Interview with Orkideh Behrouzan

“The War We Lived” is written in the form of a letter to a friend. What inspired you to write this story and why in the form of a letter?

The format of a letter is a very personal choice. I have always been obsessed with the genre of letter writing, and I am a letter writer – I still write letters. It’s a good vehicle to tell a story because you can create a context without describing it. And little by little, you learn about the characters through their letter. But for me, it comes to me very naturally to write letters, so this story came out as a letter.

The other side of it is that the actual story was inspired by a conversation I had with an Iraqi friend a long time ago, in which we found ourselves speaking about the war constantly. Then I suggested that maybe we should start writing letters to each other – and we did for a while – so that thought had always been in the corner of my mind. Then eventually this letter came out, and I can tell you a little bit later about the Persian version of this and how and why they’re different. But the story both in Persian and English came out as a letter. It was in a very conscious choice.

In the story, you say “Wars never end.” But you end by saying “even though [wars] may never end, this war too shall pass.” Can you talk more about what it means for a war to never end, but perhaps to someday pass?

On a practical level, we are witnessing the fact that wars do not end because we’re living the implications of wars decades later and in different places – it’s the same thing. But also psychologically speaking, this has to do with the nature of remembering traumatic paths. The idea is that you engage in the act of remembering and you hopefully get to a place, eventually, to mourn the memory and to integrate it, but not forget – to get to a place that you can remember without being overburdened by it or read without going through the visceral reactions that you had at the time of its occurrence.

They don’t go away, and you don’t forget but they change shape. In a way, they pass but they do not end – if that makes sense. That’s also at the individual level but also, you know, historically and politically when you look at each of these conflicts they do not end really. We are in both Iran and Iraq. We are dealing with the consequences of this one single war. Even during Iraq, additional ones were added to the list, but this one war is still having its own life through illnesses, through injuries and through new generations of even children being born with congenital disorders because of the chemical bombings and so on and so forth.

You mention that you and your friend grew up on “opposite sides of a torturous line,” of course meaning the Iran-Iraq border. Can you talk more about your choice to center the friendship of an Iraqi and Iranian person in the story as a way to remember the war between your two countries?

Well this story, this particular story, as I said was inspired by real-life conversations as well as real-life memories. But there’s also an element of gender in the story that is sort of implicit – but it’s actually there, and it’s open to interpretation. You could think that this is a romantic relationship. You could think that it’s a platonic friendship. I intentionally left that open to interpretation. Either way, there is a sense that this is a way of telling a story of the war, and it’s a very human lived experience – very intimate lived experience – through the eyes of a child without giving away too much. So that’s one element.

The other aspect of this that I’d like to go into a little bit more depth about is language, because I have a different, longer version of this story written in Persian, and in that version, I have had the freedom to go into very implicit and complicated references and use more subtle nuances without having to explain the context. Whereas in English, there’s a distance, and I have to make sure that I’m not making the story inaccessible and at the same time you’re trying to focus on bringing this experience near for the non-Persian-speaking reader or for the non-Middle Eastern reader in effect.

So that’s the challenge. I think part of what you’re asking has to do with language: what language this story is written in, and the conditions in which this story has come out of these conversations and out of these experiences.

The story one of your patients tells you about the running headless soldier stands out. You follow the memory by saying that “[Iranians] are a people who have been running for decades, in a persistent effort to exist, without a head on our shoulders.” Talk more about this.

The image of the headless soldier running has been alluded to and used in various forms of storytelling about the war. Unfortunately, it’s an image that has become familiar with a lot of people who have had experiences on the fronts. For me, the image as I encounter with it through the narrative of a patient who – as I described in the story – the very experience of remembering it is so, so crushing, and every time he tells the story his as intensely destroyed by telling it. For me, the image sort of captures a historical struggle, and I couldn’t help but notice the symbolic aspect of it – which is, you know, the people’s of these two countries fighting each other.

Ever since they’ve sort of been struggling in different ways to claim their right to exist with independence, dignity and also with peace and contentment. So I think there was something about the visuals of that image that was extremely symbolic.

The story focuses on you as a young girl growing up during the war. You gesture to the experiences of being a young girl and what you call “your silent journey to womanhood.” Why did you gesture to girlhood and womanhood, what broader significance might this have to your story?

For me personally, two things sort of dominate this story – neither by choice. One is gender – as I said – and one is language. Both of them are serious issues for me as a writer, but also as an immigrant and a scholar. The story is not sort of supposed to spell things out all over, but in a way, it’s multitasking.

