Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Poetry by Mohsen Emadi | Issue 40 (2021)

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Ash Sonata
By Mohsen Emadi, Translated by Lyn Coffin

A stranger always carries
his home in his arms
like an orphan
and maybe
all he is looking for
is a grave
to bury it.

:Nelly Sachs

Folk tales of this city speak of an alien that arrived with a blonde and a suitcase on the coldest day of the year at the oldest house in the city, where he rented a room. No eyes could look at him. He was an abyss in the shape of a man. Upon his arrival, all paired objects suffered damage to their coupling. Oral culture tells us a woman was living in the next room. All she owned was a pair of flowerpots, passed down to her, hand to hand, from ancient times. Upon the alien’s arrival, flowers in one of the woman’s pots started to wither. The woman started crying but only one of her eyes produced tears. The eye without tears now saw only shadows. When the alien and the blonde left the city, the snow that had been falling stopped, and the woman saw two flowerpots on her shelf. One of the flowerpots was full of ashes.

Again I am in this city,
and this time people see me
they sit beside me with their coffees and
they start chatting.
They tell me their memories of me and ask me humorously
If I ate the blonde in those far-off lands?
When I stay silent,
I see fear in their eyes.
Their bodies are paralyzed.
One of their eyes stays fixed and the other moves rapidly from side to side.

Legends say this type of animal was widespread in the world after the great fire of Rome. After that fire, this animal inhaled air and exhaled ash. The ash of this animal’s exhalations on a bed or a pillow caused insomnia or nightmares. It is known that the dead animals used the bodies of the living to speak out and for this reason the living animals do not have agency over themselves and their sexual desires vary depending on the number of their significant dead. To talk to them is to talk to their dead. If you want to learn their language, it is necessary for you and an animal to spit three times mutually into each other’s mouth. When someone masters one of these languages, their skin color immediately changes.

Again I am in this city
and still the weight of time is heavier than anything else.
The place leads all five senses to a deep sleep.
The eye in the continuity of snow rarely faces the discrete occurrence of a house.
The ear in the harmony of silence and breath hears the non-harmonic breaking of a tree in the depths of the forest.
The skin grows numb.
The snow does not have a smell.
And the tongue gets used to hunger.
From the four corners of the earth, my dead
lend me the sense organs stolen from them:
an eye by a shrapnel shell, the skin by fire, the nose and mouth after a chemical bombardment, an ear in the explosion.
With the intensity of all the desires hidden in loss
I look at pavements, snowed
full of the remains of cigarettes
The passers-by are not visible
without a body, without lips
I search for words
that make invisible the visible
and impossible the possible.
Hand in hand with oblivion
I stand in front of a mirror that does not show me to myself
and I start singing.

Homer and Sophocles were not the only ones to speak of them. But the Romans committed a grave error and imagined them as living only underwater. The Greeks had clearer images of them. The survival method Homer used in front of them was the following: All five senses must remain closed and escape from them was possible. However his strategy was not useful after the great fire of Rome. Like many other animals, they have the ability to sense fear in their prey. They are not Eaters of the Dead. The Dead, in their belief, are Gods and therefore when one faces them, it is better to play the role of someone dead. The eyes are the part of the human body that attracts them the most. It is known that they get the shine in their eyes by looking into our eyes and stealing our souls from them.

Again I am in this city and still I don’t know
when your eyes are green
if language is the house of existence
or a battlement of the city

The old victors
were burying captives alive
in crannies.
Your eyes were green
and I know language has crannies,
that one can look at you through them
or can bury somebody in them.

The walls of my language
the walls of your language
and the dead
in the crannies.

Your eyes are green
and my walls are high.

Your soldiers
pass through the crannies of poems
and march over my body.

Poetry
is always a traitor
and your eyes
always empty

When they fall in love with somebody, they eat them. Usually they start with the deepest organs: livers, viscera and hidden meats. The prey never feels any pain. The empty space of the consumed organ is replaced by a solid or liquid emptiness that functions like the lost organ but is devoid of life. Because the natural environment of their daily life is full of unpredictable events like bombardments or wars, they are used to anything unpredictable and surprising. They may shout without any reason. They may not show any discernible movement. They may even turn to stone suddenly. If you are forced to live among them, never cease your natural routines: play sports daily, take long showers, eat healthy meals. Never forget that no contract with them is considered valid. They use a kind of ink for signing contracts that removes itself when they wish it. In fact what they give to you never has authenticity. It simply does not exist, is either imaginary or has previously been stolen from you. Their songs are mostly melancholic and sad because they never listen to the voice of living beings. They think the music of the dead is the only possible music.

Perhaps again I am in this city
Perhaps in a concert hall
or a studio
where the fingers of piano players
touched the keys
and played this song
the quality of voice proves
the player’s hands are decayed
but I can lean over the scratched notes
as if I am sitting in a train
advancing to the front, to war,
and am supposed to get out at a safe station.
Perhaps in a concert hall
or in a small room
where your lips
were playing on my tremblings
your whispers were close
your hands young.
In another language
you were lying beside me
you were stealing my nightmares through the trembling of my body
and were translating them to your breathing.
The translations were taking you on a trip.
You reached all the harbors of the world
all the sailors were sending you kisses
you were stripping naked in the mist
you were embracing the distances between nightmares
your nakedness was filling up
the space between your breaths.
I was running in that space
and the sailors were shaking hands.
Always the snow falls
in our unconsciousness.
I am still in this city
and a sonata in flat white major
accompanies my breaths.
This music can only be heard by the dead.

To imagine a frozen tomb without flowers, without visitors, under the tones of snow, was disgusting, and Poetry was not interested in the death of the poet in this city; therefore he himself interfered and while the poet was sleeping wrote the rest of the text.

You should die like your grandmother
dreaming of dancing at your wedding:
her colorful shirts
were pouring from her sleep into yours.
But you are born
the moment the angels fall,
and you must die into a word.
A unicorn will come out of your chest
and your body will turn to a sad melody
sailors will whistle when they are trapped in the mist.
Suddenly a waterfront appears
and they pace the street
where you were born.
The resurrection of all the defeated is in that street.

In the geography of the impossible
you were advancing and were kissing her shoulders
and the rest was silence
and the embrace of darkness.
The victors of the territory of the possible
outside the frame of the mirror
outside the whiteness of paper
were lighting lamps
were opening windows.
Far away
you were gazing at the emptiness of her room
the white of the paper
snow
and you did not believe in her death.
Now with flowery clothes
she comes to the street where you were born
and asks for your bride.
You freeze
and awaken in a city
where you inhale air
and exhale ash.

