Basijis (Volunteer Soldiers) of Yesterday, Authors of Today

This note was supposed to be a review on No Title Yet, which is a volume of short stories by Ahmad Gholāmi; however, it turned out to be a restatement of more general issues regarding the literature of defense or the representation of Iran-Iraq War in our literature and its fate.
I have somewhere else categorized the different approaches to the war into three main classes:

1. Basijis of Yesterday and Today
These are the authors who uphold the conventions of the war era and whose views are most synonymous to the perspectives of the firstgeneration of revolutionaries and the precursors of the Revolution as well as the dominant ideology of the government.

2. Basijis of Yesterday, Authors of Today
By this, I mean those authors who no longer approach the topic of warfrom an ideological perspective, but who notwithstanding sympathize greatly with the then warriors, and intend to present a human portrayal of warriors whose human side has for long been overshadowed by their image as warriors.

3. Authors of Yesterday and Today
Attending mainly to the destructions of the war in their stories whose leitmotifs are non-ideological as much as possible, these authors approach the war as a social phenomenon and not as an ethical phenomenon.

The Islamic Republic State is yet to achieve ideological unanimity in most of its cultural spheres; however, the issue of Iran-Iraq War by far remains to be an exception to this lack of unanimity mostly due to the attempts of the connoisseurs to theorize it.
The roots of the advent of the said approach could be traced back to the documentary series of Ravāyat-e Fath (The Chronicles of Victory. Sayyed Mortezā Āvini aimed to make a make a documentary from the perspective of the second group (human portrayal of warriors); nevertheless, the poetical essence of Iranian thought, the mysticism, and the willingness to believe everything divine lost him and other similar artists the future arena where their theoretical and aesthetical bases were appropriated by the official approach. Television, and on a much smaller scalecinema and then theatre, have ever since played a significant role in establishing this approach. Literature has, however, fallen short of competition mainly due to the fact that the official approach has invested not much in this sector in comparison to cinema and television.
The advocates of this approach have ever since the 1370s permeated themass media and cultural authorities; they have ever since the mid-1380striumphed on all battlefieldsin such a way that no other approach is ever allowed into the field of the art and literature of the defense. The first generation of those influenced by Sayyed Mortezā Āvini and his followers who have more or less remained faithful to his human-portrayal approach (even if in terms of the portrayal of warriors as servants of God) (in cinema: EbrāhimHātamikiā, the late Mollāqolipour, Barzideh, Nourizād, etc.; in theatre: AlirezāNāderi, FarhādMohandes Pour, etc.; in literature: Hassan Baniāmeri, Mohammad-Reza Kāteb, Ahmad Dehqān, HabibAhmadzādeh, Mohammad-Reza Bāyrāmi, etc.) do not even have the opportunity to repeat, release, or publish their works from the 70s.
I shall now present thethemes of a number of stories from No Title Yet and leave it to your good judgment on how these are the stories that are nowadays given publication permit: “A basiji warrior cannot tell at martyrdom whether he was killed by a bullet shot from behind by afellow warrior or from opposite byan enemy soldier” (Along the Bridge); “a soldieris about to surrender himself to the Iraqis, for he considers fighting for one`s precious ones, people, and country a folly” (Two Pals); “the warrior who bears the news of his friend`s martyrdom, mesmerized by the melody played on the piano by his friend`s sister, neglects to give the news”(By Ten Days Later).
The official approach to war first victimized the third group of artists and then overthe past decade eliminated the followers of the second approach, the children of war; whereasin my opinion, our war had the potential to contribute to a specific Iranian literature, for it was among the very few contemporary long wars whose warriors were mainly volunteer soldiers (even when the battlefield shifted to zones beyond our borders). The said literature could have helped greatly had we globalizing ambitions, and I further believe that this probably global literature would have been produced by the second group of authors.
Alas! The mountain-like hero that you were…

Source: Nāfeh Monthly, Farvardin, 1390, (April, 2011) p. 69

Mohammad-Hassan Shahsavāri
Trasslated by: Katayoun Davallou