Growing up in the 1980s in Iran, meant that your perception of puberty and sexuality was heavily colored by the experience of social policing of the female body – even within families, by a sense of heightened awareness of the implications of becoming a woman. Now, that’s different from simplistic accounts of, you know, women being oppressed and whatnot. Rather it comes down to very complex gender and gendering languages and norms and expectations that one internalizes at a very, very young age.

So for me, it’s that nuance that’s at the core of this story here. That as a little girl, how you’re perceiving the very notion of womanhood as you transition towards it, you cannot separate that from what’s going on inside and from the war and from different kinds of femininity and masculinity that are being propagated – and in a way shape a huge part of the propaganda and also school teachings, teachings in within the family, in the media, etc. There is something very intimate about this that is so shaped by outside structures and non-intimate structures.

There is much in the story about how everyday aspects of growing up continue for young people despite war. You talk about falling in love with Reza, your neighbor whose house was attacked. You liken your love for him to Cinderella running down into the basement as the sirens go off. Such a metaphor is dark and comical at the same time, and I was hoping that you could elaborate on it a little more.

A lot of my academic and scholarly work has focused on these contradictory moments of actual lived life. Again, there are several layers here. On the one hand, life is messy and complex and visceral – life does go on even during war, and on the other hand, there is a responsibility that comes with scholarly work – creative work – when it comes to telling stories about the Middle East. Because these stories are constantly misrepresented and reduced to black and white narratives, you know, the image is either you must have been miserable or you must have been completely fine.

There is a very simple reality that the truth is that childhood has its magic, and so memories of bombs and fear and helplessness sit right next to the memories of play and joy and love. There is a significant aspect of whatever I do, whether in creative work or in academic work, that focuses on that, to make that very obvious fact – more obvious because it should be obvious. But often when it comes to media or academic representations, it’s not very obvious. Memory itself is a long-term process. I mean, we’re still sorting through these contradictions as adults or view it in different ways and with different and varying intensities, but none of us can escape this period of time.

That perhaps explains why my academic work on generational memory is very much tied into this sort of creative aspect because it has to do with the ways in which these stories come out – the creative ways that people find to make sense of them, to work through them, to come out on the other side. There’s also a lot in my academic work, a lot of stories about the 1980s, about the fact that a lot of what people had to – especially children and teenagers – had to work through and navigate. When you talk about it now, with distance and with the privilege of hindsight, most of it looks and sounds absurd and funny and comic and tragic at the same time. This is something that people have, you know; you develop a skill to think about things as common tragic and as absurd at the same time. Yet you still keep that critical edge, and this doesn’t mean that you’re taking the stories at face value. You’re not passive about them. This is an active mode of working through them with these mechanisms.

Another gripping passage: “And then, came the experience of betrayal, as years went by and my body started to change. On my silent way to womanhood and youth, it was finally possible to overhear the truth, floating in the air, on the street, in the dust and rubble that remained after the war. The truth was, the war was a big fat lie.”

I think that’s exactly what’s at the heart of this story. That so much of this history is about different generations of Iranians experiencing a roller coaster of hope and despair. You have the revolution, and then you had a moment of hopes for democracy in the beginning of the revolution, and then you had the so-called cultural revolution that was followed by the war. That was followed by a period of reconstruction, and then the reform era, which was followed by reality checks again, and then it was followed by the green movements. So this sense of a roller coaster of hope and despair was something that was extremely dominant in the narratives of this collecting for my book and in my research.

It sort of results, in a sense, in a mode of being that psychologists call “learned helplessness.” There’s a sense of defeat, and it has to do with the fact that much of this his story is also about double-binds, in the sense that the experience of a lot of the children – especially of the 1980s – is that their childhood was caught in an impossible bind. The technical term for that is a double-bind, meaning when you give a child contradictory imperatives. For example, I tell you, “it’s a sin to lie; if you lie, you go to hell.” Then in the same breath, I say, “well my child, if so-and-so calls, tell them I’m not home.” You’re putting this child in an impossible place because she or he thinks that either way they’re doomed. This is a very trivial example about the psychology of it. When you expand it to the intersection of personal and social life for a child – to go to school and get contradictory imperatives from the school, and then from the family, and then from the city – it doesn’t matter necessarily about secular or religious families, there’s a sense of discord in the way that a child is supposed to navigate the spaces of being in society.

