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Have you ever thought about your mother, father, grandfather, or grandmother who is in their seventies or eighties, and what their heart and mind may be hiding in terms of secrets and memories from a past in which they dreamed and suffered, loved and hated, lived adventures and planned a life that he or she never had! Did you think or not! You should read the novel “Our Little Library in Tehran” by Marjane Kamali (Arab Cultural Center 2022, translated by Mustafa Benami, published in English in The Stationery Shop in 2019).
It is a novel that carries pain and sadness and conveys it to the recipient and affects him in more than one place with great narrative skill and craftsmanship, after it took him far to the fifties of the last century, to Tehran in particular, and the political and social unrest that was taking place there, and the coups and popular disputes that preceded the radical coup with… The Islamic Revolution in the 1970s, where two young men live a love story governed by dreams and hopes that these dreams are possible. A seventeen-year-old girl falls in love with a young man who “wants to change the world.”
The pleasure of narration is unmatched by the enjoyment, and here we must praise the work of the translator, who enriched this wonderful novel with his style and language until we were able to read it in a strong and cheerful Arabic language. I think it added to the original text an eloquent linguistic originality that carries an influence that other languages do not carry. It was supportive of the original English language. It was a malleable tool that made the original not have any influence over the translator.
The text begins from the nursing home in America in the year 2013, where old Bahman stays, and the novel tells us that the seventy-year-old Roya tells her American husband Walter that she must make this visit… and then we move to the beginnings, to the year 1953, where the beginning of the story, the love story that… It will not be crowned with success for reasons that we will only know by reading. While we enjoyed the narration, descriptions, and dialogues, and while we learned about many of the historical events and political conflicts that governed Iranian society, we are the ones who almost limit the modern history of that country to the coup against the Shah and the control of the ruler’s rule after the victory of the Islamic Revolution.
The novel makes us think about what would have happened if the coup against Prime Minister Mossadeq had not taken place at that stage, without direct intervention to make us adopt a position, except that the boy who wants to change the world, and whom we loved as much as Roya loved him, is a supporter of Mossadeq and is secretly working against the Shah. And here comes the writer’s ingenuity, who, in her cheerful style, makes us read and follow the story of the two lovers, and we hardly realize that we support Mossadeq and wish that he had continued in power and overthrew the Shah himself and not those who overthrew him later. But is it true that if he had overthrown the Shah, Islamic thought would not have been able to ascend to power later on? We can’t be sure!
Politics only passes in order to support the movement of the characters and their positions, and to create the illusion that what they are doing is related to politics, and to inflame the position of Zari, Roya’s sister, against Bahman, and to strengthen the position of Bahman’s mother against the engagement of her only son to Roya, while making her believe that he is hiding after the coup for his safety. Bahman’s mother, Badri, whose story and intervention we learn later.
The mother intervenes, separating the two lovers, who discover the truth about the tampering of their letters after sixty years, and they meet and regain that love after those sixty years, and here is what is new that this novel presented: Is it true that the past remains present with this strength and this mastery, and does it not need more than a strong incentive? Here is Roya at the age of seventy-seven, crying for Bahman, embracing him, hugging him, and expressing to him her longing and love that never left her. At seventy-seven, the two lovers meet and she lies next to her lover while he is on his deathbed. Is that reasonable? Here it opens the door to a barrage of questions: Could this happen to my mother or father? Could it happen to me when I am an adult, so I can live moments like those with the one I loved while I was still a boy or teenager? These are all legitimate questions and were the novel’s primary concern.
The novel raised issues of motherhood, issues of loss, issues of psychological crises, issues of politics and wars, and issues of estrangement and the fulfillment of dreams, but of course it was built on one foundation, which is the past and how it remains present unless we resolve our pending issues before the days and years pass. I conclude with what the novel says near its end: “The past has always been there, hidden in the corners and winking at you, hanging on your organs from the inside, while you thought that you were rid of it and moved on from it (p. 371).” But the waves of love will continue to sweep us, “for everyone who left, and for everyone who stayed and continued (p. 372).”
