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OT:OT:OT You think they could read or just war and NASCAR

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2005-03-29, 7:15 pm

Daily Star
March 26, 2005

An outsider's story of Iran presents a collective memoir

'In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs' is a stylish debut that pushes
journalism's boundaries

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London in 1971 and has spent the past
decade in the Middle East and South Asia. He writes for the Economist, the
New York Review of Books, Granta, and the New Yorker. He lives in Tehran
with his wife Bita and his son Jahan. http://www.christopherdebellaigue.com

Khomeini, Barzagan, Montazeri, Rasfanjani, Khamenei, and Khatami. The
leading individuals of modern Iranian history are all present in journalist
Christopher de Bellaigue's impressive literary debut, "In the Rose Garden of
the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran"
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...209803?v=glance). But de
Bellaigue's book, which is stylishly written and cleverly structured, nudges
prominent political figures into the background and focuses instead on
smaller fry.

A 33-year-old reporter for The Economist who has been based in the Middle
East and South Asia for the past 10 years and in Iran for the past five, de
Bellaigue uses his 279 pages to introduce people like Mr. Zarif, Alavi
Tabar, Mr. Karimi, and Parastu Forouhar.

In terms of name recognition and marquee value, they may strike readers as
ordinary at first. But as their stories, experiences, and intimate details
unfold, they become extraordinary.

The tag of "memoir" has become somewhat loaded in book-publishing circles of
late. On the one hand, memoirs sell, and the more salacious they are the
better. On the other hand, memoirs are often taken lightly. They have
neither the rigor of fact nor the innovation of fiction. On the topic of
Iran in particular, the idea of memoir is even more fraught. For every lover
of Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," there's a
hater willing to denounce the whole thing as garbage.

"In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs" does not exoticize Iran. It does not
indulge nostalgia. To be sure, it addresses a foreign audience ("I wouldn't
tell Iranians their own history," De Bellaigue says). But it does not do so
by offering page after mind-numbing page of policy wonk, as many books on
Iran lately do, intent on instructing Western policymakers on how to proceed
vis-a-vis the Iranian "problem."

De Bellaigue could be seen to have done his book a disservice by tagging it
a memoir. After all, it has both the rigor of fact and the innovation of
fiction. But in the end he seems rather to rehabilitate the very word
memoir. Really, he doesn't dive into his own story until late, on page 224.
And even there, he does so with exacting brevity. He studied at Cambridge.
He spent time in India first, and then in Turkey. Realizing that despite two
years studying Persian in school, he'd forgotten the word for "yes", he paid
a visit to Iran in 1999. Within three weeks, he met, fell in love with, and
determined to marry his wife. Done.

"In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs" is named first and foremost for a
cemetery in Isfahan where victims of the grueling 1980-88 war between Iran
and Iraq have been buried. "The name is meant to evoke this central event
that informs the whole book," says de Bellaigue, speaking on the telephone
from Tehran, where he lives with his wife Bita and their young son Jahan. He
says he arrived at "A Memoir of Iran" after much thought and with
significant trepidation. "It's not so much my memoir," he explains, as it is
the collected memoirs of his characters. "But 'Memoirs of Iran' would have
been too vague, too convoluted. It's my memoir of my experiences in Iran but
it's more their experiences that I try to put across."

Mr. Zarif talks about the teenage gangs he formed to torment other
youngsters opposed to the Islamic Revolution or worse, taken up by
Communism. He tells stories of disastrous battles. He discusses belief. He
answers de Bellaigue's carefully phrased questions about lust and sex.

Mr. Karimi explains the physical effects of being gassed by Saddam Hussein's
army. Incredulous at the feigned ignorance of Western powers, he quotes
Donald Rumsfeld from memory. He speaks of such concepts of betrayal.

Alavi Tabar explains how he has opened six newspapers only to see them
banned one after another. He divulges the contents of his dreams. He spars
with de Bellaigue on the meaning of modernity.