The problem with double-binds is that over time, they become internalized, and they create a lot of anxiety within the psyche of a child. At that time, most children have the capacity to find ways to go through this to survive, so you might not feel the intensity of this at the time, but there are consequences long-term. This sense of double-bind, you know, with Iranian stories, what you hear often is, we had to lie to our parents or in school. Or we felt bad about, for example, having the Betamax video player that was you’re not supposed to have at home, but then if you had it you felt guilty. All of these things you had to hide at school or feelings about when people talk about cultural and media productions of the time – most of the children on these children’s programs on television were either searching for or had lost a parent. I hear stories a lot about now grown-ups telling me that they struggled with anxieties about losing their parents and that kind of thing.

In all of these experiences, you can look at them at the individual level, but you can also ask what this does to the collective psyche of a society over time. Again, I emphasize over time, because that’s what I’m interested in. What does this do to each generation’s identity politics; to their cultural aesthetics; to their dreams, desires and anxieties? My work tries to bring our attention back to the long-term effects of these experiences without creating either pathological or a rosy picture. There is hurt. There is resilience. There is good and the bad and the ugly. All of them coexist, but we need to acknowledge and process and own this history, psychologically speaking, without being defensive or performative about it. This is extremely important because a lot of times we either get very defensive or we get very performative. We need a safe space to go back to these memories and to sort of set their records straight with them in a way, if you will.

This distance of the double-bind and the learned helplessness, a lot of it has to do with a sense of betrayal. The Iran-Iraq War was the main example of that, you know; a lot of people, especially now and as time goes by and as more recent developments have shown us, a lot of these ideological wars could have been avoided. A lot of loss could have been prevented. None of this was inevitable, and I think this is something that puts a lot of burden on the psyche to come to terms with. Because you’re dealing with loss, and you’re also dealing with the fact that this loss wasn’t a given – could have been prevented – that’s part of what that passage is alluding to. That this generation came of age realizing that a lot of the things they shouted, a lot of the “death to this-and-that” or “down with this-and-that” was unnecessary. There is something very painful about realizing that as you come of age.

As I was reading the story, I thought of the ways in which climates of militarism always have their gendered dimensions. Popular images show men as fighters and women and children as helpless victims. Images of heroic masculinities, or masculinized martyrdom circulate quite a bit during wartime. This gendering of war has occurred across the world and throughout different historical periods. Can you talk about the gendered aspects of war, both in your experience of the Iran-Iraq war, in this story, and in general?

Much of this history is about living in gendered and gendering spaces. It has to do with gender and gendering languages, called of conduct and imperatives. Certain structures of power or injustice rely on these gendered forms of life, but what significant is how these gendering modes of thought and modes of being are being experienced and in internalized by children. In the very experience of double-binds, so much of those experiences that I just mentioned have to do with the female body – have to do with dress codes.

I mean, as you know, in the 1980s there was drastic change and shift; the school uniforms changed, teaching material in school textbooks changed, imagery in children’s programs on television and in the media changed. For a lot of families, whether you were religious or secular or whatever, there was a sense that there was a major shift happening, and grown-ups were busy managing that. Through the eyes of the child – girls in particular – there was a space between home and school and the streets that needed very careful navigation.

This is also what you talk about in your book “Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran.” Can you talk about it a little more?

Yes, absolutely. This is something I’ve discussed in the book as well, and particularly about the impact of these cultural productions and this particular moment on the children of this decade. In my research, a lot of people talk to me about the impact of these cultural media productions on them as girls and as boys, because your cultural imageries are being shaped by forces that are not very comprehensive to you at the time. You’re at the receiving end and love them – the children’s program on television, the propaganda. I mean, many of their protagonists were orphans in these stories.

You had foreign productions that were carefully dubbed and stories were changed. The famous Nell comes up in all of my interviews. People have very not-so-fun memories of Nell, because it reminded them of a very melancholic story of a girl looking for her dead mother, and it turns out – just in brackets to tell you – that the story was actually a completely different story. This was a version that the Islamic Republic had rewritten about Nell. Domestic production programs like “Ali Kouchlou” where all extremely gendered in the sense that you had a little boy performing the role of the man of the house; his father is at the front, and his mother is making a lot of sacrifices. So the story of war, and what it means to be a boy or a girl, are extremely intimately intertwined here, and children are just absorbing these stories at that time.

I’m not going into the details of this – if anyone is interested in the book – but overall, we’re looking at childhood and adolescence in an emotionally uncertain and ideologically scrutinized environment. And that has implications. I mean, experience is extremely heightened and intense, and yet children have a very particular way of having survival mechanisms and coping strategies to make sense of their surroundings as much as possible. Children are extremely resilient. I want to be very clear that this is not about you know, saying, “oh these children are damaged” or “these children are unscathed.”