Sleep in your childhood cradle!
This city is cold.
I cannot change the color of your skin,
the color of your eyes
but from shore to shore
I sing you a lullaby:

Mother!
No woman stole me from you.
Songs stole me from all the women.
They brought me to Malaga.

I cried on the grave of a song in Malaga
and I was born with another song in Seville.
Songs were being buried in the snowy embrace of women,
they were sprouting on your colorful skirt.
Mother!
I want those Malagaian green eyes!
—Be patient, they are yours.
I want the moonlight skin of the princess of Seville.
—Hurry, grow up, that is yours, too!
No woman had green eyes in Malaga.
There was no princess in Seville.
Mother!
You don’t have a bed covered with violets
or a red rose in your hand.
.
This wound, this bullet, this snow-
they were not in your songs.
Now, from Seville, where do I have to go?

Everything in you must attain the quality of the defeated.
Be Numancia
at the moment the Duero gets blocked,
the dead children of Llorona.
One day all the roads end in Rome.

She must assassinate Gandhi in you.
You have to sleep each night in a mass grave,
always condemned,
the one insane drunkard of the city
that searches for the remains of cigarettes on the pavement,
drowned in the darkness of the waters of the world,
a tightrope walker along the borders of the impossible
to be able to compose the melody,
that small melody
your grandmother was singing
in her death sleep,
the one thing that brings you to Rome
and you set Rome on fire

Your grandmother’s shirt
reached you in a package;
it smelled of death and of her.
In a pocket was the ring
she wanted to give to your bride.
She didn’t know that in this city
being born in her house is a crime.
Her language is a crime.
You lie down, place her shirt under your head, and go to sleep,
your sleep turns colorful.
You’re at your grandmother’s wedding,
and her mother puts the ring on her finger.
From the mountains of Mazandaran
to the sierras of Chiapas,
dancing mothers
are singing the llorona:
red
the red of fire.

Mohsen Emadi is an Iranian/Mexican poet, translator, programmer and filmmaker. He has published the poetry books La flor en los renglones (Lola Editorial, Spain, 2003), We never talked about her eyes (Goo Publishing, Iran, 2007), Las leyes de gravedad (Olifante, Spain, 2011), Visible como el aire, legible como la muerte (Olifante, Spain, 2012), Abismal (CrC, Mexico, 2016), Standing on Earth (Phoneme Media, USA, 2016), Suomalainen Iltapäivä (Olifante, Spain, 2017); as well as the book of conversations with Clara Janés and Antonio Gamoneda, De la realidad y la poesía (Vaso Roto, 2010).

His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and his poetry has been translated into several languages. He is the founder and editor of the Persian Anthology of World Poetry and Ahmad Shamlou’s offical website. As a filmmaker, he has directed several poetic documentaries, among which Querido Antonio stands out, on the influence of the Civil War on Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry; La ùnica patria, which contains the last interview of Juan Gelman, or Donde habite el olvido, about Luis Cernuda’s exile in Mexico. Since 2009 Emadi left the country to exile and consequently he lived in Finland, Czech Republic, Spain and Mexico. His poetic work has received various international awards.

Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Poetry by Roger Sedarat | Issue 40 (2021)

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5 Poems
By Roger Sedarat

Bani Adam

The sons of Adam are limbs of each other,
Having been created by one essence.
When the calamity of time affects one limb
The other limbs cannot remain at rest.
If you have no sympathy for the calamity of others
You are unworthy to be called by the name of Human.

“Children of Adam,” Sa’di

In the days of hope we had poetry.
Lines of Sa’di inscribed
on the entrance of the United Nations
almost convinced us we belonged
to each other, children of Adam
with a president reciting this verse
to our siblings on their new year
and a foreign president who reciprocated
by rhapsodizing about the origins
of the younger, enterprising nation.
Enemies of the first called him “Muslim”
like it was bad, his message going back
to the Qur’an as source of universal love
just as enemies of the second called theirs “Western”
shaming him for aspiring to such values.
Despite differences we related to the idea
of the 13th century sufi mystic.
Sometimes we experienced it as love
though we couldn’t quite explain it,
which is why we needed poetry.

On the woman’s chador…

a picture of a woman
wearing a chador on the
woman’s chador a picture of a woman
wearing a chador on the woman’s chador…

I couldn’t stop looking at her face,
superficially obsessed with the picture
of a woman wearing a chador
on the woman’s chador…

Persian Carpets

Spread out on floors of a house
bought by my father’s Iranian-
American dream
which continues to unravel
the free market
metamorphosis
of his rags to riches myth
into a moth
gnawing on fibers
holes in the thread
faceless kings turned
to empty tea trays held
by servants kneeling
on nothingness
the great empires
pulled out
from under
mane-less lions
with withered spines
slouching back
toward their maker
in Shiraz.

Iranian Sanctions

“Censorship is the mother metaphor.”
–Borges

Awaiting parts, 30 grounded airplanes
turn into a simurgh.

Denied medicine, Bijan blooms
roses in his diseased blood.

Numbers from the SWIFT payment system
regress to nightingale eggs: OO

Mr. Molani’s metalwork melts
down to a few faceless coins.

Rotting threads of the unsold carpet
expose the lion’s rib cage.

So many rooftop satellites—
waves of the Caspian rolling toward the west.

Our mothers in chadors spread their arms,
a blizzard of bats transcending the Muslim ban.

Oil inevitably seeps through Chinese barrels,
blanketing Beijing in smog.

How’d the rich kid get an iPhone?
(The iPhone is simply an iPhone).

Persian Drunk

Well, I got the fever down in my pockets,
The Persian drunkard, he follows me.
–Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan made his muse a Persian drunk
Is that okay? Let’s ask the Persian drunk.

How come no Nobel for my country songs?
My baba was a far worse Persian drunk.

I saw the six white horses, sweet Marie,
When you put me in this prison, drunk.

You’ve tried the transplanted Australian wine.
Here’s real Shiraz. Now, that’s a Persian drunk.

Hafez did not go to the mosque for God.
He found divinity in Persian drunks.

Raised in America and really shy,
I find I bravely speak great Persian drunk.