"Modernity means having the freedom and ability to criticize," says Alavi
Tabar.

"Not the victory of the individual?" asks de Bellaigue.

"No."

In addition to the characters that Bellaigue meets, there are a number of
figures who simply fascinate him, and readers, by extension, such as Teyyed
(a thug who orchestrates a coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, sparks riots in
protest of Khomeini's arrest, is executed and forgotten), Akbar Ganji (a
ballsy, reformist journalist who browbeats the public with news of political
killings), and Hossein Kharrazi (the sinister "Isfahani Alexander", long
dead, around whom de Bellaigue shapes much of his narrative.)

Through all these anecdotes and passages, de Bellaigue creates a kind of
episodic portrait of a country that is not only suffering from
post-revolutionary poop-out syndrome but is also nowhere near being able to
meaningfully or therapeutically assess the extent of the trauma it endured
in the 10 years of war that followed.

"I'm trying to explain a little bit about what it's like to be in Iran now",
he says, "and also explain a little bit about the past 25 years, what the
past 25 years have meant."

Among the most striking qualities of the book, aside from it's occasional
literary riffs (a dizzying, crazed passage in the voice of an Iraqi soldier,
a diversion into George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia"), is its honesty. De
Bellaigue writes confidently. His tone is measured. His observations are
mature and without malice. Yet he never loses himself. He is never unaware
of how his presence colors his encounters.

"In Iran, for someone who is obviously and physically an outsider such as
myself, it's very difficult to get people to open up," he says. For every
character that made it into the book, he adds, "There were ten people I
tried to woo" who didn't comply.

De Bellaigue took three years to complete "In the Rose Garden of the
Martyrs." He began shortly after moving to Tehran in 2000. But he did so
simultaneous to trying to carve out a new life, trying to set himself up to
work. "The whole thing was a very steep learning curve," he says. The actual
writing of the book took about 10 months. The rest was research, spending
time with his subjects, earning their trust.

"I wanted to sort of divorce myself and separate my reporting life from my
book writing life," he explains. "I think most reporters, when they come to
write a book, tend to write something that springs more immediately from
their reporting. I just wanted to tell another story. I spend my day job as
a reporter. I didn't want to be a reporter writing a book. I wanted to be a
writer writing a book."

In this he succeeds. But "In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs" nonetheless
illuminates the craft of journalism. Even as a writer, de Bellaigue is a
sensitive and observant reporter. He captures nuances and finds big meanings
in small details. He chronicles the experiences of living in place, truly.
He doesn't rely on the snatched details of someone who has dropped in to do
a job. Still, in capturing the frustration of traffic, the insincerity of
manners, the crappy condition of cars, he is aware of his position.

"It's the writing of an outsider as well. As a foreigner, even one who is
heavily implicated like me, you establish a distance; you're able to
criticize trenchantly without criticizing yourself. I can always say, 'Well
it's actually not my country.'"

The eminent Polish writer and reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski once said: "It
was important to me to illustrate the experiences by which a foreigner
enters a new world. He is, for instance, at first frightened, then
surprised - and then he discovers the pleasure, the fun, the exhilaration
.... The realities we face ... are so much richer, more complicated, than a
newspaper will ever allow us to report ... It's what surrounds the story.
The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the
gossip of the town, the smell."

Kapuscinski, who in his lifetime has witnessed no less than 27 revolutions
first hand and who is the author of "Shah of Shahs", "The Soccer War", and
"The Emperor", among others, looms with the glow of a soft and warm light
over "In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs".

De Bellaigue admits that, in the writing of his own book, he slipped into a
sort of homage to Kapuscinski at times. "He's simply an example of a
journalist who utterly expands what journalism is when he's writing books.
And he breaks all the rules. And he's a brilliant stylist."

In terms of his own approach, de Bellaigue says, "I suppose I wanted to give
a sense, as you say, of the craft involved. It may be a reaction to the way
a lot of writers disregard that and present information so seamlessly. That
seamless nature almost undermines credibility, when the characters all speak
too perfectly, when there's never a question not answered. The questions
where answers were not given, people's reactions to a tape recorder, these
are as revealing as the questions where answers were given."

