Disoriental and the Dichotomies of Diaspora

In the seminal Middle Eastern work One Thousand and One Nights, noblewoman Scheherazade—in order to avoid being executed—tells the King a new story every night, postponing the conclusion each time so that he keeps her alive in order to hear the end. The stories were gathered from across Arabic, Egyptian, Indian, Persian, and Mesopotamian folklore and literature; so we can imagine Scheherazade using suspense as a narrative device to retell a range of stories that were far from linear or cohesive. We can imagine the King (and the reader) greedy to hear the ending of each story, the storyteller using the equivalent of a ‘cliff hanger’ to keep the narrative—and herself—alive.

*

There is already a hint of Scheherazade in the prologue of the 2018 novel Disoriental, by Iranian–French author Négar Djavdi (translated from the French by Tina Kover). ‘These pages won’t be linear,’ says narrator Kimiâ Sadr, a young woman whose family fled Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to settle in France. Instead, she tells us the story will be guided by ‘the natural fits and starts, the hollows and bumps carved into my memories by time.’ We don’t yet know what those memories are related to, except that they are ‘marked by exile and death.’ Kimiâ uses both suspense (raising questions that are not immediately answered) and a direct address in second person (the reader is addressed as ‘you’ in the prologue and throughout the book) that plunges us as a listener straight into storytelling mode.

It is in the prologue that we first meet her father, Darius, and that we first hear of ‘THE EVENT’—Kimiâ does not elaborate further, saying only that it was a bloody incident that made the news in Paris.

When we move to the first chapter, another question is immediately raised. We find Kimiâ waiting alone in a Paris hospital, specifically for ‘medically-assisted procreation.’ She tells us that she has a secret no one in the fertility clinic knows, that if they did, ‘They’d spit in my face. They’d throw me out in the street.’ Again, she does not explain—at least not yet. Instead, there in the waiting room with the noise of construction work in the background, memories and stories come to Kimiâ, the past pulling at her despite her desire to forget, and she begins her storytelling.

These stories reach back to her paternal great-grandfather, a wealthy Khan named Montazemolmolk in the town of Mazandaran, during the period when Iran was Persia and feudalism still alive. They recount the birth of her grandmother in Montazemolmolk’s harem, born with startling blue eyes. The stories then expand out towards her other relatives, tracing various events that happened to her grandparents, uncles, and of course her father Darius and mother Sara.

Far from a simple recounting of Iranian history, or straightforward family biography, it is a story about how world events engulf each successive generation.

The family’s and Iran’s fates intertwine, as they live through successive coups d’etat and revolutions in a country coveted for its oil—coups by the British and the Americans (one in 1921 and again in 1953) and the Revolution in 1979. Far from a simple recounting of Iranian history, or straightforward family biography, it is a story about the way in which world events engulf people’s lives in each successive generation. This is particularly the case for Kimiâ’s parents—wealthy intellectual and political activists, opponents to both the Shah and the Islamist regimes, they are targeted at various times for imprisonment, exile and persecution. As the novel progresses, we encounter the births of Kimiâ’s two sisters, as well as her own birth in the midst of upheaval, and her memories of crossing the Iranian–Turkish border by foot and horses with her family in 1981 on their way towards migration to France.

True to the narrator’s word, the recounting of these sprawling memories do not occur in a linear fashion. Instead, there is a present from which the different stories and memories emerge—predominately while Kimiâ is in the waiting room of the clinic, and at various stages of the insemination process—but that fixed point of telling is also moving; jumping to different ‘presents’ in her past. Not only are stories framed within different points of telling, they are also sometimes told by others—in the story of the birth of Kimiâ’s grandmother, told to her by her ‘Uncle Number Two’, the novel switches into his voice. Djavadi moves away from Western storytelling’s focus on an individual storyteller and instead centres stories as part of an inter-generational transmission where there are many tellers and forms of re-telling, where story and memory (whose memory?) blur into each other.

It is also a testament to Djavadi’s characterisation, a detail here and there for each person, that we aren’t too confused as the novel weaves in and out of stories, timelines and points of view. It is expansive and ambitious, utilising Wikipedia-like historical and political footnotes to help anchor us. Djavadi also lays out the conventions to orient us Western readers, telling us what to expect in a voice that is assured.

Like Scheherazade, who used the power of words to put an end to King Shahryar’s bloody crusade against the women of the realm, the average Iranian feels trapped in a daily existential dilemma: speak, or die. Telling and retelling, embellishing, and lying, in a society full of danger and corruption, where the simple fact of going out to buy a stick of butter could end in a nightmare, means staying alive. It’s a way of forestalling fear, of taking comfort where you can find it…And it’s about sweet-talking that fear, and disarming it, and preventing it from doing harm. Silence, on the other hand, means closing your eyes and lying down in your tomb and closing the lid.

This Iranian belief in the power of speech to ward against fear is mirrored in the structure of the novel. In the telling and retelling of her family’s story—in a way that is often roaming and unruly, jumping and traversing through time—Kimiâ herself is like Scheherazade, using words to fight off the threat of annihilation that trauma and exile brings. The cacophony then, is intentional.

