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The Merchant’s House: the Private and the Public in the Writing of Home Nasrin Mahoutchi-Hosaini Submitted to the University of Western Sydney In fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) 2015 Dedication To Mehrdad and Arash And to the memory of my parents: Fatemeh and Madjid ii Acknowledgements I would never have been able to finish my Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) without the guidance of my committee members, help from friends, and support of my family. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the University of Western Sydney and my supervisory team. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my principal supervisor, Professor Ivor Indyk for his guidance, caring, patience, and providing me with an excellent atmosphere for writing my novel and exegesis. Professor Nick Jose, thank you for your vision and suggestions, and your time in reading my novel when it was in its earlier stage, and Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty for your vast knowledge and your generosity of spirit which you shared with me throughout the time I was researching and writing. To the members and students of Writing and Society at UWS, past and present, thank you. I would like to thank Dr Belinda Castles, Dr Melinda Jewell, Dr Rachel Morley, Dr Kathleen Olive, Professor Sara Knox and Professor Gail Jones for organising the valuable Creative Ecologies Retreat. Also a special thanks to UWS for providing UWS Postgratuate Research Awards and UWS Top-Up Award for my DCA. Because English is not my first language, it was necessary to have my thesis copy- edited, the exegesis by John Revington and the novel by Christopher Cyrill, and in both cases editorial intervention was restricted to standards D and E of the Australian Standards for Editing Practice. iii Abstract This thesis has its origin in the 2009 presidential election in Iran, and the dispute that arose over the election results between the ruling party and the ordinary citizens of Iran. This agitation compelled me to revisit in my narratives the country that I had left twenty-seven years before in a similar setting of social unrest. My Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) consists of the novel ‘The Merchant’s House’ and the cluster of socio-political essays which make up the exegesis, ‘Beginning Again’. The novel and the essays explore the journey, which began with my life before and immediately after the 1979 Revolution and continued up until my exile in Australia. In my political and social commentary on Iran I focus on the reasons why intellectuals of my generation who were involved in politics faced imprisonment and finally exile. The novel and the four essays which make up the exegesis are interconnected through the themes of memory, private and public life in contemporary Iran, and the search for the idea of home by which they are mutually informed. In the first essay of the exegesis, through the lens of a migrant vision, I review my definition of ‘the idea of home’, discussing my life as a political activist in Iran, and then my gradual shift from political activity towards science and literature after coming to Australia in 1988 as a refugee. In the second essay, I examine the significance of memory and its interplay with notions of the self, creativity and engagement with the form of the novel. The third essay involves a discussion on how and why the public and private lives of ordinary Iranians have changed since the 1979 Revolution. And finally in the last essay, I look at the difficulties and possibilities of formulating a position as someone who attempts to write in English as a second language. The novel, ‘The Merchant’s House’, is the story of the migration of two Azerbaijani sisters to Tehran for arranged marriages. The house referred to in the title is in Yousef Abad, v the area where I grew up. The time span is from two years before the 1979 Revolution until 2009. During these years Iran’s monarchist regime was overthrown and the Islamic Republic of Iran came into being. The life of the main characters is altered by the revolution and the subsequent eight years of war between Iran and Iraq. The public and private lives of Iranians provide the fabric for the novel; the main theme of the novel is how the life of ordinary Iranians changed within this time span. The novel ends in 2009, the time of a disputed presidential election result. At the conclusion of the novel, two young characters, the son and daughter of the two sisters, are prevented from migrating to Australia; hence Australia remains for them as a utopian ideal. vi Table of Contents Page Beginning Again: an exegesis 1 Introduction 2 Chapter One: the Idea of Home: to Go Home or to be on the Way Home 11 Chapter Two: Memories: Remembering and Forgetting 46 Chapter Three: Public and Private 71 Chapter Four: Fragmentation: Beginning Again 94 Works Cited 132 The Merchant’s House: A Novel 138 vii Beginning Again: an exegesis 1 Introduction The embryo of my novel germinated in a big plastic box which I carried with me through my years of living in Sydney. The plastic box contained notebooks, my mother’s prayer chador, my father’s rosary, and the photo of our home in the suburb of Yousef Abad in Tehran, taken before it was demolished to build office buildings. I had this novel with me for many years, but putting pen on paper to record what was inside me as a story was a creative struggle. I had to overcome certain fears about how to start, how to break the silence, how to look back on my last twenty-seven years of life in exile, to find a writing voice, to define a writing style. Iran’s 1979 Revolution started with promises of respect for human rights and democracy, but then fell into the hands of an authoritarian, clerical regime. The horror of eight years of war between Iran and Iraq (1980 to 1988) left writers and intellectuals, as well as many other Iranian citizens, no choice but to leave their homeland. This began the biggest mass displacement of people in Iran’s modern history. Since then, the concept of where home is has been subjected to question and examination first by convention, then revolution and finally by exile. Some writers, such as Zohreh T. Sullivan, has examined the concept of exile thorugh narrative and memory, which is collected as a book in Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora (2001), Azar Nafisi, in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), maintained her involvement with the home of literature by privately teaching students about Nabokov’s novel Lolita, after having been dismissed from her university position. Marjane Satari’s graphic novels, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003), and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004) are about the history of Iran and the 1979 Revolution through eyes of a girl between the ages of 10 2 and 14. These narratives share the concerns of memory, exile, oppression and the role of the citizen in a society that is full of contradictions in the public and private domains. In this exegesis I explain my childhood memories of home and the contradictions I had to endure when I was in Iran. I then explore my reasons for leaving Iran and coming to Australia as a political refugee. From this perspective, this exegesis, and indeed the creative component of the thesis itself, should be read as writing in exile. There is a wide variety of theoretical, social and political discourse that could traverse the domain of writing in exile, but I have narrowed my focus to issues such as home, memory and fragmentation. I have chosen these subtexts to provide and insight to my own socio-political background as a writer. Like many others in exile, when I gave up hope of a return I started to revisit the value, meaning and idea of home. As I discuss in this exegesis, exile starts at home, when a person’s own country becomes hostile to her citizens. The first two essays, ‘The Idea of Home’, and ‘Memories: Remembering and Forgetting’ deal with ideas and expressions of home and memory. The central theme here is how migrants see and define themselves in their new countries and their new homes. How we keep memories alive and how, through objects and surroundings, we carry the past into the present. In these narratives I discuss the dualistic metaphor of the blindfold – how blindness forces us to look deeply inward for our vision/s. The third essay, ‘Public and Private’, explores how Iran’s internal affairs have been misunderstood by Western society, largely because of its foreign policies. Iran’s last president, Mr Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s hostile rhetoric against Western societies, especially the United States, has made so many headlines in the Western media that 3 it is easy to ignore the fact that the ordinary life of Iranians often has little or no connection with the president’s point of view. The public and private aspects of Iranian citizens’ lives, especially those of women, have been overlooked. The appearance of Iranian women in Western media is often concerned with issues around the wearing of the headscarf. My novel, on the other hand, deals largely with the private and public lives of women who live in Iran. The title of my fourth essay is ‘Fragmentation: Beginning Again’. It reflects on how I stopped writing because I lost my connection with Farsi, my native language, and how it took me years to gain the skills I needed to write fluently in my second language, English.

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