HEART OF STEEL

Radical Society, Oct-Dec 2003 by Ravanipur, Moniru

an excerpt from a novel by moniru ravanipur*

Heart of Steal (1989), a novel whose very textual structure disrupts all notions of traditional narrative, is a story about a single, thirty-year-old woman writer named Afsaneh who is struggling to carve out a space for herself in society. She has been traumatized and driven mad by events in her childhood, her marriage, and the Iran-Iraq war. In order to protect herself, she has surrounded herself with an imaginary world and invented characters-such as the Dictator and Horseman-who appear real to her as well as to the reader. Fantasies and flashbacks are juxtaposed alongside tangible circumstances in the present to set the plot tossing between dream state and reality. By continually shifting between what was and what is now, Afsaneh finds herself adrift in time as well as place. The very act of writing empowers Afsaneh to make her own decisions about how to recreate reality, allowing her to create new, fluid alternative spaces of discourse. Through the creative process itself, Afsaneh decides about whom and what she will narrate. In so doing, she discovers her once absent voice, which is now strikingly present. Indeed, One Thousand and One Nights is often evoked because of the central role of the act of writing and the storytelling present in the narrative. And so Ravanipur finds herself on solid ground as she leans on the richness of the Persian tradition, and it is this element that constantly adds hope to a narrative that deals with severe historical and cultural dislocations existing in contemporary Iran. - Rebecca Joubin

WHEN SHE REACHED THE ROOFTOP, she heard the scream of a man searching for his eyes. He was screaming into the wind-the wind of fall, the wind of the month of Azar, Azar of 1977.

She covered her ears and fled along the rooftops. If only she could reach the beam of light and slide down from there into a small Shiraz garden alley. The sound of Father seared her nerves... Khajeh Tabal...KhajehTabal...1

A face crumpled with pain. Eyes staring into the darkness. Hands groping their way to keep her from falling from the rooftops into the small cobblestone streets of the city, the city of Shiraz, whose winds smell of narenj blossoms, whose scent permeates the darkness. Bitter orange trees, hunched down and shrinking, their leaves screaming...her eyes burned and when she licked her salty lips, she knew they would be parched. For the bitter orange tree had dried up.

If her hands could be forced loose, then a boundary could be formed between her and the darkness. The sound of Father was like fine sand hitting her face. She heard Khajeh Tabal...Khajeh Tabal...the sound of a man who was screaming and searching for his eyes. She saw those two empty eye sockets-they were not wounded. Perhaps this was why he could deceive her and the others.

The wind played with her thin, orange nightgown. And she was fleeing. Perhaps she was fleeing in the direction of the voice of Father. Perhaps. The city was asleep. The city of Shiraz in the month of Azar of 1977.

As she left the publishing house, she saw them standing there, the Dictator and the Horseman. It was as if the two of them were afraid of losing their way. Despite her exhaustion, she forced a smile. Pulling down her headscarf, she held the publication proofs in her hands in such a way that they could see them. And when they smiled back, she breathed a sigh of relief. She set out in the direction of Enghilab Street, staring at all the cars stuck in traffic...military deployment. As far as the eye could see, young men were leaving for war in buses.

She stopped on the sidewalk. The distance between being and not being. She thought that no matter what she said, even if she screamed, no one would hear her. What she would have given not to be seen. She stood very still, careful not to even blink an eye. If I were to blink, she thought, then this street would no longer exist. There would only be the ground, barren and scorched, with half-burned tanks and torn bodies scattered throughout the south and west. What was the distance between being and non-being? Who existed, who didn't exist? She didn't blink an eyelid. With one misstep, these young hands would be dragged into the frame of another picture, thirsty hands separated from the body.

"Salavat."2

An adolescent with a red band on his forehead thrust his arm out of the bus window:

"We're on our way to Karbala."

"No talking," said the Horseman.

The Dictator frowned as usual and pointed his finger at the adolescent, but the youth did not pay any attention.

He had a moonlit face and black hair. A few steps closer, and she would be able to reach out her arm and hold the hand of the adolescent who was on his way to Karbala. If only he had put his arm out farther, she could have grabbed his hand. But the youth did not move. His hair was not long, and his eyes were tiny and bewildered. He seemed about twenty years old, tall, with broad shoulders. When he sat on a red-maned horse, the horse would scream three times in the direction of the sun.