Roger Sedarat is the author of four poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio UP’s 2007 Hollis Summers’ Prize, Ghazal Games (Ohio UP 2011), Foot Faults: Tennis Poems (David Robert Books), and Haji as Puppet: an Orientalist Burlesque, which won Word Works 2016 Tenth Gate Prize for a Mid-Career Poet. A recipient of the Willis Barnstone Prize in Translation, his rendering of classical and contemporary Persian verse have appeared in Poetry, Brooklyn Rail, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

His most recent academic book, Emerson in Iran: the American Appropriation of Persian Poetry, is the first full-length study of the American poet-philosopher’s engagement with the classical verse tradition of Iran. He teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York.​

Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Essay by Amir Ahmadi Arian | Issue 40 (2021)

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The Plague Incarnate: Ghost-Spotting in Times of Pandemic
By Amir Ahmadi Arian

The Scottish traveler James B. Fraser arrived in Persia in 1821 as the cholera epidemic was raging through the country. He disembarked from a ship in the port of Bushehr, and was immediately shocked by the enormity of the suffering that awaited him. Death was so omnipresent in Bushehr that in his daily walks, Fraser witnessed people falling to the ground and dying in the street. At the graveyard he saw a long line of residents, their dead relatives on their shoulders, lined up waiting for their turn to put their loved ones into the ground. Only a few days later the mortality rate was so high that the public burial ground could no longer accommodate the dead bodies, so they were abandoned wherever the disease felled them.

Fraser left Bushehr for Shiraz hoping to secure safer lodgings but the situation was not much better up there. He noticed that, as time went by, the period between the emergence of the first symptoms of illness and death rapidly diminished. A family member who looked healthy and sound would leave to fetch water or buy bread, and two hours later his body would be found lying in the street. In one case, in a family of five women and nine men, the women left for the mountains as soon as one of the men showed symptoms. A few days later they returned and discovered the bodies of all their male relatives. The disease had attacked the nine of them at the same time and incapacitated them so fast none could muster the energy to leave the house.

The Shirazis noticed that different communities were affected differently. The Armenians and the Jews did much better than Muslims, which prompted people to believe that the consumption of alcohol reduced the risk of contracting the disease. Those who were drinkers doubled down. Those who had never touched the stuff decided that God would withhold his wrath just this once.

The result was wild. Hordes of inebriated people staggered around the streets amid the decomposing corpses, moaning, yelling and crying. Fraser saw a drunk man running along, tripping over dead bodies, screaming, “Where is this disease, this dreadful malady! Let him show himself that I may fight and kill him!”

In Journal of A Plague Year, Daniel Defoe offers one of the earliest examples of what today we call the “documentary novel.”

Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe survived the Bubonic Plague of 1665 in London and later gave his nephew an extensive account of what he endured that year. That account, combined with Samuel Pepys’s diary, inspired the author to write the story of the plague. Defoe conducted extensive research on the patterns of everyday life in London during the time of sickness, and used this material as the foundation for the novel, which appeared in 1722.

Named in honor of Defoe’s deceased uncle, the protagonist H.F. is a keen observer in the plague-stricken city. He wanders around to bear witness and records what he sees in vivid detail. People have either left town or died. The ones who stayed are mostly the poor who couldn’t afford to leave and now wait for the inevitable. Human interaction is mainly characterized by violence and backstabbing, as people have decided that survival as a collective is no longer possible. Given this dismal state of affairs, when H.F. sees a crowd at a street corner peacefully staring into the sky, he is instantly drawn to them.

When he approaches, he realizes that the people were thronged around a woman holding forth about a white-clothed angel hanging above them in the sky and brandishing a fiery sword. Her audience responds with enthusiasm to everything she says. Yes, yes, I did see the smile on her face, they call back to her. Yes, yes, I saw the flash of the sword as she raised it.
H.F. looks up and all he can see is a smallis small piece of cloud hanging low in the sky. The woman, noticing the newcomer, tries to show him the angel. H.F. refuses to go along with her, insisting that he only sees a piece of cloud. The woman calls him “a profane fellow, and a scoffer,” and tells him to go “wither and perish.” H.F. notices that the mob is stirring, ready to jump on him if he doubts the existence of the angel one more time. He walks away.

On May 14th, 2020, the New York Times reported multiple ghost sightings by people in quarantine across the US. Aman in L.A. heard the loud rattling of a doorknob and the hard shaking of the window shade, both occurring inexplicably. “I am a fairly rational person,” he insisted, yet he couldn’t help thinking something out of the ordinary was happening. Elsewhere, a young man reported that in lockdown he frequently got blasted by cold water in the shower. Every time he reached for the nozzle, he realized that an invisible hand had turned off the hot water.

The piece mentions many other cases of paranormal in passing. People in lockdown reported hearing whispers in empty rooms, the ceiling light suddenly alit without anyone touching the switch, and objects disappearing or getting moved around the house.

In this report, the story of Patrick Hind caught my attention in particular. He is a 42- year- old man who left Manhattan for a cottage in Western Massachusetts. One night he descended the stairs at 3 am for a glass of water. The Times reported that, “he walked into the kitchen and saw a white man in his 50s, wearing a well-worn, World War II-era military uniform and cap sitting at the table.” Initially, Hind said, he didn’t even register the strangeness of this, and continued drinking water unfazed. A moment later the peculiarity of the situation struck him and he did a double take. The man was gone.
None of these accounts are first hand. In all three cases the narrators chalk up the behaviors they observe to the psychological pressures of living through a pandemic. Fraser took the shouting drunk man as an example of mass “confusion and consternation.” In Defoe’s Journal, H.F. regarded the crowd as delusional. As he realized the beleaguered Londoners, under the thrall of the charismatic speaker, would not listen to reason, he was dismayed that “this Appearance pass’d for as real.” The New York Times reporter, writing in an age of disillusionment, somewhat absurdly reminds us that “there is no scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts.”

What makes so-called ‘rational’ people seek or see ghosts during a time of plague? Why is it that in such distressing circumstances the human mind conjures a visible embodiment of its predicament?

Pandemics are caused by invisible pathogens that travel covertly and replicate with incredible rapidity. A pandemic is declared when the pathogen reaches an incalculably large number of people in the world, thus generating another form of invisibility: sheer size. Thanks to this dual invisibility of extreme smallness and extreme largeness, pandemics paralyze human reasoning. The calculating mind, habituated to ferreting out cause-and-effect relations, is at an impasse.