That’s the problem. That’s where we get into muddy waters, because we are so defensive about saying all these children are, you know, impacted by this, and people are very worried about the way they’re represented. The point here is not to say whether children are damaged or not. The point is to make sense of history and to say, “well, okay, this happened, and this is our collective history. This has shaped our generational aesthetics, and generational cultures, and languages, and mindsets, and dreams, and aspirations, and fears, and we need to be comfortable with that – deal with that. Find ways of making that meaningful.” And that’s what people do when I say we need to do it, and people are doing it. It’s just that there are very few spaces that allow for that kind of analysis to come out without getting bogged down by questions of representation. Whether this is a black or white, or misrepresentation of reality which in itself is the question about notion.

So gender is a big part of that narrative here, and the body is key here. Moral codes are imposed on this body, and militarism becomes superimposed on all of this – so absolutely the question of militarism and the body are extremely married to each other here. But above all, all of this is experienced in a constant background of double-binds. If you think about it, this can be also very tiring for the mind to constantly navigate these spaces. Double-binds are tricky because they become internalized, and the anxieties they evoke become part of how we perceive ourselves. That’s the challenge: to sort of, parse out these elements of the past and the now…there’s a lot of details to that I’m not gonna go into.

Towards the end of the letter, a phrase that caught my attention was “Between the dream of return, and the wisdom of moving on.” implying that you and your friend are between those two places. What does it mean for you to be between the dream of return and the wisdom of moving on?

I’m actually really glad you brought this up, because my vantage point in my creative work and in my scholarship, is shortly influenced by my location in these liminal spaces – spaces betwixt them, between, so to speak. The story explicitly talks about the geographic limbo across borders, but liminality in between languages and identities is also implied here in the story. That’s where I’m located between languages, between places, and even between disciplines and professional cultures. It can be a place that can at times be a lonely place, but it’s extremely generative, culturally speaking, and creatively it’s where I write from and how I experience the stories that I tell.

But at the same time, and on a completely different level, it’s nothing exclusive to me, and it’s nothing personal it’s also a shared political space – this space in between, what’s behind us, and what’s ahead of us. I think it’s a shared political space we occupy as immigrants, and as, you know, writers and whatnot. It’s also an important space to make more visible – both in literature and in scholarship, I think. In the book, I talk about them, and I talk about these collective and generational memories of the children – particularly of the 1980s – daheye shasti ha. I also talk about remembering as a retrospective and a prospective exercise, or a necessity even, because the past is an integral part of this story, and our future-oriented desires and fantasies are shaped by this past. We’re constantly looking back more than forward.

That space of limbo that the protagonist of the story is caught in, I mean, both characters of the story are caught in, across borders is also a space between their perspective languages and their perspective memories. One of them is coming from Iraq, and one of them is coming from Iran. There is always this line that you want to cross, but there are so many spaces between these lines, so I think there is something about the impossibility of crossing that line, as well, that keeps you in these women on spaces. For me, that passage is about how you don’t get stuck in these in-between places and you’re constantly carving that new spaces to be and to become.

Talk about what inspired you to write “Leica.”

“Leica” captures a moment – a rather intimate moment – in a human relationship. The story behind “Leica” is that the camera actually exists. It’s a Polaroid camera that I remember very fondly from my own childhood. I have an obsession with gadgets and objects, and this is a Polaroid camera. It’s beautifully designed; it has this brown leather case and it’s really gorgeous, and I happen to have it 30 years since the last time it was used. So when it arrived I, you know, I was cherishing it, and it’s become a very, cherished treasure for me. So talking about it, or sharing with the other people, is an is a big deal. It’s not something I put on a shelf and show people; if I tell the story of the Polaroid camera to people, it means I’m sharing part of my own story and myself with them.

This poem captures one of those moments that, basically, I’m telling the story of the camera, but what I see through the lens of the camera and what my eyes that I had in the past see are two different things. There something about the complexity of time. That the time is not linear. That every time I look through the lens of that camera, I’m in multiple times. I’m in the past. I’m in the present. I also have an eye on the future, because there is a human relationship in this poem involved with the implication that there’s also life ahead. But there is also this idea of the impossibility of language, and the impossibility of translation, the impossibility of making experiences commensurable at the end of the day, and capturing the entirety of an experience in a different language because that experience in effect is lived in Persian. So as a child, I saw those images in Persian. I lived them in Persian, and then now I’m telling this story in English to someone – to presumably not Persian-speaking. So for me, there’s this ongoing struggle, or challenge maybe, to bring up the question of language and translation and the impossibility of both of them.