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article...rticle_id=13741

Excerpted from In The Rose Garden of the Martyrs.

Chapter One

Karbala
Why, I wondered long ago, don't the Iranians smile? Even before I first
thought of visiting Iran, I remember seeing photographs of thousands of
crying Iranians, men and women wearing black. In Iran, I read, laughing in a
public place is considered coarse and improper.

Later, when I took an oriental studies course at university, I learned that
the Islamic Republic of Iran built much of its ideology on the public's
longing for a man who died more than thirteen hundred years ago. This is the
Imam Hossein, the supreme martyr of Shi'a Islam and a man whose virtue and
bravery provide a moral shelter for all. Now that I'm living in Tehran,
witness to the interminable sorrow of Iranians for their Imam, I sense that
I'm among a people that enjoys grief, relishes it. Iran mourns on a fragrant
spring day, while watching a ladybird scale a blade of grass, while making
love. This was the case fifty years ago, long before the setting up of the
Islamic Republic, and will be the case fifty years hence, after it has gone.

The first time I observed the mourning ceremonies for the Imam Hossem, I was
reminded of the Christian penitents of the Middle Ages, dragging crosses
through the dust and bringing down whips across their backs. In modern Iran,
too, there is self-flagellation and the lifting of heavy things -- sometimes
a massive timber tabernacle to represent Hossein's bier -- as an expression
of religious fervour. The Christian penitents were self-serving; calamities
such as the Black Death provoked a desire to atone, to save oneself and
one's loved ones from divine retribution. Iran's grieving does not have this
logic. This is no act of atonement, but a sentimental memorial. Iranians
weep for Hossein with gratuitous intimacy. They luxuriate in regret -- as
if, by living a few extra years, the Imam might have enabled them to
negotiate the morass of their own lives. They lick their lips, savour their
misfortune.

I see Hossein alongside Tehran's freeways, his name picked out in flowers
that have been planted on sheer green verges. I see his picture on the walls
of shops and petrol stations, printed on the black cloths that are pinned to
the walls of streets. The conventional renderings show a superman with a
broad, honest forehead and eyes that are springs of fortitude and
compassion. A luxuriant beard attests to Hossein's virility, but his skin is
radiant like that of a Hindu goddess. He wears a fine helmet, with a green
plume for Islam, and holds a lance. I once asked an elderly Iranian woman to
describe Hossein's calamitous death. She spoke as if she had been an
eyewitness to it, effortlessly recalling every expression, every word, every
doom-laden action. She listed the women and children in Hossein's entourage
as if they were members of her own family. She wept her way through half a
dozen Kleenexes.

Every Iranian dreams of going to the town of Karbala, the arid shrine in
central Iraq that was built at the place where Hossein was martyred. I went
there myself, the camp follower of American invaders, and visited the Imam's
tomb. Inside a gold plated dome, Iraqis calmly circumambulated a sarcophagus
whose silver panels had been worn down from the caress of lips and fingers.
They muttered prayers, supplications, remonstrations. Suddenly, the peace
was shattered by moans and the pounding of chests, splintered sounds of
distress and emotion. Five or six distraught men had approached the
sarcophagus. One of them was half collapsed, his hand stretched towards the
Imam; the others shoved and slipped like landlubbers on a pitching deck. My
Iraqi companion curled his lip in distaste at the melodrama. 'Iranian
pilgrims' he said.

