(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Soudabeh Alishahi: Smile. Gyldendal, 2015
I was recently in the movies watching the naturalistic mafia movie Black souls. Shortly after, I started Soudabeh Alishahi's novel Smile, it struck me that the Iranian culture she describes has much in common with the mafia culture. The password is, of course, an honor, and a religion that is systematically exploited to justify both a patriarchal social order and various offenses. In a culture of honor, there is always a lot at stake, and the individual's freedom must be limited by power and fears. This provides a basis for drama in narrative forms, and I am definitely one to be moved by such stories. Iranian Marjane Satrapis Persepolis was the first cartoon that made me cry – and after watching Black souls I had dark circles of makeup around my eyes.
Smile has all the dramatic ingredients needed, as well as precise historical references that are very interesting to a reader who is unfamiliar with Iran's history. Still, it does not make the same impression as the two aforementioned works.
Shades of madness. We are located in the Iranian village of Halakabad, probably around 1990. Halakabad is not the real name of the place, it is a nickname that means "ruined settlement". In the wake of the revolution and the ravages of the Iran-Iraq war, the Barat family are trying to keep their heads above the bloody waters. The head of the family Haji Barat (after the pilgrimage to Mecca he received this honorary title), his son Jones and his son's wife Partow live together, and have taken the Afghan refugee Soleiman under his wings to help him in the house. Both Haji and Jones are marked by the war, and Haji's wife has ended up in a mental hospital. Haji himself must have indicated his son to the authorities for anti-revolutionary activity, which here means communist thought and lack of loyalty to the new theocratic regime. The punishment for this has been torture, which has made the son seem crazy. Apparently, because it is suggested early on that there are several gray zones between madness and normality in the new everyday family the family is forced to live in.
The potential of literature. The story is blurred mainly through the perspective of daughter-in-law Partow, but also through Soleiman's diary. This one has landed in Partow's hands, and becomes a welcome escape from her sad existence with her fanatical, handicapped father-in-law and husband she can no longer recognize. Using storytelling as a survival technique is an easy reference to 1001 night, and I wish the novel insisted even more on literature as a meaningful art form.
[The Critic of Religion] strikes the reader like the heat of an open stone oven.
Religious Satire. I also miss even more religious criticism – it hits the reader like the heat of an open stone oven. Here is an example, in one of the excerpts from Soleiman's diary: “Just like Haji, Dad also thought that death was up to our prayers and God. However, it was not. I was 14 when he died. And death did not happen in a corner or face Mecca, and he did not finish raising me. ”In a laconic way, the author shows everything that is completely arbitrary, hurtful and pointless, and that it will not be any easier to deal with this life when it is constantly insisted on a justice that never takes place. It also gets easier comically when God interferes with every prosaic detail, such as what birthplace it should be on the fake Iranian passport to Soleiman, or what difference it makes to access to paradise if Soleiman doesn't remember bringing water to Haji in the morning – which also illustrates how easily religion can be used as a manipulative means of power.
The author is good at articulating the religious rules, and in her satire the absurd logic emerges, as when Partow explains the use of so-called "sextau" on the bus: "Within Islam there are penalties that make men need to stand up to a ropes on the bus, there are penalties that are given away for free and lead to mandatory happiness for Muslim men, as the penalties keep them from sinning. The rope means that not even their dead or half-dead bodies on the bus or in the slaughterhouse can get into the woman's body and thus involuntarily commit haram. "Phrases like" the obligatory Islamic happiness "and Partow's pasted smile are among the linguistic images that work, though the ironic smile eventually becomes a worn out tool.
Power and power. Another memorable scene is Soleiman's attempt to get her mother's new husband to stop beating her. He borrows a police uniform and sends a picture of himself in it, and the stepmother immediately controls himself. As in the mafia environment, power symbols are far more effective than laws, rules and common decency. Great emphasis is also placed on dialects and accents, and Soleiman and his Afghan friends are working hard to get the cool Tehran snake in place. In these sequences I get associations with the literary scientist Homi Bhabha's theory of "mimicry" as a subversive strategy, in which the oppressed mimic the language and culture of the oppressors, and how this can threaten the symbols the latter use as means of power and identification.
Linguistic and flattering. The publisher describes Smile as a depiction of Iranian everyday life before and after the revolution, and there is definitely a lot of everyday life. Nearly 500 pages of food eaten, soft drinks to drink, snow falling, carcasses and tomato puree to be sold. It is difficult to load every little detail with significance, as Knausgård adds. Several of the characters are also inconsistent and contourless. The reader experience sometimes becomes like walking around one of Halakabad's war-torn houses: The furniture is misplaced and it leaks from the ceiling.
Using storytelling as a survival technique is an easy reference to 1001 night.
The language is sometimes characterized by poor syntax and sentimental clichés about heart, pain, grief and soul, but here I do not know how much is lost in translation. “Flattering and flattering is an innate part of being Iranian. The poetic and fun of the Iranian language, Farsi, also depends on the hypocrisy and flattery, ”says Haji Barat somewhere – and I immediately think of the challenging translator task.
Like many other contemporary novels, this too could have been cut down to highlight its qualities and character. It's a shame to see this flammable material being extinguished by tomato puree and chopped syntax.
Bjørnøy is a literary critic and critic.
bbjornoy@gmail.com