The story in “Leica” also, of course, has a gendered element because everything we talked about in terms of childhood, girlhood, war and the anxieties of living through the blitz and all of that is implied. There’s another element which is it’s also about a moment in a love story. Yeah, but it the way it’s it came out was in my relationship with the camera, in fact.

How would you compare “Leica” with “The War we Lived”? They are written about two different contexts and historical moments yet guided by similar themes.

For me, they are both pieces of the same broader story, but they have come to life in different forms. “The War We Lived” was written after I had already written the longer version of the story in Persian, and you know, it had also been read differently because people who had read the Persian version were different kinds of readership, right? So, the relationship I had with the readership of that story was different. A lot of people from my own generation, and from generations a little bit younger than me, related to that story; it had a different kind of audience.

“Leica” came to life in English, and so it’s had a different life. Although it’s a different piece of the same historical moment and the same story, it came out in English and it’s had a very different relationship with its readership. I mean not many people have read it but when people read it, I almost feel like I have to apologize to them, because they’re feeling something intense, and I don’t know why. (Not that I don’t know why.) It’s actually striking for me to see that if someone hasn’t lived that moment, and if someone doesn’t speak Persian, they can still relate to this story because the visuals of it are actually powerful.

They have very different lives. “The War We Lived” has also been published already in a feature section in the magazine “Consequence” on Persian literature, but “Leica” has been published quietly. So they way readers react to “Leica” is very different. Maybe because it’s more, you know, snappy.

The other thing that’s interesting for myself is that the person I was when I wrote “The War We Lived,” and the person I was when I wrote “Leica” was two different stages of my life. I wrote “Leica” in London. I wrote “The Ware We Lived” in Boston. And I know this only matters to me, and no one else, but you always have a sense of where you were when a story was born, what we were going through, how you were perceiving things. In that sense, they kind of come out of quite different moments in my own life.

You are both a scholar and a creative writer. Are there similarities between your process as a scholar and your process as a creative writer?

Well, it’s hard for me to separate the two in a way because over time my poetry, my fiction, my scholarly work have sort of informed each other in sometimes surprising ways – sometimes without intending to, but they’ve been in conversation. I think for me it’s extremely difficult to go back and, you know, put my finger on the moment when they started separately, because maybe they never did – maybe they all started at the same time.

I think both processes are extremely personal for me, and they’re extremely political – if that makes sense in the creative process and the process of critical thinking and research and critique. Of course, there is an element of a personal desire and a personal urge to do that, but at the same time, there’s a political edge. I think we all agree that they cannot be separated. For me, the process of creative thinking and critical thinking and, even, clinical thinking are always deeply informing each other, but at the same time, I don’t think it happens very consciously for me.

For example, after I published my book through the research I did on the 1980s and on generational memory, the project that followed was the “Beyond ‘Trauma’ Project” in which I started this platform to bring together practitioners, and policymakers, and creatives, and artists, and writers – and anyone who was concerned with the questions of human experience, and memory, and the complexity of lived life – in effect, come together and to sort of change the status quo on how our debates on mental health in the Middle East have been shaped. It was very important for me to bring the conversation outside of the medical realm because these conversations about mental health are very are usually in the purview of medical, clinical and psychological discussions.

While I’m very wedded to that, and while I’m professionally embedded in those discussions, I’m also embedded in discussions of the politics of this notion of mental health – the politics of representation. So much of that has to do with creativity and with the ways in which people live through difficult moments and live through moments that we then study when we study mental health, but none of that usually is included in discussions of mental health. It was extremely important for me to bring creatives and academics and scholars into a conversation and beyond trauma is a way of doing that the point and the aim of the platform.

What would you say to people who are reading your pieces now, in 2020 ,in light of the prospects of more war and ongoing militarism?

I mean, these are very worrying times of course, and my hope is that what this kind of work does would be to urge us to remember, to look back, to not reinvent the wheel. I mean, we seem to have a tendency to go, you know, our attention spans are limited to crisis and “let me jump to the next crisis.” We sort of forget that most of these crises then have an afterlife, and we don’t sustain our attention long enough to look at that afterlife.

If we carefully look at these afterlives and look at the consequences, you know, individual, political, historical and cultural consequences of these events and ruptures, I think we would think twice before we casually talk about wars and casually talk about invading and attacking each other. That’s my very personal hope; that this kind of work makes a very humble contribution to that kind of thinking, to encourage it. I think everyone knows that wars are extremely damaging and destructive, but it’s astonishing how that knowledge doesn’t come into practice when these kinds of debates are done.