Faced with a pandemic, we become like characters in Rumi’s famous “elephant in the dark” story: an elephant is brought into a dark room. People enter and attempt to figure out what it looks like by touching it. One rubs his palm along the trunk, comes out and says that the elephant is like a rain pipe. The next one touches the ear and reports that the animal resembles a fan. A third person feels the leg and believes the animal to be a pillar. If their palms held candles instead, Rumi says, their accounts would converge.

For the human mind, grappling with the reality of a pandemic amounts to feeling out an elephant in a dark room. We can only use our fumbling palms to offer flawed, distorted versions of reality. We are simply too small to wrap our heads around it.

A pandemic is a perfect example of what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”. It is an entity that spreads so vastly in time and space that the human mind has no way of capturing it as a whole. It is everywhere and nowhere. It sticks to everything, becomes present in all aspects of our lives, and yet stays far out of our mind’s reach. It resembles the image of Allah in the Quran: “He is above everything they attribute to him,” (6/100) while being “closer to man than his jugular vein.” (50/16) It bends time and space, defying the accustomed Cartesian breakdown of the world.

The story of the 21st century may well be one of emerging hyperobjects and our inability to contain them. The COVID pandemic is only one example. Every move we make, everything we say or write, is stored in a cloud somewhere. Big data is a hyper object specific to our time. Then there is global warming. The thickening cloud of CO2 in the atmosphere is a hyperobject if there ever was one, enormous and absolutely omnipresent, leaving its mark on every aspect of life. We see its discrete manifestations as individual hurricanes and droughts and melting icebergs, as disappearing islands and extinct animals.

Conjuring a visible embodiment of a hyperobject is what we have always done in the face of the unknowable. When a hyperobject strikes our lives, usually our first response is to find a visible embodiment for it: the greedy immigrants, the careless poor, the free-loaders. The pandemics are no different. The drunk Persian man wandering in the streets of Shiraz was desperate for an embodiment of cholera, so he could wrestle it to the ground. The Londoners of the 17th century needed an embodiment of the unstoppable disease, and found in the lingering death angel a soothing answer. The half-asleep Manhattan man in Massachusetts cottage gave the pandemic a body and outfit similar to what the Londoners saw almost four centuries prior.

Facing hyperobjects, we only have two choices: either accepting that we simply cannot defeat them and try to mitigate their effects on our lives, or scapegoating, designating or conjuring up figures that serve us as hyperobject stand-in, and project our fears and onto them. The latter has been by far our more common response over the course of history. There is no reason to think we will change any time soon.

Amir Ahmadi Arian teaches literature and creative writing at CUNY City College in New York City. 

His work has appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Al Jazeera, London Review of Books, Electric Literature, Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Words Without Borders, the Guardian, Lithub, and elsewhere. He is the author of Then The Fish Swallowed Him (HarperCollins 2020).

Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Fiction by Nahid Keshavarz | Issue 40 (2021)

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Elizabeth Taylor is Frightened

By Nahid Keshavarz
Translator – Khashayar Mohammadi

She has dyed her sparse bangs black, obsessively combing them together. Her full, shapely lips-accentuated by the red lip & cheek rouge on her pale skin- makes her attractive in her seventies. Her plump body appears curvaceous under the loose, black robe. When she laughs two dimples appear on her cheeks and her eyes close. She laughs out loud from the bottom of her heart. I have known her for years. When she came for her paperwork twenty years ago, Her beauty showed. She was always energetic and full of life, as she entered her laughter-which she always had a reason to let out-filled the corridor. Whenever I saw her she reminded me of someone famous, someone I couldn’t quite place.

She was fluent in French but she adamantly tried to learn German as well; but since she didn’t have much time to learn the language, she began working right away. Her graciousness in customer service made her quite the celebrity. She conducted herself with a certain dignity and poise. She strictly followed hidden codes of conduct and appearance and always claimed that one should always be courteous. We’ve fallen off the horse, not off our heritage!* I had not heard of her for years, until she visited once again a few weeks ago.

“I don’t want to move houses, I can’t live in a smaller house, I’ll get depressed! Also what should I do with my belongings? They won’t all fit in a smaller house! Forget it if you think I’ll part with them! I’ve done it once in my life I won’t do it again!”

After her husband’s death last year she must relocate to a smaller house where the government will pay her rent. After a few hours of convincing her to move goes nowhere, we plan to meet at her house where I’ll help her look through her belongings and re-consider what she can keep. Its hard work to convince someone to part with what they love.

She lives on the ground floor of a 3 story building. She has a small garden where she has planted multicolored flowers and on a corner even some mint and basil, two white chairs with a round table covered with a colorful tablecloth and an ashtray on top. Next to it is a pack of cigarettes and a long cigarette stick.

Her two rooms are rather large and see much sunlight in warm, sunny April. The rooms are filled with furniture bought second-hand from antique stores, yet they all seem to go together well. She has tastefully arranged them next to each other. Her house appears quite French in style. Her tables are covered with embroidered lace and the paintings are mostly Parisienne landscapes. A colorful silk rug is centered in the room, around which the green silk chairs have paled throughout the years. The candlelight makes the house quite welcoming in daylight. The kind of house where one feels safe and sound, a place where no one’s in a hurry to leave.

“I must take this vase with me. I bought it from an antique shop on a trip to France, look at it!”

She grabs and caresses the vase. She closes the eyes as if to commit it to memory.

“I don’t want the glasses, I want the teacups and oh that chest must also stay, the drawers…”

She walks around the house pointing to her belongings. Her voice is full of conviction.

I say: “let’s sit. This way we won’t get anywhere”

I don’t know how to ask, but I want to know why its so hard for her to part with her belongings. Perhaps its out of spite, since I’ve volunteered to do something no one has asked me to do. Today the weather was so nice, I’d rather been outside walking around. Without thinking I blurt out:

“I know its hard to part with these belongings, but what bothers you most about doing so?”

She looks at me with tears filling her eyes and says:

“I’m frightened. I’m scared I’ll die after I get rid of them. I’m afraid of dying, very much so. I don’t believe in the afterlife or reincarnation. I wish I did. That way I wouldn’t believe I’ll be gone”

Suddenly she locks eyes with me and says: “aren’t you afraid?”

Her question stops me in my tracks. My stomach begins to churn. She doesn’t wait for an answer.

“I’m afraid to die in exile, that after death I won’t stay in anyone’s mind. I visited my husband’s grave after his death. Every single day for months. When I was there I wanted to leave and stay far away, to return to the world of the living. I’m not ready for death yet. I only went there out of a sense of duty but I know no one will visit me after my death. I don’t want my cadaver to return to Iran either. I’ve grown resentful towards Iran. I’ve spent the best years of my life far away from it, the best years of my youth when I wished to be there. Why should I return after death? I wanted to live there, not die there.”

