. I was very desperate for any change in our politics. So in 2010, I came to Australia as a boat refugee, and as soon as I came out of the refugee camp, I started to write The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree. Any time that I reread this book, I feel and remember my anger and desperation while writing it.

Q. One of the most harrowing things for me about the novel is that there were no family survivors, except the memory-less fish.

A. The relationship between an oppressed society and historical oblivion is like the relationship between an egg and a chicken. People are subject to repressive regimes because they have historical oblivion. On the other hand, because people have repressive regimes they become historically oblivious.

Q. What did you think about the reception of your book in Australia?

A. It was much better than I expected. Many novels are written so that people can take them before bed, like a sleeping pill. However, a small part of the literature is written to keep people awake and to make them think. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is translated from Farsi into English, written as magic realism, belongs to another culture, and does not have a happy ending. It is a book that features national sadness and depression. So with these features, I didn’t expect Australians to like my book. I thought if I were lucky, it would attract the attention of a small section of the literary community. However, when the book was short-listed for the Stella Prize and the International Booker Prize, it got more attention than I expected.

Q. When you were writing The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree did you have a sense of who you were writing for … Iranian readers or Australian readers (or both)?

A. The only reader that I imagine when I am writing a story is myself. I write for myself as an Iranian Australian human being (not just a woman) and to record the history of human emotions. What I am writing is an undeniable part of the complex human situation in the contemporary history of Iran and the history of Islam in Iran. I’m not just a writer. I am a situation. I consider myself a representative of the human condition removed from the contemporary history of Iran and an uninvited guest of contemporary Australia. As a result, so far, I have tried to be a hassle-free guest for Australia and an indispensable citizen of Iran through writing.

Q. I wanted to ask you about how your history as a refugee and your work are approached in Australia.

A. I don’t have any problem with people knowing my background as a refugee, but what I don’t like is that people sometimes consider your seeking asylum as a part of your identity. This is a misunderstanding of the asylum situation. An asylum seeker is a person who is temporarily in a victim situation and has lost control of their life for political reasons in their country. We should not forget that a refugee is one who wants to overcome the victim situation and become an ordinary citizen. By emphasizing their asylum situation, we remind them that they should always remain a victim.

Before I set foot in Australia, I did not know that the issue of asylum seekers and their religion [Islam] in Australia is a serious public discourse. It was surprising to me to see everyone asking me about my religion, my experience at the refugee camp or in prison. These frequent questions made me reflect that if someone has had a very horrible experience in their life—for example, someone had raped them or they were abandoned by their beloved—would they like everybody asking, “How was your separation? How was your rape?” They wouldn’t like that. It’s like an open wound that people put their finger in to discover if it is real or still painful. This reminds me of The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, a painting by Caravaggio.

Q. I think people are ignorant because the Australian government has restricted the media’s access to refugees in detention centers. Many people develop a kind of prurient curiosity about people’s suffering.

A. That’s absolutely right. I totally understand people’s curiosity, and I hope they also understand the complex feelings of refugees.