It all goes back to AD 632, when the Prophet Muhammad died and Ali, his
cousin and son-in-law, was beaten to the caliphate, first by Abu Bakr, the
Prophet's father-in-law, and then by Abu Bakr's successors, Omar and Osman.
Ali gave up political and military office, and waited his turn, and the
modesty and piety of the Prophet's time was supplanted, according to some
historians, by venality and hedonism. After twenty-five years, following
Osman's brutal murder, Ali was finally elected to the caliphate. But his
rule, although virtuous, lasted only until his murder five years later and
gave rise to a rift between his followers and Osman's clan, the Omayyids.
The origin of the rift was a dynastic dispute, between supporters of the
Prophet's family, represented by Aji, and the Prophet's companions,
represented by the first three caliphs. It prefigured a rift that continues,
between the Shi'as -- literally, the 'partisans of Mi' -- and the Sunnis,
the followers of the Sunnah, the tradition of Muhammad.

After Mi's murder, Hassan, his indolent elder son, struck a deal with the
Omayyids. In AD 680 Hassan died and Al's younger son, Hossein, took over as
head of the Prophet's descendants. Hossein was pious and brave and he
revived his family's hereditary claim to leadership over Muslims. This
brought him into conflict with Yazid, the Omayyid caliph in Damascus. When
the residents of Kufa, near Karbala, asked Hossein to liberate them from
Yazid, the Imam went out to claim his birthright, setting in train events
that led to his martyrdom.

One night, on the eve of the anniversary of Hossein's death, I put on a
borrowed black shirt and took a taxi to a working-class area of south
Tehran. The main road where the taxi dropped me was already filling with
families and men leading sheep by their forelegs. Cauldrons lay by the side
of the road. Everyone wore black; even the little girls wore chadors, an
unbuttoned length of black cloth that unflatteringly shrouds the female
body. I entered a lane with two-storey brick houses along both sides. There
was a crowd at the far end of the street, their backs to us, and their
silhouettes were flung across the asphalt. Black bunting had been strung
between lampposts ...

http://www.wnyc.org/books/43984

Asia Source
February 28, 2005

Interview conducted by Nermeen Shaikh

Christopher de Bellaigue is the correspondent for the Economist in Tehran.
He studied Persian and Indian Studies at Cambridge university and has spent
the last decade living and working in the Middle East and South Asia. He
writes for the New York Review of Books, Granta and the New Yorker.
"In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran" is his first book.

Christopher de Bellaigue was in New York for a Meet the Author program at
the Asia Society. This interview took place prior to the event.

Your writing in the book, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of
Iran is a mixture of many genres: travel writing, the essay form,
journalism, reportage, personal memoir. Did you have a particular genre in
mind when you were writing?

No, it really just came out like that. I had in mind to write a history,
through the eyes of "normal Iranians" as it were. But I really had little
idea, other than that, when I started to write. I also thought that it would
be interesting, and perhaps enlightening from my own experiences as a
foreigner living in Iran, to be included in the book, to include myself in
the book, that is. So it sort of came out that way. I don't know quite how
it did: some people like the fact that it's a mix, others are a bit
confused, and don't like it. But I didn't have a plan for the book, in terms
of genre, it just came out that way.

Given the place of Iran in the present global configuration, how, if at all,
did you want your book to participate in the larger public dialogue on
European or American foreign policy towards that country?

I don't think my book is aimed particularly at policymakers. It's aimed at
people who are interested in finding out more about a country that is the
subject of "megaphone" diplomacy. When you have people addressing Iran from
other capitals - particularly from the U.S. - you have this sense of
enormous clarity of vision that I don't think is warranted, because things
are just simply so much more complicated than they are portrayed. So I
suppose if I could perform some modest service to these people, it is to say
just that: things are much more complicated, the situation is not as black
and white as people here often suggest. You cannot apply all-enveloping
adjectives to the Iranian people and say, "They all think like this", or
"They all want this and we are going to help them achieve it" or whatever.
They are obviously very complex and sophisticated people; that is also what
I discovered, what was confirmed to me, when I was writing this book.

The title of your book is taken from the name of the cemetery where those
killed in the Iran-Iraq war are buried. To what do you attribute your
interest in this war and is there anything in particular in your
interpretation of the historical and political context of the conflict which
you would like to emphasize at the moment?