I begin to think a new chapter has begun in the life of immigrants: the concept of death in exile. I extend my sleeves and make a fist under the cloth, an old habit from childhood. The thought of Death fills my mind.

“Most nights I have nightmares. I dream I’m dead but no one comes for me.”

She asked again: “aren’t you afraid of death?”

I don’t remember when she put a cigarette on her long cigarette stick, but she’s exhaling smoke in little rings, locking eyes with me, waiting for a response. I remember my own nightmares and say:

“of course, I think of death too. Everyone thinks about death sometimes. The fear of death follows one all life long. Each person finds their own way to cope”

She says quite authoritatively: “sure I know all that but aren’t you scared?”

I extend my sleeves further down and say: “yes I am also afraid.” But then continue to say, as if warding off fear:
“I believe death is similar in nature to the pre-natal state. One does not process it mentally, so there’s no reason to be afraid.”

She’s lounging on her antique furniture. Her head rests on a lace napkin ring crowning the top of the chair. She gets up all of a sudden, runs her hands through her hair, gives it a bit of structure, and snaps open an antique fan with a depiction of flamenco dancers. She fans herself and says:

“They say a human being can stare at neither the sun nor death. I believe its time to stare at it, death I mean, but I’m afraid. I always thought I’d live a thousand years, so I postponed everything I loved to do, postponed them all to don’t-know-when, didn’t take my sorrow seriously. My sorrows and more than anything my dreams. I covered them all. You know I read a lot. I love reading. One time I read this one book about an alcoholic woman; I don’t remember the name quite well, I must have read it forty years ago, but I remember a sentence that said ‘as a child whenever I fell down my mother said don’t cry now. Cry tomorrow’ I have also always postponed my tears to the next day, but the pain piled up in my heart. I’m afraid of dying, having never cried for them.”

I have a good feeling in her house. I feel a certain kinship, as if I’ve been here before. Not the space, but the feeling is familiar. Death lingers amidst the sense of intimacy. I ask:

“do you wish to continue living as you have for eternity?”

She asks: “Like this? Without any change?”

Before I answer, I think to myself if I’m ready, and as if I’m trying to cement it in my own mind I ask:
“like this. Without change.”

Her face changes, she grows distant. Her gaze lingers on the window across from us. We both remain silent for a while. She gets up and goes to the kitchen, and from the Samovar, she pours a single cup of tea which she places in front of me, but she is elsewhere. She repeats to herself “the same life? Without change?” then raises her voice, and without looking at me says:

“No I don’t. Of course I don’t. What kind of life was it till now that I want it to repeat itself. It was all dreams, gone with the wind. All withheld proclamations. All roleplaying, acting, forced laughter. No I don’t want to live like this. I haven’t lived, that’s why I’ve always wanted to live one day. To start living one given day. I have always been a traveler here. We’ve always claimed our roots were elsewhere. Our roots neither grew there nor here. I don’t know why death is so hard in exile. I always thought it was hard for a happy person to die, but it appears to be the opposite.”

I get up to close the window. Its raining hard outside. The candlelight is beginning to show. I find a reason to stay a while longer. I think I also don’t want to repeat the past.

I look towards her as she laughs out loud. Her eyes are sparkling. She gestures towards me and says: “ok its enough we talked a lot about death! I’ll think of something to do with this stuff, I still have time.”

She puts another cigarette on the cigarette stick and asks: “by the way, do you know Elizabeth Taylor?”

I finally realize how much she resembles Elizabeth Taylor.

Nahid Keshavarz is a graduate of journalism school in Tehran. She has been living in Koln, Germany for more than thirty years. For fourteen years she has been manager of Refugee and Immigrant affairs in city of Koln.

She has passed courses in psychoanalysis and works as a psychoanalyst part time. Nahid is an active writer and her articles have been published on various portals and websites. She has also published four novels, one of which has been translated into German. Her fifth book is a work in progress and is scheduled for publication soon.

Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Fiction by Alie Ataee | Issue 40 (2021)

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Parisian Coffee

By Alie Ataee
Translated by Mohammad Sarvi

FIRST:
I’m a novelist and a café owner in Tehran, so I’ve met and I keep meeting a lot of people.

The second man arrived after the first man had already ordered chips, cheese and beer. He nervously said in a loud voice: “They’ve sentenced him to death. They’re going to hang him.”

While filling his glass with beer from a bottle, the first man said: “I told you there’s no way he could get away.”

The second man took a chair, sat down and said: “There’s nothing we can do.”

The first man pushed the chips and cheese plate toward the second man and said: “Obviously not. He committed murder. It’s not a joke.”

They got busy eating. I asked: “Do you need anything else?”

The second man just noticed my presence. He looked at me with surprise, like he didn’t expect me to be there. He responded: “What’s on today’s menu?”

“Would you like to see the menu?” I asked.

“Yes please. My friend wants to order,” he answered.

As I put down the menu on the table in front of him, I asked: “Who is going to be hanged?”

“Naghawi,” he answered, ”Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“He shot his wife and daughter and neighbors in Nazi Abad,” he explained.

“Why?” I asked.

“Honor killing,” He responded.

Both men stared at each other. The first man kept on talking: “This kind of people still exists; people who would get suspicious of their daughter because of one simple phone call. And they would kill her mother too!”

“I understand,” I said.

But I didn’t understand. I left their table. The café experienced one of its sad days. Naghawi had killed his wife and daughter, and two strangers were talking about his death sentence while having a snack.

The drizzle turned into a heavy rain. I took a book from the shelf and sat in front of the yard. As I was about to open it, I remembered Maryam had told me about her uncle who had killed his daughter in Kermanshah, because he didn’t know what she was leading her life. I asked her what was she doing for living? And Maryam didn’t respond. She only said, let’s pray for her soul. Souma also said Sabiheh was killed, because it wasn’t clear whom she had been writing letters to I asked who was she writing to? Souma said no one had ever found out. g there facing the yard and reviewing these memories, I felt angry with the second man who had delivered th horrible news about Naghawi, so angry that when he asked me for napkins, I told him we don’t have any.

He ordered his cake and coffee fifteen minutes after the first man finished his. . Once the first man was done, he said: “Would you please bring me an apple tart, ma’am?”

