Désorientale: An Addition to the Tradition of Márquezic Multigenerational Story and the Quality of Proustian Sensation

 

 

When cultures fall to pieces by forces or through intrusions, our identities reconstruct and throw us into the incalculable dismissal, we procede our lives with the weightiness of other’s histories, always in existential crisis, always in escape. We create and embrace the new cultures and identities in exchange of disintegrating and losing the old and own which I will name, assumedly, dialectical culturalism.

As a Bengali Muslim I always find my subsistence in the concoction of Indian ancestry, Bengali cultures, Persian linguistics, Arabic religiosity and British modernity namely so many that always hang my identity in creation. I have always been searching for an exact word for my condition to be expressed fully. Providentially, I have met a title of a novel that has nearly reflected my reality is Désorientale, a debut French novel written by French-Iranian Négar Djavadi (Ėditions Liana Levi, 2016) and translated by Tina Kover in English as Disoriental (Europa Edition, 2018), is a narrative about the crisis of the dual consciousness in split spaces and merged times, moreover, the feeling of strangeness and alienation in the conflicted cultures and their orientations. In the end when you will put the book back on the bookshelf, you will feel a rave urges to ask the validity of the normal conditions and you will also feel belittled by the truth by knowing that how the politics at wrong hands has been derailing us from the other possibilities of human condition.

“... to really integrate into a culture, I can tell you that you have to disintegrate, first, at least partially, from your own,’ – this is the insight Kimia drenched with at the French Embassy in Turkey where she along with her parents, a political refugee couple, were dispersing from Iran in 1979 when the country was metamorphosed from the skins of kings to the masks of mullahs, was traveling from the present to the past. Reversely, the people with tormented hearts were running after from the present of the east to the future of the west.

The novel has achieved rave recognition in America and was nominated as one of the finalists of the National Book Award for its inaugural translated fiction in 2018 when I predicted the book as the most probable winner but Yoko Tawada's Emissary took the acclaimed title. Subsequently, the novel has succeeded to draw the close attention of  Dubliners and has recently been shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award sponsored by the Dublin City Council as I have expected to be in it but I have got a little bit disappointed that Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad could not make it. It is obvious that the literary narratives from Persian descents have increasingly been placing under the spotlight of world appreciations and celebrations, for example, the 2020 Booker International has also included another Iranian narrative The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree authored by Shokoofeh Azar in their shortlist, this story is also based on the backdrops of 1979’s Islamic revolution in Iran and its detrimental after-effects, both of them have used more or less Persian classics and folklore styles, Latin magic realism technique and journalistic archive as a literary resources.

 

    

   
 

Disoriental is the genealogy of the splits of human condition, a dialectical tour between Persian and Parisian, liberalism and theocracy, past and present, east and west and finally internalized assortment of identity in men and women in correspondence with the narrative modes of the novel are parted between Part A  & Part B with disoriental concerns in its forms, structures and styles.

Kimia, the main female protagonist and narrator, is waiting in a clinic for artificial fertilization in the midst of many childless couples so optimistically which signifies that the more harsh realities  or uneasy conditions you are in there are always some arrangements and options for hope. In the waiting period she recounts the events she left for ever being forced by the extinguishers and disorientors of past cultures and glories back in the uprising years. she goes to the bygone times with her great-grandfather in Mazandaran during the Qajar dynasty, to grandparents Nour and Mirza-Ali-Sadr, to parental grandparents, Rokhnedin Khan and Monavar Banou, to her Six plus one uncles from attorney to professor, from custodian of family history to liberator of lost lands, from feudal ship of Qajar to monarchy of Shah Reza Pahlavi, to theocracy of Khomeini to the republic of Ahmadinejad.

Traditional patriarchy and modern parental ship have embraced in this novel with a sharp dexterity. The stereotypes of women roles and responsibility are depicted so realistically where Sara got married to Darius with a huge age gap despite she felt fortunate and started to live her life accepting the destiny the society fixes. Similarly, the birth of a son is always a regular expectation. When Kimia was born she was treated as a boy. The book also anatomizes the different sects of human sexuality. The protagonist Kimia herself is a bisexual woman who discloses the official truth, acknowledged lies, universally accepted hypocrisy of society; foreshadows the denial of the buried realities of Kimia’s second uncle’s closet life of homosexuality by the repressive state. Négar Djavadi regenerates the idea of gender and its delusions in full fledged.

The narrative of side B, Kimia witnessed the gravitational fall of western dreams that are ‘nothing but Middle Eastern fictions’. Over the Mediterranean coast she takes refuge under the feathers of silence and alienates herself not from her only known world but also from every unknown territory. Memory is an integral element of construction and reveals the reality to us by crossing the boundaries of past and present. History makes our reality by editing and adjusting our memories.

Tina Kover’s way of translating is so original and challenging, as like Lydia Davis does, she starts translating the first line as creatively as the author without reading the second line, and the whole narrative marbles through the pebbles of uncertainty. In the novel Négar Djavadi has experimented with an unusual style of descriptive narrative using ‘Wikipediac’ information of Iranian history and current affairs to minimize the readers’ labor uncovering the lexical meanings and fact checking.

 The novel is immaculately written and richly imagined and has been added to the tradition of Márquezic multigenerational story and the quality of Proustian sensation so seamlessly that you will fall in the temptation to stay awake one more page to read.