Iranian-born Hossein Asgari worked as a physicist before undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at University of Adelaide. Only Sound Remains (2023) is his first novel. It is set in Adelaide where an Iranian-Australian novelist is being visited by his father, who is dying.
At the heart of the novel is the radical female Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967). Radical in that she was sexual, a divorcee at 20, taking lovers and writing about it.
I sinned, a gratifying sin,
in an embrace, warm and ardent,
I sinned embraced by arms,
hot and vindictive and iron
The narrator is a fan. Dealing with depression his favourite lines are –
Life is a rope
with which a man
hangs himself from a branch
But when his father arrives he discovers for the first time that his father knew Farrokhzad, who was maybe six years older than he; that she had been a neighbour growing up; that he had remained all her life infatuated with her; and after, over the years – and she spent some time overseas – being on the fringes of groups with which she was involved, he eventually got a job at the film studio where she worked and was the director’s lover.
Over the course of the novel, the father is obsessive in talking of his connection to Farrokhzad – he has come to Adelaide to get this off his chest before he dies – which necessarily involves talking of his adolescence as a committed Muslim and, via his friends, on the fringes of Iranian student politics.
Iran may well be the cradle of European civilization – in the sense of cities and book-learning and so on – sadly, it also has oil, which means that first the British and then the US attempted to colonize it (and continue to punish it for refusing to be colonized). Over the course of the narrator’s father’s life, government and society changed radically twice.
In 1953 Britain and the US instigated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of the Shah, to protect their oil interests (1953 Coup, Wiki) Then in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 the Shah was deposed in favour of a Muslim theocratic government led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the early sixties Ayatollah Khomeni attacked the Shah in his sermons on grounds such as widespread corruption, violation of the constitution, and the weakening of Islamic beliefs among the people. I turned into his zealous advocate.
(Father)
I have written before, that since WWII we have been living in a new Empire of faceless oligarchs, the borderless Military Industrial Complex, whose grip on our governments is total, most particularly in the US where money rules absolutely. Whenever Capitalism feels threatened by a new left-leaning government, that government is shut down. Russia, China, Iran, Vietnam have proved able to survive, though their democracies haven’t. Cuba after seven decades of sanctions is a shell of what it might have been. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan are in ruins.
Asgari isn’t didactic, but the politics, US interference tick along in the background. The story between the narrator and his father is not important, just a setting in which the father may talk. In the foreground as we see it, Farrokhzad returns from Europe, publishes poetry, makes a notable documentary film about leprosy, The House is Black, lives an exciting life as a “mistress”, writes about it, while the father stays in her orbit as best he is able, often as her driver.
The ultimate object of all forces is to be united,
to be united with the origins of the bright sun,
and to be poured into the light’s intelligence
[Only Sound Remains]
I enjoyed this book, for Farrokhzad’s story more than the father’s, for the poetry more than either, and for the politics going along quietly, unstoppably in the background. The more diverse we become as a society, the more we need to see history as others see it, not just as our white, Western press chooses to present it.
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Hossein Asgari, Only Sound Remains, Puncher & Wattmann, Sydney, 2023. 175pp. Farrokhzad’s poetry translated by the author.