I went to the kitchen and brought him the tart. The second man had eaten half of his cake and he was busy devouring the second half. He said while chewing: “Only if the weapon is found his crime is proven..”

The first man didn’t respond.

The second man kept talking: “He won’t say where it is because he has bought it from someone whose identity he’s hiding.”

The first man said: “It’s probably a G3 rifle. Massacres are usually done with G3.”

The second man stopped eating and said: “How do you know this? However, it doesn’t matter what kind of gun it was; a bullet kills anyway.”

The first man stuck his fork in the tart and said: “Because only a professional would be able to kill seven people.”
The second was done eating. He said: “He wasn’t a professional. If he were, he would have killed only her daughter, not a crowd!”

The first man said: “You’re being too naïve, someone who’s holding a G3 rifle wouldn’t just kill one person.”

The second man looked down at his cup of coffee, then pushed it to the other side of the table. Perhaps he didn’t like the cup. Then, he said: “You’re so confident as if you’ve ever held a G3 rifle.”

The first man Kept calm. “Of course I haven’t. There was no reason to have one. I Don’t’ have a daughter or even a wife.” laughed so hard I could see his gums. Some cake was stuck on his teeth, but he couldn’t see it.

The second man said: “Let me search the internet for G3 rifle to see how it looks like.”

“It’s the kind of rifle that Naghawi managed to obtain,” the first man said.

The second man took his tablet out of his handbag. While he was busy searching on the internet, he said: “We know Naghawi. How would he obtain a G3?”

The first man stared at the second man with surprise and finally stopped eating. He said: “Now you arrived at the same question the police did. We certainly don’t know how he obtained it.”

Scrolling through pages on his tablet, the second man said: “It’s so strange that Naghawi was such a capable person and we had no idea!”

The first man said: “Totally. It’s not easy to get such a rifle. He didn’t look like such a capable guy.”

Listening to them, I was imagining a G3 rifle, the incompetent Nagahwi, Maryam’s cousin, Sabiheh who wrote letters, and the messed up tart on the table…

The images were passing in my mind like a slideshow, but none of them made me bring the men their bill and say: “We’re closing early today.” َAfter a while, managing my coffee shop, I felt I didn’t feel like continuing anymore. The man I loved had left me and I was lonely. Also, after the day the two men visited my shop, I concluded that all other men were into weapons and bullets. That’s why I decided to leave Iran for good. Well, I thought an experienced café owner can run a coffee shop anywhere in the world.

SECOND:
As I said earlier, I was a café owner in Tehran. This makes me eligible to say that Caffe Vito is one of the most ridiculous coffee shops in Paris. Not that the seedy places in Paris are rare, but this café is really a special one. Two Italian men are the owners. Some waiters are Malaysian. The only type of coffee they serve is Arabic. Tunisians and Moroccans get a twenty percent discount.

A café owner is always curious about other cafés, so that he can compare them with his own. When you’re in a city famous for its cafés, you keep evaluating your coffee shop based on things other cafés do and don’t. For example, how the cakes and coffee taste in those places and how customers are being served. Café Vito is one of the places that I visit on a daily basis, perhaps because I want to keep reminding myself that any café in Tehran is better than Vito. One day I was there, it was one of those ordinary days that nothing really happens. It was an ordinary morning and I ordered one of their ordinary coffees, thinking I had to write a paragraph about Vito and how cheap it is. I had all the information in mind. All the items on the menu including different Arabic coffees which were actually the same and only the chocolate served with them was different. And, , the number of Moroccan customers who received a twenty percent discount. As I opened my laptop to write the report, the waiter put my coffee on the table and said: “I’m so glad you’ve been visiting us for several days. Mariam is also happy by your choice.”

I smiled and thought to myself, so this is how the story begins, Mariam, a woman whom I’ve never met, is glad that I’m back for another visit. Perhaps I was wrong about those two Italian men with big white teeth being the owners of this café. Mariam owns the place and her employees greet customers on her behalf. As I started typing, a waiter appeared with a form titled “Hello to Mariam” and said: “Please fill out this form and become a member of our customer club.”

The form requested information such as name, phone number, and number of times per day I visit the café. I couldn’t stop thinking about “Hello to Mariam”. I envisioned Mariam as a self-absorbed woman or a strong woman with devoted fans. I filled out the form and added a comment at the end: “Your coffee isn’t not at all. I keep coming here because the taste of your coffee reminds me that coffee tastes better in Iran.”

I tried my best to write a neat French sentence. I double-checked the spelling of each word. I wanted to make sure she knows my comment is thoughtful. I handed back the waiter the form. I was anticipating his return as he came back with two copies of a one-page comic story and placed them on the table without saying a word. He wasn’t smiling like before and he didn’t care to ask why I bothered visiting them if I didn’t like their coffee? Since he didn’t ask, I couldn’t tell him I had other reasons. I picked a copy and looked at it. It was a biography; the word “Mariam” on the top was emboldened.

Mariam is a Moroccan woman whose husband was from Tunisia. During the colonial times in Morocco, she saved up money by selling coffee to fund Moroccan and Tunisian migrants. Mariam spent the money for the migrants’ healthcare. Her husband died in Malaysia of an unknown illness. Later, she married an Italian man. The two Italian men at the café are her grandsons.

It ended with this sentence: “Mariam, a woman who hates borders and powers.”

The biography made me think if Mariam hated borders. Did she really dedicate her life to migrants? If yes, why the waiters are Malaysians and why do Moroccans and Tunisians get discounts and why only Arabic coffee is served. I start typing my article:

Suffering is transferable through genes. People suffering from homelessness give birth to homeless children. Even though some homeless think in the future they can own a place to live there forever, the faulty genes won’t let them. It doesn’t matter if they are born in Morocco, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Iran or Malaysia. It doesn’t matter if they belong to a colony or they are victims of a war. It doesn’t matter where their next generations are born. The chromosomes that contain homelessness are passed on. Homelessness passes through the borders and nests inside the heart of refugees forever. As a result, one day a refugee takes shelter in another refugee’s café, while none of them are the person they were supposed to be.

THIRD:
When I saw them, they were getting separated. The boy was sitting on a wooden bench near Seine and the girl was standing, listening to the boy. He said: “There’s no reason to be afraid. You just have to go to the airport and return to Tehran.”

The girl sat next to the boy and said nothing. The boy took a pipe out of his bag and lit it gently. The girl held her head down. The boy held his head to the sky, and breathed the smoke out. He continued: “so many people come and go, none of them worry like you do. It’s just a six-hour trip, like a trip from Tehran to Isfahan.”