…to tell stories which, like Russian matryoshka dolls, open to reveal other stories, is, I suppose, one way to deal with a fate consisting of nothing but invasions and totalitarianism.

*

The telling of these stories is purposefully cinematic— Kimiâ as the narrator will explicitly say, for example, ‘The camera zooms in on my grandfather’s face,’ or, ‘let’s switch now from this close-up (his blue eyes) to the reverse shot: the little boy’s eyes. Huge blue eyes, filled with tears.’ Kimiâ also has this to say about film images in the novel:

The same thing is true for the events of a life as it is for images in a film. When associated with others, certain apparently trivial events take on new meaning. Links are created. Bridges rise up to connect generations. Connections are formed somewhere in the Universe.

Djavadi is also a screenwriter, so it is no surprise that she would use the technique of montage in her novel. Montage is a method of editing cinematic images, whereby several different images are superimposed onto one another to create something new. Instead of linear narrative and cause and effect type logic, fragments and multiple images are gathered together so that new meanings can proliferate, particularly those that had hitherto remained hidden. There is something intriguing about this—the purposeful arrangement of images to direct the reader’s looking, towards what has been denied, repressed, or unable to be seen. Become visible again.

Djavadi moves away from Western storytelling’s focus on an individual storyteller, and instead centres stories as part of an inter-generational transmission where story and memory blur into each other.

In the novel, this experience of montage is manoeuvred by threading divergent timelines together, in events that repeat, in predictions from the past that haunt the future, in multiple points of telling and non-linearity. Can montage be useful for tracing a history—in particular, those devastated by multiple global conflicts, as confusing as they are complex—that is unable to be captured by a single story, or as an unbroken chronological narrative? Can montage be a bulwark against incomprehension and confusion, against the sheer meaninglessness that traumatic histories can often evoke?

Links are created. Bridges rise up to connect generations.

More personally, can montage—putting divergent images side by side—create connections between first and second generation immigrants within the diaspora? It reminds me of the sense of wonder and absurdity I am sometimes struck by when I think about my parents’ life in Cambodia and what they’ve experienced before our family came to Australia—the conflicts that beset a small country like Cambodia; due to its rather unfortunate geographic location and therefore its importance to various super powers for strategic reasons, it has, much like Iran, had to endure successive coups and wars; and before that colonialism. It contrasts so sharply with the dullness of the suburbs of western Sydney I grew up in, that there is an almost unbridgeable gap between their life before and my own.

The strangeness of knowing that both my parents as young people joined the Communists in the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam during the Vietnam War to fight against the Americans. The near-death experiences they had there. Their lives are largely incomprehensible to me—but can I perhaps find a connection with my parent’s experiences if I look to juxtapose their youthful idealism with my own? Their need for purpose, for justice—in such different circumstances, yet in so many ways familiar? When I look back on my life, can I perhaps see mirrored in myself their revolutionary zeal that has fallen into disillusionment? Holding together two disparate images to create connections—yet not erasing the gap between them, not effacing the clear outlines that each has.

What makes Disoriental distinctively interesting is the link between the structure of the novel—and the image that emerges from it. The reigning image that becomes visible in the story’s montage, so to speak, is that human agency (and its logic of cause and effect) is no longer the key to understanding the meaning of history, both personal and political. What becomes most apparent in the story is that we as humans are often being ruled by something like fate or chance rather than our own free will. It brings to the forefront the role, and importantly meaningfulness, of external forces like fate or God in people’s lives.

…I am the result of an incongruous combination of circumstances, and fate, and heritage, and bad luck, and tragedies.

This often reflects the diaspora story, where migration to far-flung countries occur because of the wider forces of war, colonialism, imperialism and revolutions. As a second generation immigrant, your family’s history can feel so bizarre and surreal compared to the life you know. I, too, feel a similar sense of fate that I’m alive here in Australia, when either or both of my parents could have not made it, meaning I wouldn’t exist. When I was three months old, after my parents had already left the Party in disillusionment, they decided to go on a dangerous journey to the Thai–Cambodia border to a refugee camp. Along the way, they were ambushed by some bandits who took me as baby out of my mother’s hands (as well as most of the family’s gold jewellery), only handing me back after she implored them to.

At so many points along the way, my family were powerless, and at the mercy of others; when I really think about it, I’m surprised I’m alive.

I wonder where I would be now if they hadn’t given me back; I wonder why I was given back, when many so many others didn’t make it. Was it chance, or fate? Both, or neither? At so many points along the way, my family were powerless, and at the mercy of others; when I really think about it, I’m surprised I’m alive.

It renders absurd any retelling of history where human agency is a central focus. Instead of the typical narrative structure of the hero’s journey, then, forms like the epic, the tragic or the fable can move away from internal causes and can accommodate forces beyond our control—and understanding.

As Kimiâ realises:

It was once written somewhere that one day I would be alone in a hospital under construction in Pahrees, 2,643 miles from Mazandaran, with a tube of sperm in my lap.

But the particular genius of Disoriental, and what makes it an unmistakably diaspora story, is that fate is not the only ruling aspect of Kimiâ’s life. As an immigrant living in France since she was eleven, she has also grown up in French culture and is shaped by a sense of fate’s counterpoint—individualism and autonomy.