Well, the reason that I chose the war is because it seemed to be a
horrendously under-reported and misunderstood conflict, and one that has
been effectively glossed over and forgotten in the West. This would be the
same as forgetting the First World War when you are examining the political
landscape of interwar Europe!

The Iran-Iraq war was a huge, huge enterprise that scarred people
horrendously, on both sides. The fact that it was the embodiment and the
culmination of all that revolutionary fervor means that it's absolutely
vital to look at it and at its effects if you want to understand Iran now.
Iran isn't a country that had a revolution, and now is watching the
revolution unravel, or run out of steam. It's a country that had a
revolution, and then engaged in an absolutely horrific war, an absolutely
traumatic experience, for eight years. So it's very important that people
try and understand a bit more about that.

And what is it, in particular, that you wanted to bring out in your
descriptions of the context in which the war began and how it continued?

Well, the first thing that I wanted to bring out was the zealousness, the
zeal and fervor with which many Iranians - perhaps millions of Iranians, or
at least hundreds of thousands - went to the front. The second is the fact
that this war was prolonged far longer than it should have been, and that
was a result of both erroneous politics and erroneous tactics. But the third
thing is that the war created this sense of trauma, both in the survivors of
the people who fought, but also in their families. That endures, to this day
and it helps to explain this ambivalence that you find in Iran now, in
relation to their own past, in relation to outsiders. It is very
enlightening to use the war as a prism through which you can see the Iran of
today.

To continue with this theme: I have to say that you appear rather
contemptuous of the way survivors and family members speak to you of
martyrdom in the context of this war. What accounts for this? In other
words, what makes the willingness to die for faith in God worse than the
willingness to die for faith in the nation?

Well, first, I would take issue with your ascribing of "contemptuous" tones
to my writing! I wasn't trying to be contemptuous; I may have been a little
abstracted from the idea but I certainly didn't mean to be contemptuous.

In some ways, I find it remarkable - and even admirable - that people are
willing to die for an abstract idea, and not merely just for material gain.
But what I think sets that aside, what distinguishes this idea of dying for
your faith from dying for your country is that if you die for your country,
there's no necessary reward in that, in terms of what happens to your soul
after you have died. Whereas, in this case - in the case of people who go to
war believing fervently that if they die in the right way, they will go
straight to heaven - then there is that sense of reward. If you die for your
country, that's reward in itself, but for people who die for their faith,
there is an extra reward.

You say towards the end of the book that Israeli and American claims that
"Iran's interest in nuclear weapons was offensive in design" are false and
that in fact, Iran's interest in nuclear weapons was really "an insurance
against regime change". What do you think the prospects are now, in the
second Bush administration, that the Americans will actively pursue "regime
change" in Iran? And even if not, do you think it is likely that either
Israel or America will launch targeted military strikes against Iran's
nuclear installations in the near future?

I think it's much more likely that they'll do the latter than the former,
but you can never put anything past this administration. I do think though
that the latter is far more likely and all the more so since it seems that
the Bush administration will probably fail to garner sufficient support in
key international institutions, such as the UN, for concerted diplomatic
action against the Iranians. So, no, I don't think they will pursue regime
change now. But at the same time even targeted strikes would seem to me to
be very, very dangerous, fraught with uncertain consequences for American
interests in that region but obviously, most important of all, for the
people of that region.

And how do you see the Iranians reacting in the event that this occurs?

Well, they have hinted broadly that they would create chaos in Iraq, that
they would create chaos in Afghanistan, create more chaos in Palestine. I
don't know if they would be willing to carry out that promise, but it's
certainly something worth taking into account.

Do you think that the Americans are likely to join the Europeans in their
negotiations with Iran?

It seems very unlikely if you've got a Secretary of State that tells French
intellectuals that Iran is totalitarian, when it clearly is not
totalitarian, it's a semi democracy. It seems very unlikely that someone
with that kind of moral clarity or vision is going to sit down and do
business with the Iranians. Although the Iranians, I think, would be
receptive if the Americans were ever to make such a gesture because they do
feel vulnerable.

