Shiraz (XOXOX Press: Gambier OH, 2006)

 

Shiraz is my first published novel.  It is based on notes I took over thirty years ago during two summers I spent in Iran.  Late in the novel, one character comments upon what he sees as the paradox of America’s involvement in the Middle East: “Whether America supported tyranny or whether it sought to unseat tyrants and impose democracy made little difference. Either way we wreaked havoc.” At its heart, Shiraz dramatizes this disturbing claim. It examines the problematic nature of intervention on several overlapping levels (political, social, & personal), and it questions whether even the most honorable intentions justify imposing one’s values on others.

      But having said this, I ought to add what I often tell my students: that we are drawn to literature for much more than the "themes" that a text seems to present.  Or as Duke Ellington said, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."  In writing  Shiraz, I worked hard to evoke the feel of this faraway city; to capture the languid rhythm of life there; and to suggest the underlying tension of life in a police state.   

       I ought to add that working with creative writing students here at NJCU became an important part of my writing process.  How much had my experience teaching creative writing strengthened my own skills as a writer?  Working on Shiraz helped me find out.  Here are the opening pages:

 

Shiraz

 

Thirty years ago I flew to Iran to visit my college friend, Doug Springer. I sat beside a southern girl, about my age, on the second leg of the New York-Teheran flight. She had a man’s name—Billie, I think it was—and she wore a flowered dress and red pumps. She told me she was from Cheraw, North Carolina and that AT&T was sending her to Teheran to bolster their overloaded long distance service. She carried a small leather diary with a brass clasp which she opened at each meal to dutifully record her airline menu. “Chicken tarragon! French wine!” Everything thrilled her; she’d never been anywhere.

       I remember her nudging me out of travel-drugged sleep. “What city?” she asked.

      “City?” I pushed up my shade. All I saw was empty sky.

      “Why, didn’t you hear? The pilot said we’re over Europe—and they have so many famous cities.” 

      “Rome,” I offered. She snapped open her little diary to record the latest stage of her adventure.

      When our plane banked low over Teheran, it was close to midnight. The sprawling city looked like a monstrous phosphorescent jellyfish that had fallen from a great height and splattered. “Will you look at that!” Billie marveled, “Why it looks just like a switchboard!”

      Back then, planeloads of Americans descended on Iran day after day, month after month, year in and year out. It was, after all, the land of the shah: America’s faithful ally, the iron-fisted leader of a secular nation hellbent on modernization, a bastion of anti-communism in the backward, fractious Middle East. The tens of thousands of countrymen who preceded Billie and me had created an archipelago of little American colonies with characteristic can-do alacrity. Counterfeit suburbias bloomed on baking plains. High walls and wire fences protected American living compounds. Security guards stood watch over new ranch houses, state-of-the-art hi-fi equipment, day care centers, women’s clubs, pets, softball leagues, washing machines, bicycles, and barbecues. Outposts of civilization in the howling wilderness.

      All this I would see in good time. And yes, of course, I found it repellant. Yet, I admit, it was also fascinating, even seductive. There’ll be time to speak of that later on—but for now I simply want to recollect my earliest impressions. And as I think back to my airborne prospect of that glimmering city, I remember marveling that my transient companion could travel halfway around the world only to register her first reaction to Iran in terms of something so common. A switchboard, indeed! Yet we are all, I think, just a bit like Billie. So many of us feel restless with the settings and rituals of our quotidian existence; and some, actually break loose in search of a new, more liberating life. Yet always, like some cumbersome steamer trunk, our past accompanies us, awaits us wherever we set down, stuffed with what we cannot leave behind.

      Doug Springer, the friend I’d come to visit, did not live at all like the other Americans. Over the fourteen months since he’d settled in Shiraz, he had written to me several times—and always he railed at the garish American spectacle. He closed all his letters with the same cheery invitation: “Come join me in the belly of the beast!” And, at last, I came. It was irresistible—the opportunity to leap outside of my life and explore this new and magical place, and, of course, the chance to spend time with him. At first I was enthralled by Shiraz, but before long it seemed impossible to simply enjoy that extraordinary city without in some way responding to the forces that poisoned our idyll. Now, I’m amazed that we managed to delude ourselves into believing, however unconsciously, that our fleeting presence there invested us with the authority to act against what we understood only superficially. “How American!” Rasoul might have said with an ironic twinkle in his eye. And he would have been right. Is it any wonder that when our little schemes fell apart we were stunned and deeply ashamed? But enough said. I do not want to rush ahead of myself and, as much as possible, I want to avoid moral sermons. If I learned anything in Shiraz it‘s that high-mindedness can be treacherous.

      Now, I’ll go back to the beginning, my first hours in Shiraz. . .