Shokoofeh Azar's THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE GREENGAGE TREE (tr. by Anonymous)

 

There's a scene towards the middle of Shokoofeh Azar's surreal Iranian tragedy, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, in which the family that is the novel's focus sets to work filling 400-page notebooks with their best recollections of the contents of the hundreds and hundreds of books that just got destroyed in a Revolutionary attack on their household. Quickly, before they forget, the parents and their three children are to write down summaries, memorable quotations, impressions, of every book the family owned: novels in many languages, poetry, journals, treatises on science and math, histories, scripture. It doesn't matter if they don't remember much, doesn't matter if something is incomplete or inaccurate, doesn't even matter if the text from, say, Romeo and Juliet suddenly turns into a passage from Will Durant about the city-state of Verona without warning. What matters is that everybody keeps writing, fills the pages. Better to have incoherent fragments of their lost treasures than nothing of them at all. For all they know, these fragments they're generating might be all that will ever survive of these works they've treasured; they've been living in happy isolation from the bad old outside world.

I think this scene is key to experiencing The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, because it promotes the understanding that what one is reading is actually one of these 400-page notebooks, in which the writer has attempted to provide a deeply felt family history but has also allowed memory, fantasy, and a deep love of Iranian folk culture and history to lead her down the garden path rather a lot. Thus an account of an actual (usually unbearably tragic) event in the family's life can drift into a magical realist fantasia of jinn and fireflies and a pilgrimage of ghosts who collectively shed enough tears to cause a flash flood in Tehran. 

All in almost unbearably gorgeous prose, so beautiful I want to hug this translator but I can't because their identity is a secret lest reprisals come their way, because Iran.

Of course, another possibility as to the "actual" authorship of the text we're reading suggests itself quite late in the book. To that point, we've understood ourselves to have been reading some kind of testimony by Bahar, one of the family's two daughters, who was burned to death at age 13 in 1979 when the Islamic revolution really took hold of Iran and of this family in the form of a fanatical attack on their household and especially the father's workshop where he handcrafted traditional musical instruments called tars. Bahar was in there helping him and learning the art when a group of angry fundamentalists broke in and burned the whole place down, with Bahar still in it. The father, Hushang survives, bitter but not broken, in part because Bahar's ghost remains with the family even as Hushang, wife Roza, and surviving children Sohrab and Beeta move from the palatial Tehran mansion their extended family has owned for over 200 years out to a remote village that isn't even served by a proper road.

The Revolution isn't done with them, though. Oh no. While the family enjoys long periods of relative prosperity, if not contentment, in the new home they establish on a hilltop above a podunk village (establishing in the process an incredible garden Azar and her translator describe so vividly that it kind of kills me that I can't ever actually visit it), even here they are not safe from extremism, the more or less organized forces of which inflict tragedy after tragedy on the family and on the village that has taken them in, until at one point, decades after the fire that destroyed his workshop and killed Bahar, Hushang, believing himself a sole survivor now, returns to Tehran and gets swept up by a new gang of fantatics making examples of people who dare to have in their possession forbidden things like CDs of popular Iranian music, and never mind that it's not illegal yet, buster.

They set him to writing a confession of all of his sins and his first draft, we are given to understand, reads a whole lot like what we've been reading, ghosts and jinn and mysterious pilgrimages and magical Zoroastrian treasure and women giving birth to goldfish and all. Has it been Bahar or Hushang telling us this story, really? But then, does it matter?

In the process what we get most of all is a meditation on memory, loss, and how forgetfulness* can be a temptation as much as a tragedy. The entire village, at one point, discovers that their sole literate citizen (before the coming of our hyper-literate protagonist family) isn't actually so literate. Nor were his predecessors, meaning that the written records of their family histories they've trusted him to interpret for them are pure fantasy. What follows is an excited outburst of liberation; everybody feels free to be brand new people and start right over, hooray! But then the government's literacy corps finally makes it to their little town and their tabulas are no longer rasa -- but potentially, because they're going to be rewritten by the Regime, rather than truly understood by their inheritors.

Author Shokoofeh Azar knows whereof she writes here, I imagine, having taken political asylum in Australia in 2011. This is her first work to be translated into English, but I really hope it's not her last. Her criticism of a regime that to this day still makes things incredibly difficult for artists of every kind (see also the Iranian film industry, hideously hampered by censorship but still managing to create works of intimate and deeply felt beauty) is hard to miss for all that it's drenched in folklore and fantasy, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's about as well regarded in her homeland as Salman Rushdie is, so Australia, please keep her safe!  And I hope her translator stays safe, too, wherever and whoever they are.

So in sum, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is one of the saddest books I've read since, well, since the last Persian book I read in translation, The Book of Collateral Damage! This is, of course, far too small a sample size to make generalizations from but nonetheless, whenever I hear a recommendation for a book that's been translated from the original Farsi, I'm going to put up my emotional dukes, just in case.

*Which, after a fashion, is the real nature of the "enlightenment" of the title, first experienced after a compulsive climb to the top of the titular greengage tree by the family's mother, Roza, described by Bahar-or-Hushang later on when, down from the tree and pondering her experience "she came to the same conclusion she had reached that day at precisely 2:35 P.M.: it’s not worth it, life isn’t what she had thought. Life is precisely that which she and others were prodigiously killing—the moment itself."