One of your reviewers in The Guardian says that it is difficult to discern
any liking, much less love, for Iran in the book. How do you respond to
this?

Well, I don't know; I don't wear my love for Iran on my sleeve.

Or in your book!

Yeah! [Laughs]

One of the things that was striking to me in your descriptions of social and
cultural life in Iran was your reading of ta'aruf, which, it seems to me,
you reduced to nothing more than sanctioned hypocrisy. Is it not true that
ta'aruf is also minimally informed by an ethical imperative (to openness,
generosity, hospitality) - regardless of the extent to which the form may
have changed under present conditions?

Well, you may be right. Ta'aruf may have changed character, and become
simply an adornment to everyday life. I don't think it's a bad thing. In
fact I find it a very attractive adornment to everyday life. But it is, as
far as I can see, an adornment, and it allows people to wiggle out of
obligations, and it also allows people to feel good about themselves when
they are not, in actual fact, willing to carry out the good deed that they
say they are.

You end your book with a description of your meeting with Hasan Abdolrahman,
the African American who makes an appearance in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film,
Kandahar. It seems as if your conversations with him influenced your
understanding of faith, of violence and in particular, of political
violence. Is this correct, and if so, how?

I think it probably did. But perhaps no more so than my conversations with
Iranians in the book. It's slightly tangential, this Hasan Abdolrahman
story, because it's more of an American story told from Iran, rather than an
Iranian story. But maybe it does say something universal about violence and
fanatical belief in an ideal, or something abstract like that.

I am interested in him, and others like him, because people like that are
forced to live with the consequences of something that may be horrific, or
may be very dramatic that they did in the past. And it's the consequences of
these things that I find extraordinary. It's impossible to judge or to
understand what he did, meeting him now, the person has changed. It's almost
like meeting a different person and hearing him talk about someone else that
he knows. So it's difficult to make that relation, to make that link. But
the consequences and the ramifications of that kind of decision are very
interesting. And it's interesting to see how people rationalize the
decisions that a former self took. So that side of it, well, I thought, was
very interesting.

You alluded to this when you spoke earlier but you sense also in this a
certain kind of "integrity." What do you mean by that?

Well, what does "integrity" mean? It means being true to your ideals. Now
your ideals may be twisted or unattractive but being true to ideals is
something that is considered to be a quality. So within that context one can
say that there is an integrity to this. But in the same sentence, I also
spoke about, I think it was a "homicidal vileness" to the same thing there.
The two things are mixed in the same sort of hue.

A recent review in the New York Times suggests that you write with an
"imperial confidence" of Iran. How would you respond to that claim?

I don't think he meant that I was being - well, I don't know, you would have
to ask the reviewer what he meant by that. But I took it as a compliment!

You can't be serious!

He was applying the word "imperial" to something that's got nothing to do
with imperialism. And "confidence" isn't something that.

..Is the exclusive purview of imperial powers?

Right!

But you can say, you might say that it's over-determined - since you are, of
course, English.

Yes, yes, you can say that. You can say that someone speaks with all the
persuasiveness of an advertising executive without them actually being an
advertising executive. With all the other unattractive facets that you might
attribute to advertising executives.

So you're saying that you have some of the unattractive attributes.

..of an imperialist? [Laughs]

Yes.

I don't know. You'll have to ask my wife that!

To end, then, what projects do you have planned now? Any other books
forthcoming?

I would like to write another book. I have got three projects that I am
going over. But I don't know quite how to order them, or quite how to take
them forward. One is fiction, and one has nothing to do with either the
Middle East, or South Asia, is completely out of that realm, in fact.

Nothing more on Iran then?

Oh, yes, I'll always keep coming back to Iran, but I think it's probably
time for a breather. And then, we'll see what happens.

http://www.asiasource.org/news/spec...s/bellaigue.cfm

--
Quaecomque sunt vera ----

GT Tick

2005-03-29, 7:15 pm

Who?