The girl grabbed the boy’s hand by the wrist and said: “But we came here together.”

The boy reacted: “But this time we’re not going back together. Is it blasphemy?”

The girl quivered and said: “Then what?”

The boy snapped: “What do you mean?”

“Are we going to meet when you are back in Tehran?” the girl asked.

“Yes, but less. A lot less,” the boy answered.

“Did I do something wrong?” the girl asked.

The boy answered angrily: “You overestimated my patience.”

“I had a wonderful time with you. I felt so blessed with you.”

The boy pulled his hand out of hers and said: “You have to wait until you’re wanted. You have no patience. An impatient woman isn’t a suitable one to live with.”

The girl tilted her head and said: “Give me more time, I’ll change.”

The boy put some more tobacco in the pipe and said: “I gave you an opportunity to travel. I got you a visa so you could come here to spend time together.”

“Don’t you consider the circumstances?” the girl said. “It was my first time out of the country. I wasn’t used to bathrooms here. The food didn’t’ go well with my stomach.”

The boy leaned back and said: “These little things are in every life. As I said, you don’t have patience.”

The girl moved on the bench to talk to the boy face to face and said: “How do you rank me?”

The boy who obviously liked the question, answered: “You used to be zero. Now you’re below zero.”

The girl leaned back again, or perhaps she collapsed. I couldn’t see her anymore. I saw the boy’s legs as he walked away. I made up their story in my mind. The story of a boy who goes on a trip with a girl. They’ve planned to marry. The boy leaves the girl before the trip is over. I got up and went toward the girl. As she was fiddling with the bits of tobacco left on the bench, she didn’t notice me. I asked in Farsi: “May I sit here?”

She looked at me with a smile, glad that I spoke Farsi. We were sitting across each other. Her full face looked much prettier than her profile seen from a distance. She had a long thin face. Her hands were shaking and her face looked uncertain” like a woman who’s insecure about her beauty and she’s convinced nobody likes her.

“How long will you be staying in Paris?” I asked.

“I’m leaving for Tehran tonight,” she answered.

I tried to pretend I was happy and said with a fake excitement: “amazing! I wish you a nice trip!”

She didn’t respond. She paused for some seconds, then asked: “How many gates should I pass through before boarding the airplane?”

“Three, I think I answered, “There’s the same number of them as when you arrived.”

She nodded. I wasn’t t sure whether she had a bad feeling, knowing that I overheard their conversation t. But I told myself, even if it was a bad feeling, it couldn’t be worse than what she’d felt earlier.

Don’t worry,” I said, “Nothing bad is going to happen. There are signs everywhere and the flight information officer answers any question you might have.”

She was quiet and kept her head down. I continued: “Let him go. Your life will be better without him, trust me.”

She raised her head. Her eyes filled up with tears, and tears rolled down her cheeks. I kept talking: “You couldn’t keep him by force, but he wasn’t a good guy anyway. You’re better off without him.”

She asked with a low tone: “How do you know?”

“Because he left you in the middle of the midway in your relationship,” I answered,” He had days and months in Tehran to tell you he doesn’t think you’re no match for him, but he chose a situation like this to say it. Do you think a good guy would do that?”

She shook her head and said: “I can’t believe it.”

I lit a cigarette and looked at the tourist boats sailing along the Seine. People took selfies on the deck and a loud music was playing. The city was alive, and I was thinking about how she was not happy. I knew that it would take her a long time to believe that the boy had left her. It would take her a long time to leave her homeland forever, and it would take a long time until she would be willing to go back to the land of shootings and angry men and loveless women. That’s who we are. Don’t human beings have anything except themselves?

Alie Ataee is an Iranian-Afghan fiction writer and playwright. She has an MA in Dramatic Literature from the University of Tehran. Her stories speak to the themes of immigration and identity crisis. She has published two novels and more recently a collection of short fiction.

Her books have won several awards including the Mehregan Adam Award and the Vav Literary Award. Some of her short stories have been translated into English and French and published in a diverse set of literary journals like Guernica and Michigan Quarterly Review. Her new nonfiction about the war on Iran at Afghanistan borders is forthcoming.

Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Poetry by Saeed Yousef | Issue 40 (2021)

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Four Poems
By Saeed Yousef

A Song of Gratitude

I can change my hats, I can change my boots
I can change my jobs and my ways and attitudes
there’s one thing I can’t change and that’s my roots.

I can change houses as easily as tents
I can change towns and countries and continents
and always find substitutes for everything.
It’s just for roots I can’t find no substitutes.

And now I find myself in this very rare mood
that I want to sing a song of gratitude
for my roots, for I see it’s just for them—
it’s just for them I can’t find no substitutes.

In the Kitchen

Bent over the frying pan
you are stirring with the long wooden spoon.
I am admiring the lines of your body
and this sizzling sound comes from my heart.

Grazing in the waving grass, my gaze
slips down the waist
taking accurate measures of each spot.

Everybody waiting, enjoying the scent
of spices and what’s being cooked,
and I have such great appetite for the cook.

Foreignness

– How are you here, far from home?
– How should I put it?
Like a train that has left its tracks, heading for the wilderness.

– What are you doing here, in foreign lands?
– How should I put it?
Each day I take my guitar and softly play a few false, foreign notes.

– How do you perceive a foreign land?
– How should I put it?
It’s something foreign to me, outside of me.

– How do you find yourself?
– A foreigner, doubtlessly a foreigner.

Twin

A forbidden kiss, wet with tears and rain,
after running under a spring cloudburst.
That’s how you are, my twin! Soul mate
of many years!
Souvenir from the years of impatience,
Growing with me along the line of times.

Lingering in my heart as some keepsake,
a star from the galaxy of friendship.
That’s how you are, my twin! Soul mate
of many years!
A forbidden kiss, wet with tears and rain,
after running under a spring cloudburst.

Saeed Yousef is a former professor of Persian language and literature at the University of Chicago (2002-2020). He began writing and publishing poems in mid-1960s. A political prisoner under the Shah (1971-74), he had to leave Iran after the revolution and went to Germany as a refugee. Yousef has published about 10 books of poems, several translations and books of literary criticism, as well as three books of Persian Grammar. 

Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Art by Fereshteh Najafi | Issue 40 (2021)

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The magic of colors and the mystic world of fantasy and dreams made me an illustrator of children’s books; a potent force that I explore since my childhood that is still with me. When I was 8 or 9 years old, most of time I was painting and making crafts. One of my interests was creating puppets. Every day I made up a story and in the morning at school, before class started, I performed a play to my classmates. Years later, my passion for colors, lines and shapes made me choose the Art University of Teheran and try new approaches to creation and art expression. After graduation I worked with art direction and graphic design for books and magazines.

In 2008 I decided to leave Iran to find new horizons. From this year onwards I stopped my graphic work and started writing and illustrating my stories. I had my first published book, La piccola Pittrice, by an Italian publisher in 2010. This was the beginning of my professional career abroad. My next book was an Iranian story, King Bahram, published in Frence in 2009. During my experience in Italy, I worked on many books with publishers from Italy, France, United Arabic Emirates, South Africa, Lebanon and Brazil. It was a rich experience for me, when I could meet illustrators from different countries, participate in several Illustration Exhibitions, especially at the Bologna Children´s Book Fair, attend various programs, meetings and round tables, when I also could publish new books every year.

In 2015, at the invitation of Editora Positivo, a Brazilian publisher, I went to Brazil for a workshop in São Paulo and to launch the book Pe and the wide world. At the end of 2015 I moved to Brazil, to a southern city called Curitiba. It is a beautiful place, pleasant in every season, full of trees, colourful flowers and an unbelievable number of birds filling the space with their songs. This is where I live today, creating my projects for children, planning my next travels, enjoying a good coffee in the afternoons. I have a great taste for travel, I believe that visiting new countries influences my art and matures my worldview, although I always try to keep my cultural roots, the Persian heritage that I bring in my blood.

– Fereshteh Najafi

King of the Sands I & II

1001 Night Stories

My Grandmother

Le roi Bahram

Piccola pitrice

un paio di pantofole

Fereshteh Najafi, an Iranian illustrator, attained a Bachelor of Graphic Design and Master in Illustration at the Azad Art University of Tehran. In 2008, she immigrated to Genova, Italy, where she directed her creative work through illustration for children’s books. In recent years Fereshteh has worked both on illustration and giving workshops in Italy, Brazil and United Arab Emirates.

She began exhibiting internationally in 2006 and since then has been selected at over 20 international illustration exhibitions, including the prestigious Biennial of Illustration of Bratislava, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition, the “Le Immagini della Fantasia” in Sarmede, Italy, the Nami Concours in South Korea and in countries such as United Arab Emirates, Germany, Serbia, South Africa, Australia, Japan and India. Najafi has illustrated more than 25 titles, in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, France, South Africa and Italy. Najafi is admired for her strong and unique visual vocabulary of heavily textured brushwork and a distinctive and confident use of colour. Since 2015 she lives in Brazil.

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Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Art by Sheida Mohammadi | Issue 40 (2021)

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Doll-making

Sheida Mohammadi, born in 2000, is currently majoring in Graphic Design at the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran. From a very young age, she was attracted towards the arts, and more specifically illustration. Even though her major is in graphic design, she mostly focuses on illustration. Doll-making has been a long term love of hers, and lately, she has been working on a series to show the stories of Iran, her country and people through the same. She believes that there is a strong voice of the feminine in her work, modelled on her fascination with women who broke norms. At 20, she knows this is just the beginning of her professional journey, and is delighted that she can create something that others take something positive and heartwarming out of from. 

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Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Art by Ebrin Bagheri | Issue 40 (2021)

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In these portraits, Bagheri alludes to historical notions of pre-modern desire and the alternative gender norms to the current Western models. Greatly invested in Persian literature and poetry, Bagheri’s large-scale drawings have a historical element reminiscent of Persian miniature paintings in their details and intricacies. Using these poetic and literary tropes in conjunction with elements of Persian visual culture, Bagheri’s work complicates notions of Persian culture, contemporary Iranian identity, and the conflicting themes of gender and sexuality that might arise at their intersection. Bagheri, in his “Eastern Desires” series (2014-2017), uses delicate drawing techniques coupled with immense detail to depict scenes of Iranian men that fluctuate between being contemporary subjects, and archival source material referencing Iran prior to the industrial revolution and modern period. These intimate scenes, at times evocative of hammam or bathhouse settings, are coupled with visual motifs reminiscent of Quajar dynasty Persian paintings that point to a masculinity of the subject that is unlike traditional depictions of Iranian men. Later works like “Someone Who is Like No-One” series (2017-2018) take similar archival references and delicate drawing techniques, coupled with jarring visual tropes that look out of place. This theme of not-belonging is extended in the artist’s use of traditional notions of hiding, and various critiques of the binaries between private/public culture and visibility/invisibility. Using these different strategies, Bagheri unsettles traditional depictions of Iranian men and examines the shift in gender norms from pre-modern Iran, and puts these shifts in dialogue with contemporary identities.

Ebrin Bagheri, born in 1983, is an Iranian/Canadian visual artist currently living and working in Toronto, Canada. Bagheri has completed a Masters of Fine Arts degree at York University, and holds visual arts degrees from other Canadian institutions, including a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD University and an arts diploma from George Brown College. Bagheri has been a part of multiple-group shows in Iran and Canada, as well as a solo exhibition in Tehran. Working primarily in drawing and painting, Bagheri has been exploring issues pertinent to Iranian culture and identity. Particularly, Bagheri uses portraiture to explore themes of masculinity and gender.

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Iranian Edition (Vol II) | Art by Moslem Khezri | Issue 40 (2021)

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Looking at his previous drawings and paintings, one can trace his layered efforts first to master the human anatomy as a structure made of flesh and skin and bones (by depicting nearly naked, sometimes life-sized bodies), then to reflect different moods and emotions on their skins (by shedding strong chromatic lights onto bodies and faces) and, ultimately, to explore the interaction among humans and between humans and their real or imagined surrounding spaces; spaces that are often so cold and claustrophobic that the viewer might associate them with the inside of a coffin or a morgue. Khezri’s works are also playfields for contrasting warmer and cooler tones, a strong visual language of vertical versus horizontal in often static, lying positions of the figures, as well as the tension between organic body forms, straight lines and mostly rectilinear geometric shapes.

Moslem Khezri was born in 1984 in Kerman, Iran and is a painter and a university lecturer. He holds an MA in Painting from Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran and a BA in Painting from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan in Zahedan. His paintings were featured in many solo and group exhibitions in Iran and abroad, for example in the 2020 Art Dubai and in the 2019 Art Feast 7 in Tehran.

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